Customer advocacy as a competitive differentiator

Customer advocacy as a competitive differentiator

Even in today's fast-changing business landscape, one thing is constant – the need to put your arms around your customers - we have repeatedly seen that happy customers don't just buy again; they become advocates, spreading the word about your products and services. Customer advocacy is a strategy that helps a business prioritize customer experience by identifying and prioritizing their needs when making critical business decisions. It is a continuous process that companies must engage in to remain relevant to their customers. Customer advocacy offers multifold benefits including boosting brand value, ensuring better word of mouth, reducing churn rate, and finally increasing prospects for increasing revenues.

Praxis toolkit to help clients build advocacy Based on our work with clients, we have developed a five-step methodology/framework that companies can adopt to enhance customer advocacy:

Our initial focus revolves around acquiring comprehensive and detailed feedback concerning the customer journey. We segment customers basis our Customer Advocacy Matrix (CAM) and employ a structured "driver tree framework" to systematically collect responses. Using the established driver trees, we take a customer-centric view of the customer lifecycle, capturing the nuanced emotional factors that influence both positive and negative feedback. We also assist businesses in evaluating their market position to those of their competitors by comparing NPS as well as multiple data points in our CAM. The third step involves a comprehensive assessment of current customer advocacy levels at three distinct levels: sector, industry, and offering. Our analytical framework highlights strengths and weaknesses among promoters and detractors, enabling companies to pinpoint crucial action items. This helps us identify key interventions needed to  enhance customer experience and build customer loyalty by addressing areas of concern identified during diagnostic phase. Finally, we work with clients in prioritizing and implementing the initiatives based on the impact they have on the identified metrics. At Praxis, we have also developed our own proprietary matrix, called Customer Advocacy Matrix (CAM), to measure customer advocacy levels in the BFSI sector. This matrix lets companies identify and address customer issues in a recurring manner by using a range of factors to calculate a comprehensive score. There are two types of factors: sector-agnostic ones like app and website analysis, used for all companies, and sector-specific ones, tailored to different types of financial services like banks, NBFCs, payments, and insurance. This way, we capture unique customer perspectives for each sector. These factors cover many aspects that affect the customer experience with any company, including engagement, problem resolution, usage patterns, and growth. The composite score from our matrix provides a metric to compare between companies, regardless of their size, location, or customer base.

Some of our recent work in this space is described below: A leading health insurer wanted to build an industry-leading customer service proposition. Based on a comprehensive mapping of the service journey and identification of customer pain points, we developed a comprehensive set of initiatives to take their service capabilities to the next level. A mid-sized Indian private bank wanted to increase the effectiveness of its customer service function for corporate clients. One of the key levers designed by us was to develop automated and intuitive tracking and monitoring tools to diagnose the issue, thus enabling the operations and IT teams to address the issue promptly. This significantly reduced the customer service team’s reliance on other departments and reduced the TAT for resolving service issues. A digital insurance broker wanted to improve their claims management process to enable their sales teams to provide a differentiated experience to their customers. We conducted an in-depth review of the process and tools used to identify the key improvement areas and designed a roadmap and high-level processes to build a best-in-class claims experience for their stakeholders.