Customer advocacy is a hot topic in marketing and customer experience circles—and especially so following the economic upheavals of 2020 and 2021. Many of today’s most forward-thinking leaders—Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Emily Weiss, to name a few—see it as the only true and sustainable way to win customers and market share over the long term.

I define customer advocacy this way: Customer advocacy consists of the actions you take to focus the organization on doing what is best for customers, which, in turn, rewards you with loyal customers who advocate for your products and brand. My encouragement is to not view customer advocacy as a “project” or “initiative” of its own. Picture it instead as an ingredient—it’s the secret sauce to add a delightful complement to a recipe you already have. It should be part of, not a replacement to, all of the aspects of customer experience you have going: product development, marketing, communication, customer service, and others.

Customer advocacy plays out in many different ways, small and big. For example…Read more.

Read more about customer advocacy in the article “Equipping Your Agents to Be Customer Advocates” by Brad Cleveland, published by ICMI.