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A Winning Customer Advocacy Strategy
Complete Payroll turned to HubSpot’s Marketing and Sales and Service Hubs when Marketing Director, CJ Maurer, joined the team. Since then, the team has been implementing several different tactics including building a content ecosystem with more than 25 gated assets through the platform. Along with CJ, Joe Peluso Marketing Coordinator, is also responsible for the lead generation and branding of the company. Joe came in with video experience and in an effort to build that out for Complete Payroll, the team started creating videos as a part of their larger marketing strategy.
This new strategy soon became a full-on advocacy strategy with client testimonial videos and employee bios as they began to use these assets as a source of referrals and references to quickly gain their audience’s trust and generate more referrals. The team’s goal was to understand how they could put customers at the forefront, reducing friction, and delighting them with top-notch service. CJ and Joe implemented an advocacy strategy composed of customer testimonial videos that have allowed them to amplify the customers’ voices. It was a matter of building trust and increasing qualified leads, by leveraging word-of-mouth.
“Everyone says ‘we have great service’ but when the customers say it, then people listen.” CJ Maurer says.
However, trudging through the muddy waters of identifying clients willing to share their testimonials about Complete Payroll, CJ noticed many people loved the company and wanted to work with them. However, they needed a system to manage and collect this data for the company's benefit. This is when they started using HubSpot’s NPS tool to start an advocacy program, prioritizing what their clients say about them instead of what the company's marketing or sales departments cared to share about Complete Payroll.
“We knew we had good customer service because our retention rate was high compared to the industry average. We had often received verbal anecdotal feedback of, ‘You’re doing a great job at this service for my company,́ but we weren’t measuring any of it. It’s important to have feedback that’s not only recorded but also being tangibly measured. You may have favorable business results and assume people perceive you as an important HR and payroll service, but it’s important to have the data to back it up.”
How Complete Payroll Generates Word-of-mouth at Scale with Advocacy Automation
Knowing that launching an NPS campaign was the first step to take, CJ began by building out the workflow through HubSpot, using the advocacy automation tool offered through the platform to identify customer advocates and collect testimonials for their business.
With the advocacy program in full force, the marketing team can now leverage HubSpot’s post-survey automation feedback where they have set up a workflow to manage high and low NPS scores. This workflow enables them to action feedback from both positive and negative scores. Following up with the proper next steps for both happy and unhappy customers will provide an overall better customer experience for Complete Payroll customers.
“We want to show we put customers first. But rather than sharing it ourselves, we want to let our customers share on our behalf. With customer testimonials, our clients now say it for us.”
Through an advocacy strategy, the company has been able to create follow-up tickets and surface customer issues with the relevant customer service manager. When an NPS score is low, the customer service team takes
a closer look at the original case and gains more insight into why their case resulted in a low NPS score. This sets them up to quickly resolve a similar case with better results in the future. If, on the contrary, a customer speaks highly about Complete Payroll services and the NPS score is between a 9 and 10, the system automatically sends an email asking if they would be willing to have their testimonial about Complete Payroll shared on the company's site – either by video or writing.
In the future, they are hoping to incorporate customer testimonials into their ad strategy on platforms, such as Facebook ads. They are excited to see how this marketing strategy drives new leads for their business. As they continue to build out their customer advocacy program, the marketing team also wants to create a Learning Management System, which would act as a marketplace and referral partner program between their clients who may benefit from each other’s company’s services. With these plans on Complete Payroll’s roadmap, they are taking their advocacy strategy to a higher level and delighting their loyal customers.
Since implementing an advocacy program with HubSpot tools, CJ advises: “Get an advocacy program. It doesn’t even need to be a program. They just need to realize the customer's opinion carries more weight than theirs. If they subscribe to that belief, then they should use customer testimonials. A lot of people may be afraid to ask for customer opinions. Go to your best customer, call them up, and say that you want to compile a couple of comments. It’s as easy as that – and it’s doing wonders for Complete Payroll.”
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