The Support Strategist

I have talked a lot about enhancing the customer experience. Obviously, one of the most lasting elements of your customer's experience with your company is the day-to-day use of your product. I talked about this relationship between your products and your customers in a previous blog posting: The relevance of a 1966 spaghetti western.

There is a way to tilt the balance of the scales in your favor; to create the interdependence with your customers that builds customer intimacy — embrace the business philosophy of the "whole product."

This concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in his 1991 business management bible Crossing the Chasm. Even though this book is now over 20 years old, very few companies have been completely successful at implementing the concept of the whole product.

The reason? It's hard work. To provide a whole product solution for your customer requires gathering their specific requirements and satisfying all of those needs with a one-of-a-kind solution.

This is not for the faint of heart. But, it can be done, and the rewards can be significant. Over fifteen years ago I was co-leader of a project in Hewlett Packard to accomplish exactly this: to reinvent ourselves to be able to provide custom solutions through professional services to meet specific customer requirements. These services include all those required to be successful in the solutions business:

• requirements analysis,
• solution design,
• custom engineering,
• special product manufacturing,
• field project management,
• installation,
• training, and
• support services.

After only three years we had grown the professional services business over 600%! This is just the revenue growth for services — the standard product sales that were leveraged by this activity also grew significantly!

And, perhaps even more important, we created an almost unassailable barrier to entry for our competitors. After you have gone through all this work, you are intimate with your customer's business challenges and opportunities, and they yours. With this trust and interdependence in place, you become the preferred partner for future business.

This is the power of embracing the whole product as a strategy to build customer advocacy (and make some money in the process).

There is a single primary advantage to successfully transforming into a customer advocacy company — you build deep, lasting relationships with your customers.

Of course this one single advantage has far reaching implications for your organization:

• You get new customers easier and cheaper through referrals reducing reliance on advertising and promotion.
• Your customers recognize the value in a long term relationship and cut-throat competitive pricing practices are ineffective.
• Company/customer interdependence reduces product development risk and therefore the investment required.

Many of the references listed on the Resources page include case studies of companies that have made a commitment to the principles of customer advocacy including some of the most publicized like Zappos and Ritz-Carlton to some real surprises like MyProductAdvisor.com where you can comparatively shop for products across all brands.

Many. but not all, of the examples have a significant on-line component to their businesses. This is not surprising. The internet is extremely effective at keep in touch with today's speed of the customer.

Following on last week's blog posting, the honorable goal is to make every interaction a memorable experience for each customer individual involved.

What is Customer Advocacy?

Giving each individual customer an experience to remember (in a good way, of course) is one way to describe Customer Advocacy. Why is this a worthwhile goal? Here is what Glen Urban has to say:

That is, advocacy is that state where your customers actively recommend your goods and services to others.

The path to customer advocacy involves increasing levels of dedication to not only sound business fundamentals but a passionate focus on the customer. This blog and much of this website will be used to explore the complexities of becoming a customer advocacy organization.

As we go along, your comments and questions are welcomed. The Support Strategist Facebook page is the easiest way to participate. I hope you will join the discussion.

What are the specific benefits of a Customer Advocacy organization? This will be the subject discussed in the next blog post.