Zuberance describe a brand advocate “as a highly-satisfied customer or other who recommends their favorite brands and products without being paid to do so.”

Brand advocates are a fantastic way of attracting new customers at little expense on your part. With 77% of consumers more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends or family.

“But how do I get this kind of customer?”, I hear you ask. Nurturing advocates is all about providing customer service so exceptional that people can’t help but talk about it. Luckily, live customer response provides such a high level of consumer satisfaction that it is hard not to develop some advocates in the process.

There are several steps to nurturing advocates:

Lay the Foundations

The first step in the advocate process is making your customers feel special, but not just a little. You want them to feel that they are the centre of your universe and that they have your undivided attention. Luckily, live customer chat is perfect at this for many reasons. A live conversation allows you to identify customer’s needs in a personal manner and then overdeliver on them, quickly. Whilst making them feel like a King or Queen in the process.

Identify

Once you have high consumer satisfaction as standard, you need to identify which customers would make good advocates. One of the best ways to do this is with post-chat questionnaires. There are two questions that are important for this process:

“On a scale of 1-5 how happy were you with the level of service provided?”

“From 1-5 how likely would you be to recommend our product to a friend?”

Together these questions allow you to find people that are really buzzing about your business.

Seal the Deal

Once you have happy customers on your radar you can nurture them further. A good live chat software will show operators customer details before you even talk to them. Knowing you are talking to someone that has rated you high in previous post-chat questionnaires means that your representatives can invest time going above and beyond what is expected by the customer, whilst steering them towards an offer, which leads on to our last point.

The Carrot

Once you have potential advocates in front of you, you want to offer an incentive for spreading the word about your business. Offers such as: “10% off of your next purchase if you refer us to a friend” work well, depending on the nature of your business. Live customer support is a great platform for communicating these offers because it is much more personal than an email or letter, which can appear spammy, even if the customers have been specially selected by you. Offering it in a conversation adds to making customers feel special.

Nurture not Nature

Don’t leave customer advocacy to chance. By applying some purposeful step’s, you can highly increase the chances of happy customers spreading the good word about your business, at little cost to you. And live customer support is the secret sauce for each stage of this process. Quality live support software such as Xeno will give you everything you need to get cooking, including customer info, pre and post-chat questions, and detailed analytics to help target advocates.