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The Playbook to Building a Customer Reference Program with ...
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Our net retention rate was over 130%, so we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. One great way is to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. We’ll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. Many times your customers maybe choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. If you’re able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. “Another way that customers become advocates is a personal relationship with the account team.” Great support experience. Then finally, one that I love and we spent a lot of time talking about a Talkdesk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it’s generally the exact opposite. When you are able to overcome a challenge, and sometimes it’s even Talkdesk’s fault, right? Let’s say we messed something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days.
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Our net retention rate was over 130%, so we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. One great way is to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. We’ll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. Many times your customers maybe choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. If you’re able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. “Making sure that all of that is documented on the new sale opportunity allows us to very quickly mine that to identify who may be an advocate for us.” Great support experience. Then finally, one that I love and we spent a lot of time talking about a Talkdesk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it’s generally the exact opposite. When you are able to overcome a challenge, and sometimes it’s even Talkdesk’s fault, right? Let’s say we messed something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days.
Right? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk? Then a third thing that you can do is incorporate it into the contract. Either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there’s always that negotiation that’s happening. What am I going to give? What am I going to get? One of the things Talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so a customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don’t offer, whatever it is, we can say, “Okay, well, if we’re willing to give this few, might you be willing to be an advocate for us?” “This is a really great way to find your advocates because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you.” What are the considerations? I want to spend a couple of minutes on each of these because I’ve debated them and we’ve also changed our tactics a little bit overtime at Talkdesk. The first one that we go back and forth with a lot and it is a basically philosophical decision is, is this going to be an incentivized program or is it going to be a rewarded program? An incentivized program, you often use a software solution, one that’s very popular as Influitive, that you encourage people to join this program, and they know that if they do whatever it is, the customer reference call, the case study, the live presentation, the webinar, the onsite visit, that they’re going to get something, right? It’s almost like a point system where if you do this, then you get Y. That is an incentivized program.
QUESTION 9: How does that relationship work? “whoever owns the relationship is often the one who starts to promote the advocacy program.” QUESTION 10: You were talking about the references and getting them ready, but let’s say if an AE has all the accounts, does it often happen that the AE actually bypasses you guys and reaches out to their accounts directly?
People who you find that are repetitively thanking your support team, they’ve got an emotional connection to your organization, these are great people to target as advocates. NPS surveys. We run a NPS survey right within Talkdesk. We get a couple of thousand responses every single month. We look at those in real time. We’ve got a Slack bot set up and we see every NPS survey that comes through one by one. Those are great people for us to engage with to be advocates. This is for references, but also the broader advocacy program. Targeted customer feedback surveys. This is actually something that we’ve only just started. We’re identifying what we consider to be our primary contacts for our customer relationship, technical users, business users, budget decision makers, primary administrators of the product. “CSM, account manager, AE, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship, they can also just ask.” Right? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk? Then a third thing that you can do is incorporate it into the contract. Either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there’s always that negotiation that’s happening. What am I going to give? What am I going to get? One of the things Talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so a customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don’t offer, whatever it is, we can say, “Okay, well, if we’re willing to give this few, might you be willing to be an advocate for us?”
We’re sending them surveys that help us collect key information for the marketing team, the product team, but also general feedback on the services organization. Positive sentiment around that and willingness to fill that survey out, these are going to be people who are willing to be your advocates. The way we normally do this as companies is really this fourth bullet, but there’s so much else that we could be considering, but let’s not forget the one-to-one relationship. CSM, account manager, AE, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship, they can also just ask. They can ask formally in a QBR setting. You could create some slide where that says, “Talkdesk customer advocacy program. Here are the benefits to you. Here are the benefits to us. Are you willing to sign up?” “We can also ask informally during a catch-up call, a site visit, personal email out to a ballgame, would you be willing to be an advocate for Talkdesk?” That’s another point in time where you can start to engage around that topic. Then finally, local event attendance. Talkdesk has invested a lot in the last year in local event attendance for both customers and prospects. This is a really great way to find your advocates because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you. They’re good folks to talk to, to engage with in your advocacy program. Now, we’ve talked about who your advocates are and how you can find them. Now, we need to start thinking about, I’m ready to build and scale my advocacy program, what are the things that I need to be thinking about? What are the decisions that I need to make as I build that program out?
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