Another important point on the checklist for running a successful customer reference program is working effectively with others that are interacting with customers.
When ramping up any customer reference program, interacting with other internal teams and programs across your organization is essential. Failure to do this can result in a disjointed experience for your customer and missed opportunities to increase the efficiency of your own efforts.
I had the opportunity to speak with Laura Ramos; an analyst at Forrester Research who has been researching customer reference programs. She supports the value of customer reference programs but emphasized the problem of reference programs operating in isolation. This isolation is a major threat to a program’s ability to deliver a positive experience.
Essentially there are two steps to interacting with others that engage customers:
1) Understanding the needs and resources available from other groups. Find out who to engage within your company, what your program can provide to them and what they can offer. Understand their interactions with customers and look for opportunity to leverage each other’s efforts. Once you are more familiar with their process you can uncover resources and even develop champions for your program. These relationships are critical.
2) Creating a single positive experience for (both internal and external) customers. Work to ensure that programs are integrated into customer engagement initiatives and tied in with other groups. This will eliminate costly duplications and create a unified positive experience for everyone involved: happy customers, happy sales teams and ultimately happy executives and shareholders.
When building relationships with your program constituents it is a great idea to engage them in the development process of building the program. Make sure to ask about existing efforts and activities so that you don’t have to build everything from scratch. When people are involved in the creation, they will feel more pride and ownership of the final program, and therefore will be more likely to participate in the way that you need them to.
Once your plan is in place, hold regular meetings with these groups to update them and keep the momentum going. Communication and relationship building is key to your efforts. The more you can engage all the groups and individuals in your organization that you need to be involved, the better your program will perform.
Effective interaction with other customer facing groups, allows you to increase service levels to those people internally that your program is designed for, and is what makes an overall well respected program both internally and externally.
