Sosennah Every, Advocacy Marketing Specialist at Esker, gives an insight into her role of building and nurturing relationships with Esker’s valued customers.
What is customer advocacy?
Customer advocacy is the act of building and nurturing relationships with loyal customers, who then act as spokespeople and champions for a brand, products, or services.
In some companies it is called Customer Success and in others Customer Experience. Here at Esker, we are the Customer Advocacy team and we are all about fostering long-term relationships with our customers, so we can work with them to create customer success stories, written and video testimonials and act as spokespeople at events too. What better way to endorse Esker than having a prospective customer, hearing an existing customer wax lyrical about our solutions!
Customer journey
The Esker customer advocacy journey starts right from the minute a new customer signs with Esker.
New customers will get a welcome letter sent from Alistair Nicholas, Managing Director at Esker Northern Europe, explaining about all the key contacts and various stages for setting up the Esker solutions and recommended training. I will also send a lovely hamper to welcome our new customer into the Esker family! It is always a great part of the job to get such positive comments back from new customers once they receive their welcome gift!
Once a customer has set up their solution, been through training and testing, they will be in Go-Live and Hypercare. At the end of their Hypercare time, I will introduce myself and talk through our Esker All Access – Community Hub. This is a great opportunity for me to meet customers and start to create an ongoing relationship with them.
I also like to send the team of users and super users that I meet some of our Esker goodies! We have tried to keep to useful products, and as much as possible, environmentally friendly too, to keep within our ESG commitments.
“Thank you for the welcome message and hamper. It is much appreciated. I will share with the team.
We are planning for the kick off meeting day. Once all in place, it would be a pleasure to update our LinkedIn page and tag Esker Northern Europe to celebrate the new partnership.
We look forward to working with you and the Esker team!”
Maeva Evans, ABB Group Ltd
“Thanks very much for the Esker goodies, the team loved them!”
Ruth Birkin, Novuna Business Cash Flow
Esker All Access Community Hub
This is a platform where customers can keep up to date with:
- New solution features
- Tips and tricks on using the solutions
- Esker news and events
- Connect with other Esker users
- Offer feedback and suggestions
- Engage in discussions to help get the most out of the Esker solutions.
Customers will also have the opportunity to:
- Connect with other Esker users and like-minded experts
- Gain exclusive access from across the globe and updates to Esker events
- Benefit from a direct line of communication with Esker to provide feedback, suggestions and ask questions
- Grow & develop their Esker solution expertise via our Resources Centre for self-paced e-learning, FAQs and new feature information
- Compete in fun challenges for redeemable points
- Receive exclusive Esker products and gifts
“I would highly suggest getting involved with Esker All Access as the tools they use to teach are very interactive and help a ton!”
Chris McDaniel, Credit Manager, Excel Industries
I regularly post new content on the hub each week to keep it fresh and interesting. There is a discussion thread element where customers can discuss any issues or highlight any solution queries they may have, so that they can get our global community to feedback and help them. It is a wonderful tool for like-minded individuals to share a common space.
The hub is also where users and super users can log into Esker University through our O2C or P2P Resources tabs. This is a treasure-trove of information and e-learning courses that is available to all Esker users. Any question about the Esker on Demand platform can be answered within this resources area, without having to go to the CX Team for queries.
We want to make our customers as self-sufficient as possible to find the answers they are looking for within the hub.
Customer Success Stories
I love contacting a customer after they’ve used Esker’s solutions for a good period of time and talking to them about their successes using Esker’s AI-driven automation solutions. It is incredibly interesting detailing their original challenges and objectives for automation, to then find out how the solutions have enabled proven benefits such as:
- Boosted employee morale
- Reduced order processing times significantly
- Saved businesses time and money
- Taken efficiencies through the roof
- Improved supplier relationships
- Reduced their environmental impacts, and so much more!
Some examples of customer success stories can be found here:
Customer advocacy at Esker is an extremely interesting and exciting role that collaborates with the Sales and CX teams to bring everything that is wonderful about Esker into the limelight!
