HR.com and Seventh Echo, a customer advocacy company, today announced a partnership that will provide comprehensive services to identify, activate and measure customer advocacy for HR solutions companies to accelerate revenue growth. The partnership builds on HR.com's legacy mission to connect HR solutions companies with HR buyers and is the first in a series of announcements that will unveil the most comprehensive marketing products and services in the HR industry.
"This is a perfect partnership for HR vendor companies that work with HR.com. It helps them tell their story through their customers' success while enabling them to continuously improve," said Debbie McGrath, CEO of HR.com. "Customer advocacy is a challenge for nearly every HR solutions company that conducts a webcast or research project with HR.com. Now, they will be able to build a pipeline of customer-focused content with the added benefit of improving their competitiveness, as well as provide education for talent leaders and HR solutions buyers."
Volumes of research underscore the value of Customer Advocacy, including a recent report by Qualtrics revealing that companies that cultivate customer advocates outperform competitors by 85%, have higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. The HR.com and Seventh Echo partnership will provide a scalable three-phase methodology and measurement capability for HR companies:
Phase 1: Internal Alignment and Messaging
Phase 2: Advocate Identification and Activation
Phase 3: Revenue Growth
Depending upon the company's needs, Seventh Echo will provide strategy, planning, execution and measurement, or develop a sustainable foundation to hand off for internal management.
"This a powerful combination of cultivating and shaping powerful customer stories that can be told to the right audience at the right time," said Patrick Rooney, CEO and Founder of Seventh Echo. "While many companies have some elements of advocacy in place, most do not have the time, resources or expertise to develop a customer advocacy program that is sustainable, scalable and focused on revenue growth. That's what this partnership will do for HR solutions companies."
"These are challenging times for marketers and even more challenging for companies that market to HR. The industry is flooded with vendors and it's hard for buyers to differentiate between solutions or know who to trust," said Brad Sutton, VP Global Sales and Customer Success for HR.com. "With this partnership, we are better able to serve HR solutions companies so they stand out from the crowd and convey competence and trust through the voice of their customer."
Customer Advocacy Index
Until now, the ability to measure business outcomes of customer advocacy have focused on "execution-level metrics" including number of advocates or number of references. For the first time, Seventh Echo's Customer Advocacy Index(TM) quantifies the business impact of customer advocacy. The Customer Advocacy Index is the first measurement approach to tie effort with effectiveness and business impact. In addition to using a company's Net Promoter Score, the Customer Advocacy Index is a proprietary measurement methodology that tracks sixteen metrics related to revenue, including:
"Most B2B companies recognize the importance of customer advocates but haven't been able to justify the investment because they couldn't track what they were getting from these programs," said Patrick Rooney, CEO and Founder of Seventh Echo. "This partnership will make it easy for HR solutions providers to draw a direct line between advocacy and business success."
