how to Building Better Customer Reference programs

Customer Reference Program – Building

Now that you have a good idea of what you need to provide, begin building the program. Start by defining the processes you will use for keeping track of reference accounts, activities those references have completed and the reference requests that your team will receive. If possible, use tools that are built for these purposes. (You will quickly outgrow Excel spreadsheets.) There are quite a few companies that specialize in reference tools such as Salesforce.com and Point of Reference. Or, while I like the out-of-the-box solutions, you may have an IT organization capable of building an in-house application. These tools are very helpful in managing your reference contacts as well as the activities they complete for you. We also use these tools to manage all of the customer content that is created, such as success stories.

As soon as you have the major processes defined and the tools in place, you need to find out who your references are. Start by spending time with the sales teams to understand who helps them when they need references and recruit those contacts into the program. Once you have a database of references, you should be able to search it to match a request with one of your references. It is also important to set a service-level agreement (SLA) for your internal stakeholders so they understand what to expect in terms of turnaround.

If you get a request for a reference and you can’t come up with a match in the database, what do you do? Not defining a process for saying no can be a reference-program pitfall. It is important to separate fulfillment from reference prospecting.  We have found that if you have a reference manager who is responsible for fulfilling requests as well as trying to find new reference customers, the prospecting portion does not get the attention it needs to meet the demand of the requests.  Many companies have an escalation process in place for these types of situations, and escalate the request to the subject matter experts. If they don’t know of a match, the request is closed as unfulfilled.