If you want to put your organization’s best face forward, your agents should be more than just employees doing a job; they should be true advocates for your organization who enjoy their work and feel positive about their employer.

Of course, this may sound like a far-off pipe dream to many organizations. But with the implementation of a formalized employee advocacy program, it can be a reality.

What is Employee Advocacy?

According to Forbes, employee advocacy is “the promotion and awareness of a company and/or its products and services by the employees who work there.” There are numerous ways that employees can be advocates for their employers, such as by sharing company content on social media, or by wearing or using company-branded merch.

Formalizing an employee advocacy program typically involves setting goals for specific key performance indicators (KPIs), training employees, providing incentives, and tracking success. A successful employee advocacy program will not happen overnight. But it can absolutely be worth all the time and effort invested.

Why Implement Employee Advocacy in Your Organization?

Employee advocacy provides benefits to customers, individual employees, and the organization as a whole. Keep reading to learn how.

Increased Brand Reach

Employees can help boost their company's reach on social media by interacting with its posts. When employees like, share, or comment on company content, it extends the content’s reach beyond the company’s followers to include the employees’ own personal networks.

This applies to other forms of advocacy as well. If, for example, an employee is wearing a company t-shirt during their weekend errands, every person they pass on the street will see your company’s name and logo, contributing to increased brand awareness.

Increased Trust in Your Brand

People are more likely to trust information about a brand from a friend than from the brand itself. According to Gartner, it has been proven in multiple studies that people trust product or service recommendations from people they know more than ads on social networks.

Contact center employees in particular are usually fully aware of any problems faced by your company’s customers. With this level of insider knowledge, if they are still happy to advocate for your brand, it’s a good sign that others should trust in your brand as well.

Improved Profitability

According to Gartner, companies with a highly engaged workforce are 21% more profitable. An engaged agent is willing to put in the effort to understand a customer’s concerns to the best of their ability. They genuinely want to help and find solutions.

The difference between such an engaged agent and one who does the bare minimum is obvious to customers, and it makes a huge difference in their experience and their willingness to continue supporting the brand. Considering this difference, it’s easy to see why engaged workforces are linked with higher profitability.

Enhanced Individual Credibility

Participation in an employee advocacy program helps enhance employees’ credibility and position them as industry experts. According to Hootsuite, about 86% of employees involved in formal advocacy programs said it positively impacted their careers. With the credibility improvements and associated confidence increases, agents are set up for success in customer interactions! Additionally, a confident, credible agent can help a customer feel more confident that they’re getting the best solution possible when they reach out with an inquiry.

Increased Sales Efficiency

Employee advocacy can provide extra benefits to contact centers with an outbound sales component; a formal advocacy program can increase sales efficiency and provide a good basis for social selling (Hootsuite). Similarly, about 64% of employees involved in a formal advocacy program said that attracting and developing new business was a positive program benefit according to Gartner. About 45% attributed new revenue streams to employee advocacy.

How to Implement an Employee Advocacy Program

If you’ve decided to implement an employee advocacy program but are unsure how to do it, here are some helpful tips to keep in mind.

1. Create a Workplace Worth Advocating For
2. The first step to implementing a successful employee advocacy program is ensuring that your employees have an employer they want to be an advocate for! This means fostering a positive culture and ensuring agents feel supported and have access to the resources they need to be successful in their roles. Creating this kind of environment encourages participation and authenticity.
3. Set Clear Goals
4. Before beginning your employee advocacy program, make sure you take the time to set goals for what you want to achieve with the program. They should be associated with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you can evaluate the success of the program and make adjustments as necessary in the future.
5. Incentivize Participation
6. Even with a great culture and all the best support in place, agents still may not want to go out of their way to advocate for their employer. To address this, it’s helpful to offer incentives. For example, you can encourage participation by offering prizes to top advocates or entering all participants in prize draws. Prizes could be gift cards, event tickets, or company merch, to name a few.
7. Provide Training and/or Establish Clear Guidelines
8. Providing incentives can motivate employees to participate in an advocacy program, but the program could still lose momentum if employees don’t know where to begin. That’s why it’s important to provide some kind of training or set of guidelines for their advocacy efforts. Let them know how and where you want them to advocate. This could include training on specific platforms you want them to use, establishing policies on appropriate social media use, or teaching them the specifics of your brand guide.
9. Provide Valuable Resources
10. Finally, make sure you provide valuable resources that your employees will want to share. Agents using social media will be more likely to share content that will resonate with their networks and position them as an industry leader than content that won’t provide value to them or their followers. For example, content that would be considered valuable and worth sharing might make an agent’s job easier or provide information to address frequently asked questions.

Conclusion

It’s clear to see that an employee advocacy program can benefit your contact center agents and your organization as a whole.

For more ideas on how to improve your contact center performance, check out our blog post on gamification.