In the latest edition of our Referential “Employee Highlight” series, the first of which you can read here, we are once again providing our global team of consultants with an opportunity to shed light on themselves and their experiences working in Customer Marketing with some of the most visionary companies around the world. These are organized into a Q&A format, and each will focus on a specific theme, or one of Referential’s nine pillars of service. In this edition, our focus is on recruitment and best practices to build trust. Our discussion is with Advocacy Consultants Kristian Gallego ..read more

In the second of our Referential “Employee Highlight” series, the first of which you can read here, we are once again providing our global team of consultants with an opportunity to shed light on themselves and their experiences working in Customer Marketing with some of the most visionary companies around the world. These are organized into a Q&A format, and each will focus on a specific theme, or one of Referential’s nine pillars of service. In this edition, our focus is on recruitment and best practices to build trust. Our discussion is with Advocacy Consultants Kristian Gallego and Rob ..read more

When it comes to dating, setting a time and place for a date is always appreciated. It ensures the date will actually happen, reinforces your interest in spending time together, and avoids the nebulous "We should go to dinner sometime..." approach. Similarly, in advocacy, people appreciate directness and assertiveness, such as saying, "Let's meet this week. How does Thursday at 10am sound?" We've all experienced the struggle of getting a response from a customer after multiple follow-ups with no reply. Sometimes emails end up in spam folders, and sometimes it's just plain busyness preventing ..read more

In the second of our Referential “Employee Highlight” series, the first of which you can read here, we are once again providing our global team of consultants with an opportunity to shed light on themselves and their experiences working in Customer Marketing with some of the most visionary companies around the world. These are organized into a Q&A format, and each will focus on a specific theme, or a rotation of Referential’s 9 pillars of service. In this edition, our focus is on reporting and metrics, and our discussion is with Senior Advocacy Consultant Denise Taylor. How long have you ..read more

Demonstrating the value to C-Suite of Customer Marketing and Advocacy programs, and the desire to learn about, and embrace, AI technologies were resounding messages heard at October’s CustomerX Conference in Boston, which Referential sponsored. While Referential doesn’t offer psychic readings, in many ways this conference observation offers tangible insights into what’s to come in 2024 for customer marketers. Program justification has taken a vocal seat at the table, education across departmental silos and stakeholders has never been more important. Proving the value of what you do is now, pe ..read more

I’m sure we all must mutter the same as we approach yet another year end: “Where on earth did that go?” We all share similar feelings about the passage of time, but I feel that 2023 may have brought us all individually something a little different. Although we may share the same space, we may not have all walked the same path.  It has been evident this year that customer advocacy has encountered many ups and downs. Within a year where program cutbacks, re-orgs, budget reviews and department shifts have featured heavily, the age-old question has come up time and time again: “Can we do mor ..read more

Advocacy is largely an intangible service, as customer relationships are at the crux of it. So how do you justify program costs to people who might not be familiar with advocacy? Through Metrics. Referential tracks various key business parameters for each of our clients on a monthly and bi-annual basis, which in turn provides the data they need to justify their advocacy programs’ budgets. One of the most meaningful and powerful bi-annual metrics that we have in our portfolio is Client Lifetime Total Revenue and Longevity (CLTR-L). CLTR-L was developed to evaluate the dollar value of a client ..read more

If you’ve ever managed a community or advocacy program, you’ve probably looked into tools that can help you deliver better organized results, faster. At Referential, we help manage programs that haven’t yet invested in a purpose-built reference management system (RMS) or customer marketing & advocacy (CMA) platform of any kind. Should interest arise in an RMS or CMA, we help clients review available solutions to find the one that best fits their needs. In that sense, we’re vendor agnostic. Maintaining a robust, dynamic program using spreadsheets requires diligence and any number of best p ..read more

In what is Referential’s “Employee Highlight” debut, we are introducing a series intended to provide our global team of consultants with an opportunity to shed light on themselves and their experiences working in Customer Marketing with some of the most visionary companies around the world. These are organized into a Q&A format, and each will focus on a specific theme, or a rotation of Referential’s 9 pillars of service. In this edition, our focus is on program management, and our discussion is with Senior Advocacy Consultant Barbara Leavy. Q: Hi Barb! How long have you been working in cu ..read more

At Referential, we are acutely aware that the success we experience is directly tied to our clients’ success. To that end, we love to help our clients tell the story of their own customers’ wins. Allow me to pull back the curtain and walk through how a graduation gift laid the path for me to create testimonial videos for Fortune 500 companies and SMBs, alike. Upon graduating from eighth grade, my parents gave me my first video camera. This went with me everywhere; from Europe to Alaska to my own backyard. You could usually find me with a pocket full of MiniDV tapes, ready to swap into the cam ..read more