Good Influence from Zaptitude is a solution for running and managing customer or member referral programs.
Have you ever bought a product or joined an organisation and been promised rewards and benefits for encouraging your friends to do the same? That’s a referral program. Even just a prompt to share a link to Twitter telling others of a recent purchase can be part of a referral program.
Good Influence is a cloud-based platform that allows you to create, run, and report on these referral programs, including linking them in to your CRM system.
So, why do you need a referral program?
People are more likely to buy a new product when learning about it from friends and family. Hearing someone you know speak highly of a company is much more compelling than seeing advertising about them. Prompting your customers or members to refer a friend or colleague will grow word of mouth and increase positive awareness of your organisation.
Using the Good Influence platform to manage your referral program then, gives you control and insight. You can get reports on how many people have recommended your organisation and how many of those referrals have gone on to become members or clients. You can track ripple effect if individuals who were referred to you then refer other people, who go on to refer others. You can encourage and track recommendations through social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
As well as tracking this information as a company, you can let users see their own influence. If your referral program includes rewarding people for referring others, then you can give them a dashboard so that they can see the impact they’ve had and the rewards they’ve earned.
From a management point of view, you can test out different wording of messages to see whether a particular phrasing encourages more sharing than another. You can run campaigns and target different people in different ways.
Where it gets really interesting, is when you integrate the platform with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A CRM system stores a lot of information about your clients, members, or other contacts. You can use that information to target people at what’s known as a “happy point”. If someone has just renewed their membership with your organisation, it’s safe to assume that they’re happy with you and so prompting for a referral is likely to yield a positive response. On the other hand, if someone has just logged a complaint, this is probably not the best time. You can use the data in CRM to implement rules and only prompt for a referral when certain conditions apply.
Once someone has been referred to you, you can use that information in CRM as well, triggering automatic processes, sending standard emails, or assigning an employee to follow up. By linking into your CRM processes, you can ensure that these referred individuals are dealt with appropriately.