Telstra’s director of corporate marketing, Inese Kingsmill has told the AANA’s Marketing Dividends program that customer advocacy has become the key focus for growth at the telco.

“We fundamentally believe that customer advocacy has to underpin any growth that the business is going to be able to achieve,” says Kingsmill, “whether that’s in the core of our business or in growth markets. Customer advocacy is strongly related to trust, for example. Customer advocacy is very strongly related to lifetime value and the future relationship with the customer.”

Kingsmill says that right up to the board level it is understood that customer advocacy is not ‘a soft metric’ as a result of econometric modelling that proves the lifetime value of a customer increases as customer advocacy rises.

“We have a very sophisticated research, insights and analytics function within the Telstra marketing team. So we’ve got a very good understanding of what the drivers of advocacy are, and what the attributes are that then help us to shape our go-to-market products and services, solutions and brand focus so that we can build advocacy, build lifetime value for the customer and improve the growth of the business.”

Kingsmill says analytics and insights guide the marketing team and, “the modelling work that we do allows us to look at value pools, and to be able to create the right types of offerings, construct those offerings that we can take to market and deliver to people in a way that is relevant to their needs. Therefore the aperture through which they can consider Telstra as the right option is exponentially increased.”

Here’s Kingsmill on Marketing Dividends via the AANA YouTube channel.

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