The importance of customer engagement as a central part of customer advocacy is well understood. It may not always be executed to the fullest, but like with any type of relationship you value, care and feeding is necessary and assumed.
Do you apply the same principle to your stakeholder relationships, those stakeholders you turn to for advocate nominations, those who could really use your help if they knew about you? Engagement includes regular reminders about what your program does, how it is leveraged, what it’s done for those who use it, and how it’s continuously adapting to stakeholder needs.
It’s not okay to launch a program then go radio silent until you need something. We’ve all had “friends” like that. How did that once-in-a-blue-moon “ask” feel? Kind of selfish, right?
Here are some examples of how program managers who’ve mastered engagement stay in front of their stakeholders:
Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product Marketing. They all have team meetings, and CMA leaders should be visible, if not have a recurring spot on the agenda. The point is to stay in touch with their challenges and strategize ways to infuse advocates for the best outcomes. Nothing builds business relationships like comradery, commitment and consistent follow through. That results in trust.
Customer Advocacy is a [team sport]. The entire company owns it. These meetings are an opportunity to give examples of how every employee’s interaction with a customer contributes to their experience, both good and bad. The customer advocacy program is the hero for placing customers on the podium, their stories in campaigns and PR, or on the company website. Or, it’s the scapegoat for upstream company “sins,” unable to coral the appropriate number and type of advocates when they’re requested. Another benefit of being visible to the entire company is when someone brings up a need for customer advocates, there’s a good chance someone nearby remembers you and the program and acts: “Remember at the last All Hands…?”
In between all the facetime opportunities, there should be a steady flow of useful information to stakeholders, especially examples of how they can gain from what the program has to offer. Like product marketing, they should be kept informed of changes and improvements to the “product,” and given tips for maximizing the value they gain from the program. Slack and Teams are great for short bits, newsletters for more detailed information.
Some program managers create 30-second video updates that are both informative and entertaining. When stakeholders look forward to these videos, you know you’re on to something. Like the written communications, this is a great way to share recently completed customer videos, advertisements featuring customers, and excerpts from event presentations.
First impressions. New hires are so thirsty for anything that will help them become productive faster. They are impressionable, and somewhat malleable. So if they don’t meet a member of the advocacy team (live, web or video) in their first week, that’s a real missed opportunity that can’t be replayed.
Effective customer advocacy hinges not only on engaging customers, but also on maintaining robust, active connections with internal stakeholders. Regular engagement—through meetings, communications, and visible presence—keeps the program relevant and responsive. Building trust through consistent interaction and follow through on commitments helps embed customer advocacy deeply into the organizational culture, making it a shared responsibility. Such sustained engagement prevents the program from being a forgotten resource and ensures it remains a vital, recognized force within the organization. To learn how ReferenceEdge can help keep your customer advocacy program organized and make cultivating stakeholder relationships easier, please contact us today.
It's only natural that many advocacy leaders have landed on the same objective: make the program easier to use by meeting users where they're already working.
Today, that increasingly means Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever generative AI assistant employees happen to have open.
Imagine a salesperson simply asking AI, "Find me three German healthcare customers using product Y, willing to speak with a prospect," instead of navigating to another interface, or waiting for someone from advocacy, or elsewhere, to respond. It's easy to see the appeal. Removing friction has always been one of the fastest ways to increase adoption.
It is exactly the right instinct.
The difficult parts, arguably the reason program managers exist, occur before and after AI says, "Here are your three best matches."
The value advocacy professionals bring is the ability to operationalize and scale customer advocacy for maximum impact. Quality advocate information doesn't just appear, it's the result of a system.
Now that the user has three advocates, what should happen?
Notice what happened. The search was completed.
The next steps are just as manual as ever if AI search is the be all, end all.
Reality Check
AI can tell you who could participate. It can't tell you who should participate unless someone (or something) has been keeping score.
This is where the story starts to feel strangely familiar.
Many companies still operate their program using spreadsheets, scattered CRM fields, shared drives, email folders, and the remarkable memories of a handful of program managers.
Eventually, organizations realize they aren't managing an advocacy program at all. They're managing lists that happen to contain advocates.
But the shortcomings are real:
Purpose-built advocacy platforms emerged because advocacy is much more than a search problem.
Ironically, AI has convinced some organizations to revisit the same shortcut they worked so hard to escape.
Let's imagine two different worlds.
In the first, AI recommends an advocate for a sales call.
Months later, AI knows this customer recently participated and may deserve a break before being asked again.
Now imagine the second world.
Three months later someone asks how many customer reference contributed to the revenue this quarter.
Silence. Nobody really knows.
The advocacy happened...hopefully. The program didn't. Collectively, the organization slowly stopped feeding the very system it depended on to understand its advocacy program.
Reality Check
If AI helps facilitate twenty closed-won opportunities this quarter, but none are recorded, your executive dashboard still says zero.
One of the easiest mistakes to make in an AI-first world is assuming that successful interactions somehow become organizational knowledge on their own.
They don't.
If a customer agrees to speak with a prospect and nobody records it, the organization loses far more than a single activity.
The most valuable advocacy data isn't simply who your customers are.
It's everything they've done.
That's the story AI actually wants to read.
It's often said that AI needs good data.
That's true.
But operational history is far more valuable than static customer information.
Those aren't search results.Those are patterns.
Remove any one of those pieces and AI becomes little more than an exceptionally fast search engine.
Reality Check
Every workflow skipped today is a pattern AI won't discover tomorrow.
The AI revolution has created tremendous excitement, and rightly so. Finding the right advocate is becoming dramatically easier than it was only a few years ago.
That's worth celebrating.
Just don't confuse a better search experience with a better advocacy program. Search is only one chapter in the story.
The organizations that see the greatest return from AI won't necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated models.
They'll be the ones with the richest operational history.
Those organizations won't use AI merely to answer the question, "Who should we ask?"
They'll use AI to answer far more valuable questions.
That's when AI stops behaving like a better Google search.
That's when it starts behaving like a strategic partner.
Finding the right advocate has always been the opening scene.
If your AI can find advocates but your program can't learn from using them, you've built a remarkable search engine instead of a remarkable advocacy program.
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