Customer Advisory Boards for Customer Advocacy Programs
Advisory boards are essential for customer advocacy programs. As a customer advocacy program manager, you need regular feedback to ensure the program is on track to meet the needs of its stakeholders. Relevance is the name of the game. Your primary objective is to provide the most valuable assets (customer advocates and customer content) to Marketing for lead generation and branding, and to Sales to bring in new revenue. If the program isn’t positioned for those two objectives, it’s unimportant to leadership—programma non grata.
We believe the best was to stay relevant is to form an advisory board for your program, and then act on the recommendations the board makes. Here are answers to the most common questions we’re asked concerning the formation of a board.
Board Composition
- Who’s in it?
Representatives from your most valuable stakeholder groups including Sales, Marketing, PR, Events, Customer Success, and Customer Experience should be included on your advisory board. It’s highly recommended that at least one of your executive sponsors is included as well. They may be critical to facilitating some of the initiatives that come out of board meetings. - How many members should it have?
If you assume that for any given meeting 75% of members will be able to attend and you want a quorum, we’d recommend a total membership of 10-15. - How are members chosen?
It is essential that members feel they have a special responsibility, and that being a board member is a privilege, not a burden. With that goal in mind, we recommend having management nominate members from their respective departments with your criteria in mind. The ideal member is opinionated, thoughtful and cares about the companies’ best interest, not just their own. - How often should the board meet?
The answer depends on what’s going on with the program. If your program is generally running smoothly, then a monthly meeting/call is probably sufficient. If you are trying to get a program off the ground or turning around an underperforming program, you may need more frequent contact. - What can the members offer to the program?
First and foremost, candid feedback on what is working and not working. This feedback could encompass processes, policies, gaps in the database, technology, forecasted needs, and content feedback. We suggest that members see themselves ‘ambassadors’ for the program as well. That means they are the feet on the street, gathering feedback from peers, providing direction to new employees in their department, and disseminating program news among other things. - Should members be compensated?
That’s mostly a cultural question, but from our experience, if members are treated to catered breakfast or lunch at in-person meetings and they get to have input into a program upon which they depend, that is usually ‘compensation’ enough.
What’s a Board Good For?
While each program will have a bespoke set of goals and expectations for it’s advisory board, here is a short list of topics that might comprise a meeting agenda:
- Review and refinement of the goals of the program
Advisors can help define or refine the goals and objectives of the program, ensuring they align with broader, and most current business strategies. For instance, if Sales was just asked to focus on a particular segment of the market, then the program should pivot to align it’s goals with that direction change. - Criteria for the advocates chosen for the program
Feedback on the criteria for selecting customer advocates, ensuring the program database reflects the current needs of Sales, Marketing, PR, Events and other stakeholders; and can articulate the stories needed by those stakeholders to achieve their goals - Advocate engagement strategies
Suggestions on how to engage and motivate customer advocates, including recognition programs, incentives, and personalized communication strategies, based on firsthand observations and advocate feedback - Content needs
Insights into the types of content that would be most valuable to stakeholders, such as videos, case studies, testimonials, or peer reviews, and advice on how to produce and distribute this content for maximum discoverability, and impact - Communication Channels
Recommendations on the most effective channels for communicating with and disseminating content to both prospects and customers, such as online communities, social media, the company website, or industry events - Training and Support
Guidance on the training and support needed for customer advocates to ensure they are informed, confident, and effective in their roles, which is a big part of change management, one of the top factors in program success, next to leadership support - Feedback Mechanisms
Advice on establishing effective feedback mechanisms to gather continuous input from program stakeholders (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success & others) about their experiences and the overall program - Measurement and Evaluation
Help in formulating metrics and evaluation strategies to assess the impact of the advocacy program on customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction - Technology and Tools
Recommendations on maximizing the adoption/value of existing advocacy technology, or gaps in the tech stack to support the program - Market Trends and Insights
Sharing insights on industry trends and customer sentiments that could influence the direction and focus of the advocacy program
In Conclusion
Establishing an advisory board may seem like one more thing for which you, as a program manager, don’t have time. But the benefits will far outweigh the cost. By assimilating insights from key stakeholders, you ensure your program’s relevance, aligning your efforts with organizational goals and market demands. This board becomes an invaluable resource, guiding your strategies and ensuring your advocacy efforts resonate with both internal goals and external market conditions. Remember, the true strength of your program lies in its responsiveness to feedback and its ability to evolve—a dynamic that your advisory board will significantly enhance.
Think about the board members as an extension of yourself; they are (should be) program ambassadors, integral to the face of the program. If you establish a sense of ownership from the advisory board members and build true team spirit, you will have made your job easier when it comes to program awareness, education, user adoption, and ultimately results.
It Started With a Legitimate Aspiration
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.
What's Next?
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.
Haven't We Seen This Movie Before?
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.
When Search Replaces Process
Let's imagine two different worlds.
In the first, AI recommends an advocate for a sales call.
- A request is automatically created.
- The Customer Success Manager approves participation.
- The customer receives preparation materials.
- The call takes place.
- The activity is recorded.
- Recognition is issued.
- The opportunity is linked to the advocacy activity.
- If the deal closes, revenue attribution updates automatically.
- Executive dashboards reflect the contribution.
Months later, AI knows this customer recently participated and may deserve a break before being asked again.
Now imagine the second world.
- AI recommends the same advocate.
- The salesperson sends an email.
- The customer agrees.
- The meeting happens.
- Everyone moves on.
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.
Invisible Work Stays Invisible
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.
- It loses context, attribution, and recognition.
- It loses another piece of history that could have helped improve the next decision.
The most valuable advocacy data isn't simply who your customers are.
It's everything they've done.
- Every request, acceptance/decline, event presentation, analyst interview, product beta, reference call, press interview, reward, closed-won opportunity revenue influenced by their participation.
That's the story AI actually wants to read.
AI Needs Memory, Not Just Data
It's often said that AI needs good data.
That's true.
But operational history is far more valuable than static customer information.
- Advocate profiles answer questions about who someone is.
- Operational history answers questions about what consistently works.
- That's where AI begins uncovering insights that no spreadsheet could ever reveal.
- Perhaps healthcare advocates participate twice as often as financial services advocates.
- Perhaps customers who join advisory boards are twice as likely to become conference speakers.
- Maybe advocates who receive recognition within a week participate significantly more often than those who don't.
Those aren't search results.Those are patterns.
- Patterns emerge from history.
- History emerges from process.
- Process emerges from systems.
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.
Don't Stop at "Who?"
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.
- Every request becomes institutional memory.
- Every activity measured.
- Every contribution attributable.
- Every outcome becomes another lesson AI can learn from.
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.
- "Where are we running short of advocates?"
- "When is the most effective time to use advocates?"
- "What types of advocacy generate the greatest business impact?"
- "What patterns have we been missing?"
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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