Featured Guest: Lauren Turner
In this episode of The CustomerX Files, host Alison sits down with seasoned customer marketing and advocacy (CMA) expert Lauren Turner for an unfiltered, forward-looking discussion on the current state of customer advocacy—and where the discipline is headed next. As organizations face mounting pressure to demonstrate real impact, unify customer-facing teams, and activate customer stories at scale, Lauren offers a candid look at what leaders must prioritize to succeed in today’s landscape.
This conversation goes beyond surface-level tactics. Lauren outlines the macro forces reshaping advocacy programs today, the gaps she sees in how organizations operate, and the opportunities that the most strategic teams are already beginning to unlock. Whether you're building an advocacy function from scratch or looking to elevate a mature program, this episode offers insights you can put into practice immediately.
Throughout the episode, Lauren emphasizes how dramatically the expectations for advocacy have changed. No longer a “nice-to-have,” customer advocacy has become a foundational engine for influence, credibility, and revenue. Buyers trust peers more than brands, sales cycles are getting longer, and decision-making committees are expanding. This makes authentic customer voices more critical—and more impactful—than ever.
Lauren explains how leading organizations are reframing advocacy as a strategic growth lever, rather than an isolated marketing initiative. She breaks down:
Her perspective highlights a growing truth across the industry: advocacy is no longer just about collecting wins—it’s about enabling the business.
A key theme in this episode is the expanding role of AI. Lauren shares her take on how AI is reshaping the advocacy discipline—from automating workflows and surfacing insights to enhancing customer experiences and uncovering new opportunities for engagement.
But she also offers a grounded warning: success with AI requires clarity, intentionality, and thoughtful change management. Tools alone don’t transform a program; teams do. Lauren breaks down what enables AI-powered advocacy programs to succeed and where many organizations misstep, providing listeners with a realistic roadmap to integrate emerging technologies effectively.
Lauren and Alison also explore the skills and strategies advocacy professionals must embrace to stay relevant and future-ready. Among the biggest takeaways:
Lauren also reflects on the growing expectations placed on advocacy teams—and why this evolution presents an exciting opportunity for practitioners who want to expand their influence.
This episode is ideal for:
Whether you’re exploring new strategies, evaluating your current program, or charting a future vision, this conversation delivers clarity and direction.
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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