One of the sections in our Change Management Playbook addresses the sustainability of a customer marketing program. Although it seems pretty obvious, the topic is planning for extended time out of the office. Sometimes it seems like you’re not away from work enough; maybe more likely true than not if you work from home, right? The reality is that there are plenty of reasons to be out-of-office from maternity/paternity leave, to illness, caring for a sick or injured family member, leave-of-absence, vacation, and so on. Frequently your absence is not predictable or avoidable.
You might be tempted to think the program can survive your disappearance for a few days, a week, or even longer. Kudos to you if you’ve bullet-proofed the need for your personal oversight of the program, but you’re likely an exception, not the rule. Our experience, from the vendor side, is that a program can begin to disintegrate surprisingly fast without a proper day-to-day leader. By proper I mean sufficiently passionate, knowledgeable, focused and available. Even if you have a majority of requests being fulfilled on autopilot (i.e., self-service), there are the request outliers; the ever-changing advocate needs related to new initiatives in PR, events, digital, social, content, etc. You know how these can come out of the blue, often without a lot of lead-time? Then there are the left field data or report requests, often from leadership. What about advocate recruiting activities in-flight? Presumably, the recruiting initiative came as a result of need/demand, and your being out of the office doesn’t change that. You don’t want to be perceived as ghosting a potential advocate when you’re the one who initiated the outreach. Ouch!
When you built your program, do you remember how much time it took to convince salespeople and other stakeholders to trust you? You convinced them they could trust the advocate data, the process, the SLAs. They could trust you to jump in and assist if they had an extraordinary need. You had their back. After all, your goals are the same: revenue growth and retention. Were you to disappear for a day, a week, or even longer, this trust would be in jeopardy. As is the case in any relationship, it’s hard to build back trust when your (internal) customer has been burned. You may never be able to build it back, which really stinks given all the effort you put into getting the program off the ground. When trust collapses then old habits return. As an example, the reference shadow market will be back with a vengeance as soon as salespeople get the sense they’ve lost you as a teammate.
Think about who might be in the best position to cover for you based on familiarity with what you do, their involvement in the advocate ecosystem, skill set, availability (i.e., excessive travel isn't compatible), etc. Probably easiest if they're on your team, but that shouldn't be a hard prerequisite. Then run your ideas by your manager, get their approval, and have them set up a meeting with the backup to discuss details. There is always a cascading effect to consider as well. If your backup needs to hand-off some of her responsibilities for a period of time, who can take those on in a reasonably successful way? Document the plan and get your manager's final sign-off.
Having a list of the processes you've established, such as processing nominations, fielding complex advocate requests, uploading content into a system, rewards management, community management, whatever, along with any SLAs you've established will be invaluable. No matter how small or common sense some activity might be, write it down. You can organize these documents however they make sense, such as by general area (e.g., recruiting, reporting, data maintenance, etc.), or cadence, such as daily, weekly, or monthly activities. Collaborate with your backup so the organization is familiar when they need to find the necessary documentation.
How can you ensure your backup doesn't have to assume your responsibilities cold? That's really hard and may be under pressure given how many things in customer marketing are time-sensitive and urgent. Is there a not-too-onerous way to keep them somewhat connected to your day-to-day (e.g., periodic program review meetings/calls)? They might periodically join a weekly/bi-weekly cadence call with your Point of Reference account director, if you're a client.
Things change. If your backup leaves the company that's a clear reason to revisit the plan. But the backup's role may change such that they're no longer a viable candidate. If you're aware of such a change, don't procrastinate redefining your backup plan. Anticipate the unexpected.
Like insurance, you hope to never have to employ your backup plan. But you’ll be so happy it’s there when it’s needed, and so will those people who’ve come to depend on you to effectively do their jobs, whether it’s salespeople, event managers, demand gen managers, or anyone who relies on advocates and their stories. And of course, we're always here to help!
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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