“Let’s be careful not to ask the Sales team to do too much.”
“CS already has a lot on their plate, let’s keep them out of this."
These are quotes from people in leadership roles when hashing out the processes and design of a customer advocacy program. On the surface, they sound like respectful, reasonable positions. But are they? Is the bigger picture being missed?
After the staff reductions over the past 12–18 months, it’s a safe bet that every department is trying to juggle the same amount of work with fewer people. It’s not really clear that Sales or CS are uniquely under resourced. But even if they are, effective customer advocacy offers these teams disproportionate efficiencies with a small investment of time to provide essential information they and they alone have.
But the bigger issue with these statements is that it’s presumed customer advocacy is some sort of burden, an over-and-above function; not a part of each stakeholder team’s responsibilities. That’s problematic, and just plain unfair.
The reason customer advocacy exists is to contribute to company growth through both acquisition and retention. Isn’t growth the end goal of every department in an organization? Customer experience is every employee’s responsibility. Great CX leads to advocacy. This quote, while from a B2C company, really sums up our belief.
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.”
– Shiv Singh, former Global Head of Digital at PepsiCo
Who benefits from a well-run customer advocacy program? It’s quite a list.
That’s a lot of value from a single function! Is it really possible to deliver on that promise? Yes! We see programs that are killing it every day. Here’s the catch: a program manager/team can’t know everything about every customer relationship. Intelligence from the field is essential.
– Who is a potential advocate and, precisely, for what?
– Which advocates are happy and available today?
– Who has left their position and is no longer an advocate?
– Are there are any service/technical issues affecting sentiment?
– Is the contract being renegotiated?
– Has anything about the account’s profile changed in the past 6 months?
Is it practical for the advocacy program to keep asking customers these questions to obtain regular updates? Most companies limit asking customers for information to NPS and customer satisfaction surveys. That’s a small portion of the information a customer advocacy program requires.
However, customer-facing team members have the answers to these, and many other questions of high relevance to an advocacy program manager’s ability to do their job. Without the answers, how can a program manager pull it off, especially a team of one? But the lives of our advocate contacts are fluid in ways that only relationship managers can stay on top of.
Given that the greatest beneficiaries of a customer advocacy program are also the people the program must rely on for a chunk of it’s intelligence, is their participation in the advocate ecosystem really a burden, an ask that goes above and beyond? Doesn’t the “Help me help you” rule apply here?
Now, do these statements really make any sense?
“Let’s be careful not to ask the Sales team to do too much.”
“CS already has a lot on their plate, let’s keep them out of this.”
We don’t think so. A change in perspective is in order. Without a clear-eyed understanding of the relationship between advocacy and the rest of the enterprise, a program will always be swimming upstream, never reaching its potential. And who will take the blame? The customer advocacy program, of course.
It’s easy to understand the hesitation with involving busy teams like Sales and Customer Success in your customer advocacy practices and processes. However, effective customer advocacy is an integral part of a strategy that supports the growth and efficiency of the entire organization. One element of a successful customer advocacy program lies in recognizing that advocacy is a collective effort, not the domain of one, discrete team. When teams collaborate and share essential customer insights, the program thrives, benefiting everyone involved.
By shifting our mindset and embracing customer advocacy as a core function intertwined with every department’s goals, we create a robust foundation for growth and customer satisfaction. The “help me help you” principle underscores the reality that participation in advocacy efforts is a shared pathway to mutual success. Adopt this philosophy and harness the true potential of customer advocacy to drive company success. Discover how our supplemental staffing services can enhance your customer advocacy program and improve overall company success.
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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