You’ve rolled out ReferenceEdge, your shiny new customer advocacy platform. It’s packed with the features you dreamed of—dashboards, automations, time-saving tools galore. The promise? Scale your program, 10x your impact.
But here’s the catch: if no one uses it, it’s just a cool, digital trophy gathering dust on a shelf. Pretty? Sure. But that’s not what you or your leadership team signed up for. This is where an adoption plan comes in.
User adoption of a new technology is essentially how well and how quickly individuals begin to use and embrace a new system, tool, or process as part of their day-to-day work.
Adoption is the human side of change. Change doesn’t install like software. It’s a process. People need to opt in, shift habits, and sometimes let go of the old ways (even if the old ways were inefficient and held together by spreadsheets, duct tape, and hope). As your technology partner, we don’t just understand this—we plan for it. We’re not here to drop off a tool and walk away. We’re in it with you to help change how work gets done.
This isn’t a check-the-box support role. Your Point of Reference account director is in the trenches with you—week after week—invested in your success like it’s their own. Because in many ways, it is. When your program thrives, they do too. This is a real partnership, not a perfunctory pass-off.
And like any good partnership, it works best when the commitment is mutual.
Your account director will bring the guidance, playbooks, proactive red flags, and a full heart to the table. What they can’t do is secure your budget, get your execs to show up, or move mountains solo. They need you in the game—engaged, honest, responsive, and ready to keep the momentum going.
Account directors are there for you as you choreograph the success of your program: weekly syncs, making space for strategy, flagging what’s not working early. Your account director is your guide, strategist, and (yes) occasional tough-love truth-teller. They’ve danced with many partners; they know what works and doesn’t. When they raise a red flag, it’s not drama—it’s wisdom. And when they offer a new way forward, it’s grounded in experience, not guesswork.
They’ll help you craft training that sticks, messaging that engages, and incentives that actually drive change. They’ll help you translate program goals into the language your leadership understands. And yes—they’ll be the quiet voice reminding you to measure your wins before anyone else is even asking.
At the end of the day, this isn’t just about software. It’s about people. It’s about the process. And it’s about partnership.
Contact us today to get started.
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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