If these sound familiar, your company’s customer advocacy program has room to grow.

  • You’re reactive. You identify advocates case by case as needed: Emails asking “Does anybody know a customer who can speak to … ?” clog your inbox.
  • You can’t track advocate activity. You’re not sure which customers have given or are willing to give a reference, a testimonial, or a review.
  • It’s all about you. Customer advocacy is a one-way street: You ask for help when needed but haven’t factored in customer advocates’ preferences and motivation.

How can you make your customer advocacy program more proactive, more transparent, and more motivating to customers? With technology. Higher-performing customer advocacy programs lean on technology to scale customer advocate sourcing, management, activation, and measurement.

Next question: Which direction should you take?

Consider Four Approaches To Advocacy Technology

Strategic customer advocacy programs can and do function with a variety of technology categories, alone or combined. Our new report How To Buy Customer Advocacy Technology In A Shifting Market (subscription required) lays out four categories relevant to customer advocacy and guides practitioners and decision-makers on where and why to commit.

Perhaps you are seeking customer advocacy technology for the first time. Or you’re reassessing your current setup. Either way, your company’s readiness and willingness to support a long-term commitment, your program goals, the severity of the pain of not acting, and the preferences of the advocates themselves should guide your choice. Forrester’s research surfaces four approaches:

  • Advocate management and activation platforms are purpose-built with advocate identification, activation, and measurement top of mind. This category ranges from vendors covering a few core use cases, such as connecting advocates to buyers, to those with an expansive view of customer marketing including core and extended use cases.
  • Community management platforms fill the need for peer engagement. Customer advocacy program management is not a primary use case for online community platforms, but they are worth a closer look for programs built on a community experience where customer advocates are accustomed to, or would be responsive to, an online advocate-focused destination featuring peer interactions and company engagement.
  • Reference management platforms offer focus. Purpose-built reference platforms have a tighter focus than advocate management, supporting identification, management, activation, and measurement of customers who are willing to serve as references.
  • CRMs meet monitoring needs. Your CRM likely already contains individual- and account-level data about advocates. You can monitor advocates with the addition of new fields and creative segmentation.

The Forrester Tech Tide™: B2B Customer Advocacy And Reference Technologies, Q4 2024 (subscription required), offers more insight and guidance on relevant technology categories. Reach out to speak to a Forrester analyst about our maturity assessment and to explore technology options.