Top Customer Advocacy Software in 2020

Customer Advocacy Software Overview

What is Customer Advocacy Software?

Customer Advocacy Software is designed to support a company’s marketing, sales and customer success efforts. It allows a company to amplify social proof from existing loyal customers. That social proof is brought into communications with prospects and during onboarding of new customers. This can increase buzz around a brand in a somewhat organic fashion.

Customer advocacy software is related to referral marketing software and consumer ratings and reviews software. There are also products on the market designed to promote brand advocacy among employees. These are used for recruiting purposes and brand reputation management. However, those products are not covered here. Customer advocacy software is distinct from advocacy platforms designed for non-profits or political grassroots efforts.

Benefits of Customer Advocacy

Here are some of the possible benefits of a successful customer advocacy program:

Spreading brand recognition
Increase customer engagement
Increasing word-of-mouth referrals (i.e. inbound leads)
Shortening the sales cycle
Easing the onboarding process through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing
Generating ideas to fuel customer-centric product development
Improving morale among employees

Software supports customer advocacy best practices by automating and streamlining workflows. This help programs (and their benefits) scale.

Customer Advocacy Software Features & Capabilities

Customer advocacy software helps companies identify potential advocates and encourage them to engage with the brand, often for incentives. This might include providing referrals, offering feedback, or participating in reference programs.

Features to support customer advocacy programs may include:

Identification of potential advocates, activity tracking, and record management
Referral campaign program creation, promotion, dissemination, and tracking
Segmenting or sorting of referrals and customer-generated content to suit a purpose (e.g. marketing, onboarding, sales, customer success, etc.)
Support for many types of advocacy channels, like social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram), blog posts, reviews, articles, tutorials, webinars, etc.
Incentive management (e.g. incentive creation, distribution, tracking, rewards and recognition, etc.)
Engagement tools to communicate with brand advocates
Customer reference or testimonial request workflow and management
Collateral sharing and microsites that feature advocates
Reporting and analytics to demonstrate success of referral campaigns or individual influencers by KPI (e.g. sales closed)

Integrations

Leading customer advocacy platforms may integrate with the following types of tools.

CRMs to log events and provide visibility over activities
Third-party rewards and gift fulfillment platforms to support incentive management
Marketing Automation Systems so that referrals and other collateral can be distributed across large segmented groups
Social media sites where much of the advocacy takes place are expected
The organization's CMS to house advocacy materials with other marketing content

Pricing Information

Customer Advocacy Software is generally available on a subscription basis. Higher pricing tiers may cover expanded capabilities or greater capacity for reaching a larger audience. Basic platforms for locating and soliciting advocates start at $60 per month. They might climb to $600 per month for managing larger advocacy campaigns. Pricing for enterprise plans are based largely on the size of the referral base as well as the volume of communication and materials produced.

Gainsight

377 Ratings

Gainsight says they enable business transformation through their passionate community, proven expertise, and cutting edge technology. In addition to the largest customer success community, the vendor says they also have a diverse, 333+ customer base spanning across Fortune 1000 companies such as ...

Influitive

111 Ratings

AdvocateHub helps B2B marketers capture customer enthusiasm and use it to drive marketing and sales efforts. With AdvocateHub, B2B marketers build an advocate community and invite customers into it to complete “challenges” like referrals, reference calls or product reviews. As they complete chall...