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.
Here are some of the possible benefits of a successful customer advocacy program:
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:
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 ...
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...
Annex Cloud (formerly Social Annex) headquartered in Los Angeles offers the Referral Marketing Cloud, emphasizing customer-to-customer referrals and rewards as a means to increase volume of business and revenue.
Ambassador empowers marketing teams to increase new customer acquisition, referrals and revenue by leveraging the power of word-of-mouth. The vendor says their marketer-friendly software simplifies referral marketing. Ambassador automates the process of enrolling, tracking, rewarding and...
CustomerAdvocacy.com, headquartered in Virginia, offers their customer and employee advocacy platform, supporting a Voice of the Customer approach to research, data collection, and customer success, as well as driving customer references and testimonials.
Advocately, headquartered in Singapore and started by former Trade Gecko leadership, offers a customer advocate platform to drive reviews and testimonials or referrals.
Zuberance headquartered in San Carlos offers a customer advocacy software platform supporting customer testimonials and reviews, advocate leads and referrals, and community advocacy for supplying a knowledgebase with brand advocate story.
Amplifinity in Ann Arbor offers a referral and customer advocacy platform encompassing branded workflow for engaging brand advocates, gift card and incentive management, partner management with advocate management by partner, partner registration and co-branding, and other features.
NextBee headquartered in California offers a referral marketing and customer loyalty platform supporting incentive management with rules configurator and reward distribution, and program management console with segmentation and campaign analytics.
Upland Software acquired RO Innovation in summer 2018 to build out its sales and customer enablement capabilities. RO Innovation offers a suite of tools supporting reference marketing, content enablement, and customer advocacy to generate new business.
Swedish company Referanza offers their customer advocacy platform, supporting locating, recruiting, and enabling customer brand ambassadors to generate promotional content and provide testimonials.