AdvocateHub - Awesome for Marketplaces
Updated December 04, 2014

AdvocateHub - Awesome for Marketplaces

Jenn Steele | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AdvocateHub

We're a recruitment marketplace company, and we use AdvocateHub for both sides of our marketplace - both the recruiters and the clients. We initially started using it for the recruiters, since they're our best advocates and we didn't have a good way to communicate with them and build their community across 10 countries. We use it to build community and get proactive business, primarily.
  • Allows me to ask for 12 things at once from each person without sending 12 different emails and getting blocked by their spam filters.
  • Makes my community feel loved with a minimum of effort on my part - I can send bulk emails, but they look more tailored. The emails also come from 3 of us, so it works really well.
  • AdvocateHub has allowed some of my more inactive recruiters and clients to make themselves known to us as a source of referrals, business, or knowledge - we would have missed them otherwise.
  • Sometimes, it's clear that the product is still in beta, but their support is extremely responsive.
  • I'm not necessarily using AdvocateHub traditionally, so I have a bit more administrative overhead than I would like.
  • We had a massive increase in proactive business from our marketplace - we got a decent ROI in month 1, which was far faster than expected.
I haven't evaluated similar products.
If this stops working or we can't dedicate manpower to it anymore, we'll stop using it. Otherwise, you'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
If you have humans you work with, this will work. It doesn't really matter what you want from them,
  • Community? Check.
  • References? Check.
  • New business? Check.
  • Fun? Check.
  • Education? Check.
But you should note that you can make this fail. If you don't pay attention to it after setup, you will fail. It's a bit time-intensive, so you have to dedicate resources (human ones) to it in order to succeed.

Using AdvocateHub

4 - Growth, marketplace, sales, and support.
4 - Support for daily challenge maintenance, marketing/tech for setup and new challenges, sales/marketplace for ideas.
  • Marketplace community building.
  • Proactive business from the marketplace.
  • Referrals.
  • Asking clients to leave feedback and close out projects with AdvocateAnywhere.
  • Education and training of recruiters.

AdvocateHub Implementation

To implement correctly, you HAVE to put in the time. This isn't a no-brainer implementation. It's easy from a technical end, but you have to have your community-building hat on and you have to actually put challenges into the product in order to see any results at all. If you have zero time to manage it, you will fail.
Change management was minimal - Because we're a small team, we handled change management by me putting on a single training session for the entire company. I walked through a scoping document (which was huge - the scoping document set everyone's expectations), the user experience, and then the admin interface. It was actually the first major project rollout I'd done at my company, and we learned that we could handle any change if we did it methodically.
  • I didn't have the right version of Salesforce, so I had to do a workaround.
  • Some of the documentation wasn't 100% complete, so I had to reach out to support more than I would have liked.
  • Groups weren't as easy to implement as I assumed they were, but they've made product improvements since then.

AdvocateHub Support

I've never run into a support team so responsive - I even sent them an edible arrangement after helping me with no fewer than five questions one day. Even on off hours, my non-urgent questions get handled. I'm just stunned by the responsiveness and quality of the support team at Influitive.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - Yes - they kept me in the loop with the bug, and they let me know when it was resolved (even though I'd forgotten about it!).
When I was setting up salesforce integration, I had no fewer than five different questions, including two about documentation. Five different people on the team (from the support folks to my awesome coach to two people on the product team) helped me that day, and no one got even remotely impatient or short with me. It was truly amazing.

Using AdvocateHub

It's not perfect - sometimes it feels like a beta product - but it's not that hard to do exactly what you want to do with it. There is, however, a bit of a ramp-up for non-technical people. That said, it improves with each feature release, and it was really straightforward to implement.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Technical support not required
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Familiar
None
  • It's very easy to create new challenges.
  • The new group management is much more elegant and gives really granular control.
  • Technical implementation is a breeze - a few DNS changes, a line of javascript, and you're done.
  • The badges interface is both hidden and non-intuitive to figure out.
  • There's a sad shortage of webhook documentation (not that you need webhooks, but I'm a geek and like using more things...)
  • There's a lack of visibility into certain pieces of data (e.g., which advocated favorited which challenges).
Yes - I'm pretty sure I can't administer AdvocateHub from the mobile interface, but their user interface (called Maven) is really amazing. It allows use from events, and makes it easy for customers who are members of multiple hubs. In some ways, the mobile experience is easier and cleaner than the web interface!