Building a thriving community with customer advocacy and engagement via Influitive

Tech support gives an immediate auto response email that says "we've heard you", with a live person really working on the issue usually within a few hours. When something isn't fixable, we're usually told shortly thereafter, with a few suggestions of workarounds. Only once did we have a bug that persisted for a few weeks.

Influitive is a true advocacy program for building communities as well as identifying and nurturing customer champions. To have it run at its optimal level, you need a full-time admin; ideally someone who is working cross-functionally in the company to get buy-in and content from different sources. It is not a "set it and forget it" kind of hub--you get out of it what you put into it, and to get it to work well, you need a constant wellspring of ideas, activities and creative ways to encourage customers to engage. Influitive does a great job at facilitating this engagement with numerous templates and pre-built campaigns, but if you want a really tailored experience for your customers, and specifically different personas within your customer base, you really need to create a lot of content yourself.

To use the discussion forums only as a source of crowdsourced tech support would not be using Influitive to its full capacity, and frankly if that is the primary purpose of your community, there are probably more suitable solutions out there. However, if you're looking to really identify, nurture and *reward* customer champions (this is key--you can't just bleed customers dry asking them to do things for your company, it's more important to GIVE value to them), Influitive is the best, hands down.