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Building a thriving community with customer advocacy and engagement via Influitive
November 19, 2021

Building a thriving community with customer advocacy and engagement via Influitive

Lauren Turner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Customer Advocacy

Overall Satisfaction with Influitive

We use Influitive primarily for customers, so that they can network, share best practices and learn both tactically (our products) and strategically (soft skill building, industry news, etc.). However, we also use the platform to drive employee engagement as well (incentives for Best Place to Work surveys, charitable fundraisers, engineering thought talks, etc.)

The level of personalization that Influitive offers is great--challenges can even be brought to 1:1--we've used this degree of personalization for specific big "asks" of customers, and it's worked really well. Given how many different challenges and channels can be created, customers get a wide variety of ways in which they can engage and interact.Influitive helps us identify promoters that might typically slip under the radar. It's enabled us to learn personal data points about specific customers that help us connect to them on a deeper level. Recruitment for high-value activities like joining our research group, doing a case study, or speaking with an analyst is much more streamlined thanks to Influitive.
  • Mass personalization of activity challenges, so that customers receive a curated experience.
  • Robust reporting features enable us to see what's working, and where there are areas for development and growth.
  • Lots of integrations: Salesforce, Marketo, Sendoso, Tangocard, Zapier and more.
  • CSMs are extremely knowledgeable and proactive. Special shoutout to Meaghan Shepherd--she's the best!
  • More "select all" functions, like "assign badge" to a group of people.
  • More targeting at the "notify" stage: there are quite a few activity challenges we'd like to be available to everyone, but only pushed to a subset of customers; and the only workaround now is to clone a challenge and have two sets of targets. It works, but is clunky and clutters up the screen space.
  • I'd love to see a crowdsourced challenge bank, where we can share and borrow content from other hubs.
  • Significantly higher retention rate for accounts in our community compared to the general customer pool.
  • More case studies, references, referrals, webinar speakers, and reviews.
  • Identification of power users who might otherwise go unnoticed.
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.
Absolutely, yes. Customers really benefit from the discussion boards, which we offer not only for them to share best practices but also to network. We also tie in specific discussion boards to our regional user groups (we'll host the user group meetings over Zoom, and then put links to the recordings in the discussion boards).

For advocacy, we've used multiple activity challenges to source customers for speaking opportunities, testimonials, reviews, award submissions and more.
Vanilla is great for forums, but they don't have the gamification/challenges piece that is so important toward building advocacy.
I've found a similar circumstance with Salesforce communities--good if you're looking primarily for crowdsourced tech support and QA, but nothing "sticky" for really building a thriving community, or the advocacy piece.

Do you think Influitive delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Influitive's feature set?

Yes

Did Influitive live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Influitive go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Influitive again?

Yes

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.