This article comes from Catherine Staite’s insightful talk at our Customer Marketing Summit in London, 2024. Check out her full presentation.
No company can succeed without its customers. And customer advocacy is more than just a marketing initiative – it’s a powerful driver of trust, growth, and long-term success.
From compelling case studies and high-impact testimonials to strategic customer engagement events, customer advocacy has the ability to shape brand perception, influence sales, and foster deeper relationships.
But for advocacy to be truly effective, it needs to be more than just ad-hoc storytelling – it must be strategic, scalable, and rooted in customer value.
So, how do you build a customer advocacy program that delivers measurable business impact while ensuring customers feel valued, not just used?
In this article, we’re going to cover:
- Why customer advocacy belongs in customer success
- How to create a structured, strategic approach to advocacy
- The role of cross-functional collaboration in scaling advocacy
- Turning advocacy into a revenue driver
- Key lessons for building an advocacy program that works
Why GoCardless moved customer advocacy to customer success
In 2020, GoCardless made the strategic decision to move customer advocacy under customer success. One of the first things I discovered was how broken the process had been.
There were stories of customer case studies taking over 12 months to get approved, and customer success managers (CSMs) felt frustrated – either repeatedly approaching the same customers or hearing rejection after rejection. These interactions often felt negative for both CSMs and customers.
We identified three major challenges that needed to be addressed:
- Lack of alignment with business objectives – Customer advocacy efforts were scattered and unmeasured. The approach had been largely opportunistic – “This customer seems happy, let’s work with them” – with no clear strategy or metrics.
- Siloed and uncoordinated activities – While there was a dedicated customer advocacy team, multiple teams across the business were independently reaching out to customers for press releases, events, and partner activities. This lack of visibility led to customer fatigue and a disjointed experience.
- No focus on customer value – The most significant issue was that customer value was never considered. What was in it for the customer? Often, they were being asked to participate at times when they weren’t ready or hadn’t yet seen success with the product. This disconnect made engagement challenging and, in some cases, counterproductive.
GoCardless’s approach to customer advocacy
The first step in transforming our approach to customer advocacy was identifying our key stakeholders.
In any business, there are countless stakeholders with different priorities and expectations, so it was essential to engage with them early on. We took the time to listen – understanding what they needed and, in their view, what “good” looked like. While we couldn’t promise to deliver on every request, having that insight was invaluable.
One of the most crucial relationships we needed to build was with our global leadership team. Securing their buy-in from the start was a game-changer, helping to embed advocacy as a core function within customer success.
The customer advocacy growth loop
To bring structure to our approach, we developed what we call the customer advocacy growth loop – a four-stage process that puts customer value at the center of everything we do.
This framework allows us to clearly communicate to the business how we operate and why our approach is intentional and strategic rather than reactive.
