Quick Summary: Buyers now trust peers more than marketing, making customer advocacy essential for growth. CS teams should own advocacy to drive authentic reviews, prepare for easier vendor switching, and use AI to amplify (not replace) CSM impact, says Godard Abel.
In a market saturated with branded content, buyers trust their peers over your marketing prose. Customer advocacy, once a side program, has become a strategic engine of awareness, conversion, retention, and expansion. For you and your customer team, that’s a big opportunity.
At ZERO-IN 2025, we hosted G2 CEO and customer-centric company builder Godard Abel, who shared why customer advocacy now drives more impact than ever.
Both current and future buyers, as well as LLMs, are hungry for customer-generated insights, Godard explained, and customer teams are best positioned to deliver them.
As G2’s CEO and a repeat founder, Godard has long studied buyer behavior at scale, having enabled millions of peer reviews and earned a unique perspective of the signals that move pipeline and category rank. His ZERO-IN keynote connected what customers say, which sellers win, and how AI is changing the entire game. Here are our three top takeaways.
1: Customer success should own the customer voice.
You’ll get more and better reviews, more reliably, when your customer team runs the process.
After all, your CSMs are closest to your customers’ outcomes and context, Godard notes. They know who just realized value, which proof points matter, and when the request will land. Equally importantly if not more so, your customer should already appreciate their CSM and the value they add, making it easier to secure a ‘yes’ and turning review generation into a steady, reliable cadence.
Another advantage of CS ownership of reviews is timing. Your team already leads the moments that count: a successful go-live, first ROI proof, an executive value recap, a resolved escalation, or renewal. Each is a natural advocacy window that raises both conversion and review quality.
Keep the follow-through in CS, too. Thank every advocate, respond to their feedback, and be sure to route constructive input to your product team, complete with the customer context your team uniquely holds. Look for patterns that might emerge by role, use case, or integration.
The payoff will compound: fresh, specific reviews lift your category rank, increase qualified inbound, and de-risk late-stage deals as buyers validate with peers. When CS owns the process, reviews become part of the lifecycle: measured, forecastable, and tied to expansion. If your goal is to turn real customer value into social proof that drives growth, this is the fastest path.
2: It’s getting easier than ever to switch vendors. Prepare accordingly.
The frictions that used to protect incumbent vendors are shrinking, and your customers know it.
Peer reviews and side-by-side comparisons cut through marketing, usage-based pricing reduces lock-in, and standardized security reviews speed approvals. Open APIs, cleaner exports, and AI-assisted migrations lower the cost and risk to move. Meanwhile, integration platforms make “does it work with my stack?” a quick check, not a project.
Expect higher churn pressure in point products first, Godard warns. Tools like coding apps are increasingly swappable as vendors converge on common, focused use cases. Enterprise workflows with deep integrations will remain stickier—but for how long?
What should you do to adapt? Consider:
Tightening time-to-value. Streamline your onboarding, for example, to remove steps that don’t change the result.
Locking in integrations that matter. Prioritize the 3–5 systems your customers rely on and make those workflows effortless.
Turning proof into a habit. Keep recent, specific reviews live and ready for late-stage validation.
Monitoring switch signals. For example, track export activity, contract term changes, and competitor mentions.
Finally, could you sell expansion on outcomes, not features? If parity is rising, differentiation comes from measurable impact and service.
3: AI won’t replace your CSMs anytime soon, but it will make them more strategic.
AI is the fastest path to a more effective customer team, says Godard—and it’s not about replacing people. It’s about removing the busywork so your team can focus where it matters most: strategy, impact, and customer outcomes.
When done right, AI removes manual updates, accelerates insight-to-action, and multiplies reach. The shift is clear: from busy to effective.
Remember: smart AI adoption isn’t about headcount reduction; it’s about elevating performance. You’re not replacing your team. You’re amplifying them.
Meanwhile, don’t forget the additional frontier of getting your customers to adopt your AI too. While internal enablement is important, customer adoption may be the real multiplier, so treat it like a product-led motion, with a clear value promise, and show ROI fast.
Want to speed up your team’s AI adoption? Start here.
Get more actionable advice on driving faster AI adoption in ChurnZero’s new AI guide for customer teams. From planning early pilots to pioneering transformative use cases, our guidelines, tactical tips, and expert perspectives will help you steer clear of dead ends and stay one step ahead.
