Customer advocacy doesn’t have to be manual or marketing-led. Learn how to operationalize customer advocacy by building it into CS workflows, asking early, and automated signal tracking.
Do your CSMs sidestep requests for customer references and case studies? Given how cumbersome these asks can be, it’s understandable.
Yet, to ignore customer advocacy’s potential is to ignore a strategic growth engine. And what’s more, says Dana Alvarenga, VP of customer experience at SlapFive, it doesn’t have to be that difficult.
In Dana’s ZERO-IN 2025 workshop on advocacy for CS teams, she outlined a blueprint for streamlining and operationalizing advocacy.
The big idea: to embed it directly into your customer journey and CS team workflows rather than treating it as a separate campaign—and to get started at the earliest milestone possible.
When further enabled with some technology tweaks and AI air cover, your program has the potential to drive faster growth, higher adoption, and more internal influence for your team, and all without the disruption that a one-off request creates today. Here’s what to do.
How to operationalize customer advocacy.
Ready to take advocacy from ad-hoc to systematic? Follow these four best practices.
1: Make your first asks early, as soon as success happens.
Most advocacy programs wait for renewal-ready customers. That’s an outdated approach, says Dana.
Instead, CSMs should plant the seeds of advocacy during onboarding, which simplifies later outreach and normalizes advocacy as part of the partnership. This could be as simple as:
“We love sharing quick wins from customers. When your first dashboard goes live, would you be open to a short note or clip about what worked well?”
Aim to capture micro-wins when a new customers’ excitement is at its peak. This might mean documenting an early product success, celebrating a customer who’s just gone live, or highlighting a milestone like completing an integration ahead of schedule. Moments like these create the most authentic stories.
“The right moment is literally right after they’ve had a success,” says Dana. “It doesn’t matter if that’s day one, day 100, or day 10. Those early firsts—the first integration, the first dashboard—are gold.”
Within your customer success platform, look for high NPS scores, positive mentions in community discussions, or unprompted praise for a CSM—all early signals that the customer is happy and ready to share.
2: Make it easy to say yes.
Advocacy fails when it feels like extra work—so aim to make it feel effortless, starting with showing customers what their contribution might look like.
Dana’s “Welcome to the family” campaign at SlapFive is a perfect example. During onboarding, new customers see short video clips of other customers explaining why they purchased and what they hoped to achieve.
As well as being onboarding assets, these videos also show customers what advocacy participation looks like, and make it easier to give quick, confident approval.
“If you show them what the advocacy output is up front, it goes a long way,” said Dana. “Customers don’t see a testimonial or product endorsement, just other customers sharing what they do in their role.”
3: Protect trust and avoid burnout.
Advocacy thrives when it’s built on trust and mutual respect. The best advocates are those who feel appreciated, not overused, Dana points out, which requires setting boundaries and using the assets you collect thoughtfully.
“Ask once, then use five different ways,” Dana says. “Don’t keep going back to the same people every month. If you make it easy and respect their time, they’ll want to keep doing it.”
Instead of requesting multiple interviews or testimonials, record one high-quality conversation and repurpose it into quotes, short clips, internal enablement snippets, and peer content.
Always show customers what the final piece will look like before publishing. Keep the focus on their story and results, not on product promotion.
Finally, rotate your requests. Keep an internal log to ensure you’re not asking the same advocates for favors over and over. Limiting your outreach frequency keeps advocacy sustainable.
4: Use tech tools to source advocacy opportunities effortlessly.
While advocacy might be the most human of customer success charters, technology could be your best friend in making it happen.
Use AI note takers or call recorders to automatically flag key phrases such as “first value,” “reference,” “mentor,” or “chose you over.” These systems can route short clips to a shared queue where you can review them for potential use in content or peer enablement—an approach that lets CSMs capture customer enthusiasm without adding a manual reporting task.
In your CSP or CRM, add a “Nominate advocate” button or dropdown, Dana suggests, so any team member can quickly flag a customer win. To ensure that promising stories don’t get lost in emails or Slack threads, have these nominations route automatically to advocacy owners for review. Each week, advocacy leads can review, respond, and follow up to keep the momentum going.
Finally, think agentic. ChurnZero’s new AI Agents work in the background to help you find the right advocates ahead of when you need them. Data enrichment agent Herald assesses customers for advocacy potential on a recurring basis, while signal agent Spotlight scans customer engagements to find and compile signals of value realization, which you can use as a source of advocacy leads.
Where and when to source advocacy signals: a quick guide
Even with the right strategy, advocacy programs stall when teams don’t know where to look for the signals. These moments already exist in your systems; you just need to monitor and connect them.
Onboarding-stage advocacy signals:
- Customer success platform: Milestone fields such as “first dashboard created,” “integration complete,” or “go-live date.”
- Implementation playbooks or project tools: Systems like Asana or Jira often log onboarding checkpoints.
- AI meeting note summaries: Keywords like “we’re live” or “we launched” captured during kickoff or onboarding calls.
These signals reflect time-to-value and confidence, making them ideal for quick spotlights or onboarding success stories.
Adoption-stage advocacy signals:
- Product analytics: Feature adoption, active usage metrics, or API activity tracked in tools like Pendo or Amplitude.
- Support and chat logs: Comments such as “we finally got this working” or “this unlocked X workflow.”
- Community platforms: Peer posts where customers share best practices or wins.
These signals show forward momentum and growing confidence on your customers’ part.
Renewal and expansion-stage advocacy signals:
- CRM systems (Salesforce, HubSpot): Renewal opportunities marked Closed Won or Expanded.
- CSP analytics: Accounts trending upward in sentiment or engagement scores.
- Call notes: Mentions of new executive sponsors, expanded use cases, or upgraded tiers.
Renewal and expansion milestones mark credibility moments. Think in terms of creating “why we stayed” or “why we grew” narratives.
Peer intent advocacy signals:
- AI meeting note tools (Gong, Chorus): Look for “happy to share,” “talk to a customer,” or “mentor others.”
- LinkedIn or community spaces: Customers posting wins, sharing advice, or commenting on success stories.
- Advocacy platform logs (e.g., SlapFive): Acts of advocacy such as references, testimonials, or event participation.
Peer intent signals identify customers who are ready to champion your product, and reveal where trust in your company is greatest.
