Brigid O’Donnell Colver is the Senior Manager of Customer Advocacy at Delinea and a member of Vitally’s Success Network.

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I bristled a little recently under the weight of a new-to-me CS title: “Customer Advocacy.”

It’s not a new term, and the work itself is in line with work I’ve led in the past. The title, however, is not one I’ve held before and, at first, I struggled to explain it concisely. 

Is it about advocating for customers — a traditional Customer Success objective? Or is it about facilitating ways for customers to advocate for the company — a marketing initiative? Curious how other teams explain it, I put it through a search engine. 

The very first two results were, and I quote:

• #1: “Customer Advocacy is a specialized form of customer service in which companies focus on what is deemed best for the customer.” 
• #2: “Customer advocacy refers to the act of customers actively promoting and recommending a brand, product, or service to others.”

🤣🤣🤣

So that added to my confusion. But as I’ve settled into my job and title, I’ve come to realize that the confusing part isn’t that there are two definitions; it’s that the two definitions are presented as if they’re unrelated initiatives. 

In fact, Customer Advocacy — like CS as a whole — is a closed loop, baby. Customers actively promote and recommend our companies when they’re happy with us. Customers are happy with us when we center their experience, every step of the way. 

Here’s to a future where Googling (or ChatGPT-ing if that’s your thing) Customer Advocacy returns this: 

• #3: “Customer advocacy is the cycle of doing so right by your customers in every aspect of your business that they feel compelled to shout it from the rooftops, thus bringing in new customers.”

Boom.

Is it a CS role that delivers marketing outcomes? Is it a marketing role that focuses on the customer? 

Who cares? It does right by the customer, and it does right by the business. Shared-value at its finest.

How a CX Mindset Helps Marketing (And Vice Versa)

I’ve worked in CS-at-scale roles for over a decade: customer communications, community management, events, enablement. So when I started offering contract services, I was surprised to find myself hired, time and again, for marketing.

“I’m not from a marketing background,” I’d tell my clients candidly, but they already knew that. These were wise leaders. They recognized that bringing a customer experience mindset into marketing material made for better content, more educated prospects, and more highly qualified leads. I’m forever grateful for those opportunities to learn more about marketing and the essential crossover between functions.

Understanding that crossover has made me a better CS professional, too. I recognize now how great marketing leads to better-fit sales, which lead to deliverable promises, which lead to a better customer experience, which leads to referrals, which support [drumroll]… great marketing!

And that closed loop across GTM teams is becoming a more and more integral part of scaled CS today. Forward-thinking companies recognize that CS doesn’t end with customers’ renewal. It feeds back into presale, through customer stories and references.

Customer Success Looks Different Than It Once Did

I have always loved how Customer Success gets up in everyone’s business. CS may be a standalone function, but it’s a function with a lot of tentacles and I’ve loved working with product management teams, support teams, internal enablement teams and many more to make customers’ experience top-notch.

Now we’re seeing this really cool shift toward presale; a bundling of CS into the overall GTM team. And it makes perfect sense. If you believe that customers’ experience starts before customers are actually customers (and… it does) then CS has a role to play centering that experience in everything from branding and marketing to structuring products, prices, and services.

In the past year, I’ve seen about 2,409 million LinkedIn posts asking “IS CUSTOMER SUCCESS DEAD?!”  Hahahaha, no. What is fading is the idea that CS entails a discrete set of post-purchase services. Customer Success is expanding. It’s participating in pre-, point-of-, and post-sale moments in the customer journey. More companies have dedicated CS team members asking “Is this brand decision right for our current customers?” and “Will this make prospective customers successful if they buy?” right alongside “Are we meeting this customer’s expectations now that they’ve purchased?”

I am — and I think most CS pros are — really good at getting involved in other teams’ business. But it works both ways! We are also being asked to embrace other GTM teams’ participation post-purchase; the part of the journey that used to be CS’s territory. But in this new, murky world of work, Marketing and Sales shouldn’t be relegated to pre-sale any more than CS should be relegated to post-sale. When all of our functions walk arm-in-arm across the customer journey we see shared-value outcomes.

For example, I am currently a member of a (stellar) CX team. But the colleague with whom I work most closely is a member of Marketing. My closest working relationship is a whole ‘nother function. She recently bought us matching sweatshirts because our work is so closely intertwined that we feel like a standalone team.

We went through a few iterations of a RACI exercise and determined that — in many cases — I manage customer channels, she manages messaging. But she advises me on the channels, and she’s usually right. I share opinions on the messaging, and I’m right too. What’s so beautiful about this is that she is on the hook for outcomes like pipeline whereas I am on the hook for outcomes like CSAT. We bring a shared-value set of views to our work: what’s best for the business AND what’s best for the customer. 

While we should all aspire to maintain a shared-value mindset, let’s be honest: it’s like that illusion of the old woman versus the young girl (or that dress — was it blue and black or gold and white?! The internet can feel very communal sometimes). It can be easy to focus deeply on a customer’s needs at the expense of business objectives. 

But it can be just as easy — and as a CS-minded person I am compelled to say worse — to slip into the mindset of “this is right for the business” at the expense of customers. When we pair team members who are keyed-in on each area, we can let collaborative tension do its work.

A Blurred Line Isn’t a Bad Thing

I guess the moral of this story is simply to celebrate and embrace the murkiness of CS. It’s still young, it’s still evolving, and we have so much to learn. That’s a good thing! It’s a fun thing. So let’s keep learning: learning from innovative CS leaders, learning from the voice of our customers, and — of course — learning from our fellow GTM functions. 

Let’s keep getting all up in each other’s business for the success of our customers and the success of our organizations. As we do so, we may just find ourselves closing more loops and consolidating more definitions.