Producing Great Results!

The idea of customer advocacy and customer marketing is a new way of thinking within B2B business. I feel fortunate that we have chosen a partnership with Influitive, who in my mind, is the leader in this particular space. Our implementation was quite easy and even with my competing priority of creating an online user community at the same time. Their customer support is quite incredible. They are timely, polite, and sure to close the loop. The knowledge base articles are great and usually show walk-throughs and how-to's on nearly everything. I also appreciate their willingness to continue to foster partnership through ongoing coaching with advocacy experts every two weeks. They have even gone so far as to add me to a great SLACK group with Awesome Advocate Marketers from around the world to learn and grow. As a result of our coaching, execution, and leveraging the software within the first 30 days we have had 12 new software reviews, 9 referral leads, and 10+ users raising their hand to be references. I have been blown away with our results and so have my executives. We are going to continue to build on our early success and leverage this tool at an upcoming event - specifically with Influitive's great mobile app. Another thing I appreciate about Influitive is they are constantly learning, growing and trying new things. Their own VIP AdvocateHub is a great place to learn about the company, what's coming around the corner, and also great advice to incorporate into your own hub. We are really looking forward to continuing our success with our Hub and ultimately mobilizing our advocates to spread the footprint of our brand and services via word of mouth, social, and reviews while having fun at the same time!

Pros

You truly get out what you put in. The time spent building campaigns and targeted challenges are directly related to what results you're able to yield thereafter. Their customer support is incredible. Their coaching is very helpful and they are all about building value for your Hub. If you are the sponsor, rest assured you will have plenty of benchmarking and metrics to present to your executive teams.

Cons

No real cons to speak of at this time. Like any other B2B company, they are interested in appending add-on solutions such as API links to Marketo, Salesforce, SSO etc. These do cost money and are typically not included in a base contract.

Influitive is a valued partner

From the beginning, we have had nothing but a positive experience with the Influitive product and the team. We've had a dedicated customer success manager with who we meet every month to plan our projects and key initiatives. The support team is responsive and helps

Pros

Our company spent time researching which company would provide the best platform for running our online customer community and Influitive was the top pick. Almost five years later, we are still pleased with the decision. The Influitive platform is a safe, closed environment for our educator community to engage and collaborate. The evolution of the platform product roadmap continues to improve our administrative functionality in addition to the ease of use for our members. The channel functionality allows us to put similar activities into the same category. Members can pick and choose their areas of interest without having to sift through all the activities. The reporting functionality gives us the data we need to report out successes and evaluate areas that need improvement.

Cons

Many of the issues I liked least about the software have been improved on the Influitive product roadmap including the ability to clone challenges with targeting, the ability to delete members, and the reporting functionalities. The thing I like least about the software is the campaign library can't always be edited easily to meet the tone and needs of our community. We generally create 95% of our own campaigns and don't rely on the campaign library.

I love using Influitive

Pros

I love the app's Lead Management feature because it allows me to look at new leads which are crucial in my new startup's success. Reporting/Analytics plays a crucial role along with lead management in my startup's role of trying to gain new customer. I do not have an use for this part of the app as my new company is still in it infancy stages. I love Social Media Integration in this app because it allows me to be productive and reach out to potential new users on Instagram so I think it is a critical feature of the app. Another critical feature of the app because it allows me to track referrals which are new and can be a potential client down the road.

Cons

The only con I would think of in this app is the pricing which is a a bit higher than I would pay for a great service like this just because I have just started a company from the ground up.

Buggy, Unreliable Software. Support is Non-existant

While we have had positive results with Influitive, we have faced numerous challenges. The team is almost impossible to work with (a far cry from the past where they were absolutely exceptional). There is a lack of caring about the customer and in expertise (even of their own software). My first few weeks with Influitive went like this: sales member left items out of the contract and rushed us to sign it (we did, realized our mistake, and accepted it). The company forgot to actually setup our hub (we had to email them to get them to give us what we purchased). The next thing I know I'm receiving crude calls from someone claiming to be their legal team telling me I'm being sued for someone else's account (yes they messed that up). Later, when we tried to purchase the item that was left out of the contract, they tried a bait and switch and tried again to sell us something we didn't want in place of what we specifically asked for. It's gotten to the point where we file a ticket knowing support will tell us to ignore it, and every senior person we've reached out to at the company is leaving or moving positions and unable to help us (redirecting us to other people who we never hear from).

Pros

I've used Influitive for several years. It can drive results if implemented correctly and with dedicated resources. The platform offers a nice balance for users with challenges, rewards, a messaging center, and a new focus on a forum (although if you already have a forum you cannot turn this off and they will force you to use it).

Cons

The company has changed directions pushing the forum over the challenges (the initial reason Influitive was created). The software is often unreliable, with our team finding bugs and issues almost daily. These issues range from targeting (advocates not receiving challenges), inaccurate counts, data disappearing, and blatant issues in production such as when they broke the rewards page or the challenge forms. We have numerous complaints from our users, and people complaining that it doesn't work. In less than a year we have filed probably over 20 bugs - most of which support ignores. The most common response we get is "it will fix itself eventually." While they have an API, it's very random and not well designed. For example, there is a groups endpoint, but the only way to get the group ID is to go back into the admin, go into reports, dig into the report, pivot and filter, and then eventually you'll find a hidden ID that doesn't match the group ID used throughout the system. The forum likewise is extremely buggy - although they've made vast improvements. Now posts and responses at least show up in order, although moderation and editing capabilities are a far cry from any other available forum solution (in most cases limited or non-existent). If users need to be able to copy/ paste code examples - you can forget it (this feature, while available doesn't work and is as you guessed it, extremely buggy). Unfortunately, this is the tip of the iceberg.

Great for marketing, great for users

I am a user (advocate) of 2 Influitive campaigns, 2 different companies and products. I use both the website and the mobile app to earn points by spreading my thoughts about both products. I don't have to be negative though, because I truely like both products a lot. What a better way than to spread my positivity and earn a buck with it ?

Pros

Companies can use Influitive to marketing their products and build a community of loyal users. Those loyal users are good advocates for the companies, because they use their own social media channels to tell about the products.

Cons

Honestly I haven't found anything negative about the use of Influitive. Both the website and the mobile app work well.

Amazing Platform to Build a Customer Community & an Advocate Marketing Program

Pros

Influitive helps us communicate with our customers in a meaningful way at scale and reward them for everything that they do for our business. Not only can we provide tools and resources to help customers with our product but we can drive measurable results by utilizing advocates to help with every aspect of the business including sales, customer success, editorial, marketing and product development. It's a great way to create a community amongst our customers and we can get feedback on various initiatives quickly. What I love about the advocate hub is it's intuitive, easy to use and is adaptable. I like to think of it as a ball of clay - you can adapt it to what works for your team, audience and business. The first thing I noticed when I started using the AdvocateHub was how easy it is to use and how flexible the platform is. This enables me to adapt my program and shape it to fit my needs and strategies. Influitive is committed to ensuring their customers are successful. The company is dedicated to ensuring that my program is successful which is a huge benefit of using their platform. It feels more like a partnership than a vendor relationship.

Cons

There's not much that I would recommend in terms of room for improvement. Influitive is awesome!

Leading Advocacy SaaS Software keeps getting better and better

I have been an advocate of Influitive since it's conception many years ago whilst looking for a platform to support our growing advocacy needs, where manual systems are just no longer viable, workable or simple. I have been involved in implementing Influitive at two large organizations and still recommend it as my first choice Advocacy platform. Influitive ticks many boxes in terms of its capabilities of vision and execution, and whilst not perfect, is actually a simple and effective way to manage a fully functional advocacy program. As a Saas platform, you get the added convenience of non-hosting, but the additional benefits of access anywhere. I use Influitive daily. My advocates love the platform, it's simple but powerful and has many great features such as templated challenge creation, social media linkage, and easy management of advocates. However, there are certain areas of the product that need addressing which don't work well, such as text formatting, the white label mobile app (which is truly terrible), image hosting and the ability to access the platform through the eyes of an advocate. Whilst these improvements sound minor, they have an impact on daily administration of the platform, and if addressed Influitive would be a standout platform. Overall, it's a great tool and one that makes advocates happy to engage my business and that's what it's about.

Pros

Ease of use, reporting, level of support, capabilities and integrations

Cons

Missing some very basic functionality like simple formatting tools and testing features

Building great customer advocacy communities with Influitive

Pros

What I love the most about Influitive is that it helps (in a rather intuitive way) build connections with your customers and helps the members of the community engage in relevant and valuable ways. It is the perfect tool to feature your products and educational resources by putting to really good use all that gamification technics can offer. Whether you want to just get to better know your end-users, drive attendance to specific events, recognize and award loyal customers, or build a strong discussion forum for your customers, Influitive has all the features you need to achieve all these. The integration with different applications is also very helpful, and the support knowledge base covers most of the questions you might have on how some things work.

Cons

The reporting can be challenging, but it offers great functionality. Some features are not intuitive, so you would need someone to walk you through the back-end to make sure you don't miss any capabilities that are relevant and helpful for your needs. The mobile app could use some improvement.

Top of the line advocacy platform

Influitive offers the most advanced advocacy platform. Although it's expensive, it's the best option for marketers that want to start an advocacy community. The learning curves is long, but easy. Once you understand how to use the hub it gets easier. I would suggest giving it a try, meet with their team (they have amazing support), and talk with other users.

Pros

Influitive's platform makes creating a community a breeze. It helps for planning, creating content, gathering people, and much more. Instead of losing time to create your own community, use Influitive Hub and start creating. It's fun to work with and it's fun for advocates (users/customers).

Cons

The platform isn't intuitive... You need to spend time with the tool for a while before understanding it better. There are bugs here and there, but nothing too major.

Neat product to drive customer advocacy

Pros

I inherited this product and had no background in customer advocacy, so can't compare it to other similar products. The tool is quite intuitive once you get trained. The professional services team that trained me on the product and my CSM have been invaluable for imparting not just product knowledge, but also industry best practices and being a fantastic sounding board for all my ideas for my advocacy program. The Support team is similarly extremely responsive and helpful.

Cons

As with all software, the more you use, the more you find better ways for it to work. The tool works great overall but there's, of course, always room for improvement. The product team is so great with listening to suggestions for improvements and adding them to the roadmap. Though it does take a while sometimes for those new features to come about.

Wonderful tool, ROI in weeks if you can have a dedicated person work on it!

We've been growing our hub quickly after implementing it a few months back. The ability to get private discussions going in our forum and gather valuable feedback has already put us to a point where ROI is pretty easy to see. Product Management is getting feedback like never before and Marketing is able to build relationships to get more webinar participation as well as messaging feedback. We're just about to roll out referrals as a challenge so we're still new to the platform and I can't speak to the increase in referrals, but our engagement has been through the roof.

Pros

The customization is wonderful. Influitive spends a lot of time setting up training for you, offering a customized portal within Influitive to get you started (insert Inception sound effects here). There is so much to do, but they help you bite it off piece by piece until, poof, you've got your very own advocate portal with real live customers talking with you and engaging daily. If you look at it as a partnership then you'll succeed easily. Using their advice on rewards systems, challenges and content will get you up and running. Afte that it's definitely something that needs to be managed, but their newer reporting engine shows a lot of the ROI metrics we're tracking to prove effectiveness and success of the product internally. As a side note - we're getting unsolicited product feedback from our most engaged advocates which is helping our product team figure out more about their use cases.

Cons

It takes a village. You're going to want a dedicated person to take point on this project. Any why wouldn't you? This is your communication to your customers and gives them the ability to engage with you in a way you've probably never been able to before (if you have, it probably didn't scale well). It's not a cheap product, but it's also very effective once you put some time into it - you're paying for quality here. And don't get me wrong, it takes time. Buy-in from your customer support team is crucial so they can make sure that you implement it fast and get your ROI. You'll want buy-in from marketing to make sure that the customer audience feels loved. You'll finally want to make sure your product management team is excited to get more feedback. With all of these together you can definitely succeed.

A+ Product to Transform Your Marketing!

I think one challenge is some companies haven't got the concept of "advocacy marketing" yet. Advocate marketing encompasses many different marketing departments. First and foremost, I see that it's a demand generation opportunity because you can get referrals from employees and customer advocates for new business. That's really powerful and Influitive already has templates and training on how to do this. Second, I think it's a major social media initiative. Every Friday since January 2014 I've sent out customer success Fridays with a new customer success. This includes suggested tweets but then employees have to cut and paste the content. With Influitive it's so easy for advocates just to click a button! The other ways you can leverage customer advocates are for online reviews, customer references, identifying customers for press/case studies/videos and so much more! There are so many opportunities to leverage our advocates and I think of new ways every day!

Pros

The product is solid. As an admin I was responsible for creating challenges, coming up with point amounts and some other things. Influitive manages the software. I did a three month pilot to build and test our Mitel Champions Hub and didn't encounter any problems with the software. The staff at Influitive is rock solid! I was assigned a success coach, Eli, who met with me weekly to set goals and work through action items in Basecamp. This was the highlight of my experience having someone guide me to build the best Hub I could! Anytime I had questions the team at Influitive has been stellar! The folks at Influitive get marketing! This Hub is brilliant and is going to help us grow our social selling initiative and other marketing initiatives so much that we are thrilled we found the product!

Cons

Nothing. I've been incredibly impressed with this product!

Great Engagement Tool

We've been using Influitive for a few years now, and I started using it as an admin over a year ago. I didn't go through any hands-on training as the previous admin had already left our company when I joined, and I was able to learn the tool on my own fairly quickly. I leveraged not only the articles in their Community, but also asked lots of questions to our customer success manager and support team. They're always very responsive and helpful, whether it's a strategic initiative or a technical question.

Pros

The gamification piece is really stellar. Our customers are not always the most active on social media or other forums outside their industry, but our advocates have been consistently engaged with our advocate hub and it is continuing to grow in size and engagement. We use it as an additional marketing channel and work closely with our customer success organization to come up with not only educational challenges that will help with user adoption, but also for special programs like getting more reviews on our affiliate sites, creating awareness around our events via Experiences, and for industry thought leadership.

Cons

My only wish would be that there was better segmentation functionality in regards to finding very specific customers in the hub for the purpose of a marketing or sales reference. For instance, we would love to have more customizeable info captured on the advocate's profile so that we could target very specific use cases to align with our different marketing and sales needs. Today we would need to create a survey with the data we'd like to collect, and then from those responses, create filters and groups to target for individual challenges. That means we won't necessarily have this info automatically for all our advocates, just the ones who respond to the survey. It would be great to pull in more data like this automatically from our Salesforce instance.

Customer engagement at scale

We launched our Influitive AdvocateHub in January 2015. We've used the hub to drive referrals, case studies, reviews, beta testers, awards nominations, reference calls, conference submissions and a lot more. There is simply no other platform on the market that help you nurture happy customers into brand advocates the way Influitive AdvocateHub can. By the numbers, we've been able to generate 250+ online reviews, 30+ video testimonials, 3,000+ social shares, 1,000+ pieces of product feedback, plus dozens of case studies and user-generated content. Marketing, Sales, Product, and even Executive teams always need to involve customers in their initiatives. AdvocateHub gives you the opportunity to respond quickly to these requests and deliver the right customers fast. No more begging sales for contacts or intros, no more relying on the same 10 customers to beta test new features or products. Influitive AdvocateHub has given us the central point of engagement from which to drive and support core company initiatives.

Pros

Influitive AdvocateHub gives us a tool to engage customers at scale. It's easy to deploy, easy to manage, and fast to deliver results.

Cons

They're still building out some needed features. I wish the admin view was a bit more helpful in some places, and the mobile experience needs an overhaul.

Fantastic Customer Advocacy Platform!

The Influitive team has become a wonderful partner to work with. They are always there when we need them - whether it is a question for our Customer Success Manager or needing some help from support, they are always there to guide us. I love how fun and creative Influitive is - it helps keep our program fun and fresh!

Pros

I love that the platform is easy to use and allows us to engage with our customers. We are able to manage all advocacy activities - from references, case studies, speaking opportunities, social sharing, and more! The best part is we have so much fun with our customers. Influitives has enabled us to build and cultivate relationships with our customers.

Cons

I don't have a least favorite about this software. I do wish it would write over to Salesforce once a reference has been submitted, but it hasn't hindered our program at all.

Growing your program with Influitive...

Pros

It gamifies advocate engagement to the point where it's not too "cheesy" on their end. Participation feels organic and can be as serious or fun as you want it to be. I feel this was something other vendors attempted but could never do as well. The AdvocateHub provides detailed metrics so that we can accurately present our success to other departments. Plenty of reports are at our fingertips and can be pulled quickly or sent automatically on a week-week, month-month basis. We needed that to be there and done well, it was selling point for the AdvocateHub. Customer advocates in our AdvocateHub are encouraged to engage daily and Influitive does a great job to coach us on how to do just that. You're never left in the dark or left alone to fend for yourself and your customers. Influitive is there with you to coach you through the process and truly cares about getting the most out of your new AdvocateHub. "You're their only customer" is the feeling you get from them.

Cons

It's a growing vendor so there can still be a few dents in the software here and there. Targeting and uploading content can sometimes take a bit of time at certain points in the day but nothing that has hindered us so far.

Influitive AdvocateHub is helping us change the focus from us to our customers

We launched a new customer advocacy program about 6 months ago. We had several pain points we hoped to address with a customer advocacy program: 1) A more effective way to gather customer references - whether a case study, press release, testimonial, video, or actual sales reference; 2) a more efficient way to engage our customers as references for speaking opportunities, media interviews, and online discussions that allowed us to offer these opportunities to larger, targeted groups rather than one individual at a time through e-mail; 3) getting our customers to interact with us more frequently and on more platforms and 4) generating more customer referrals. Using Influitive's AdvocateHub, we have created a thriving customer advocacy program that our customers love in a very short amount of time. With Influitive, we are able to present a plethora of "challenges" to our participating customers - everything from following us on social channels, sharing content, giving product or program feedback, participating in webinars, writing blog posts, etc. Our customers then choose from these activities and therefore determine how they would like to interact with our brand as advocates. Challenges have points associated with them, which gives the program a gamification element that our tech audience enjoys. In less than six months we were able to double case study output, increase social mentions over 60%, book industry conference and webinar speakers, collect a couple hundred testimonials to be used in e-mail and online display advertising, double LinkedIn reviews, collect several hundred customer referrals and the list goes on. As you can easily create a challenge around any marketing effort, we are excited to see how much further we can develop this new program. It has definitely helped switch our focus more rightly to telling our customers stories rather than our own - a much more authentic and powerful way to do marketing.

Pros

Advocate groups can be created around Industry, Location, Product, Company Size, etc. and then challenges targeted appropriately. CRM integrations make for a more successful solution. The company is incredibly attentive and customer oriented.

Cons

As a fairly new solution, there are occasional bugs we run into. There are many features we would like to see added, but every update (which occurs regularly) brings new features, often ones we requested.

Great Product = Great Results

Pros

The AdvocateHub is a great product that many companies could make use of. Customer marketing and customer advocacy go hand in hand and it's on the rise. Before Influitive, I had no idea this was such a thing in marketing. With great effort comes great results which is what I've seen over the past 2 years. We have got feedback rather quickly from our advocates on their hub experience as well as product feedback which is great and beneficial. We have also been able to drive a ton of reviews, referrals, reference calls as well. Tons of quotes and testimonials that we share via Social Media have came from our hub. I believe if you utilize it in every opportunity that you get then you are definitely getting way more than your money's worth for this amazing product. The discussion forum is also a great place for our advocates to discuss our product as well as other things.

Cons

Over the past few months, Influitive has been buggy at times as well as e-mail digests going out slower than usual due to lag times (Tuesday mornings on the West Coast) There's been maintenance issues during the day.

All you need isn't love. It's Influitive AdvocateHub!

Pros

The platform is very user-friendly but what I most like is the team behind it. They are always ready to help and provide you with resources and best-practice advice. The support team is going up and beyond to resolve any issues you might have really quickly. I can honestly say that Influitive have spoiled me and I expect to get the same customer support from others. I'm even surprised when that doesn't happen! The platform helps us keep our customers and partners engaged with our products on a more informal level. We significantly improved our footprint and positioning on a third party review sites, we accelerated the quantity and the quality of customer references and boosted our company social amplification.

Cons

The only thing that I don't like is that email notifications sent from the hub land in spam folders. We managed to find a workaround but still, it's a bit more work.

Best advocate program!

Very positive! The support team gets to you immediately with any questions and concerns you might have. Furthermore, they always go a step beyond to recommend something or way to work around the issue if there's isn't a solution. We also meet with our rep on a monthly basis and that conversation is great and informative.

Pros

I like how easy it is to use the program! There's a lot of ways you can create engagement, educate your members, but also perform various acts of advocacy. It also has a great reward integration system and offers support when needed. The pre-built campaigns really come in handy, and the support team is fantastic! Cannot recommend this product more.

Cons

The reporting can be a bit hard to understand and has limitations. However, with some training and practice, it is such a useful tool. I like how you can build custom reports and look at reporting metrics for each campaign.

Advocate Marketing is a MUST!

For those of you that have not become passionate about Advocate Marketing - you need to get on board now. And, for those of you that have not chosen an Advocate Marketing partner - you absolutely need to connect with Influitive. I've been working with the AdvocateHub now for about 6 months now, and we've already seen some amazing results. Customers are engaging with challenges, we are getting testimonials from customers on software review sites like G2 crowd, they are engaging with us in Discussion forums, sharing our content via social networks, etc. Not only is the product great, but the team is really spectacular. Don't wait, contact them now!

Pros

Very easy to create challenges that engage advocates. the concept of gaming that is embedded in everything is highly addictive and just draws you into doing more and more.

Cons

it would be nice to have better capabilities that let advocates find other advocates with similar questions, similar interests, etc. I know they are working on a new messaging feature that is supposed to be out in the next few months. hopefully, this will be a big step forward in allowing advocates to easily connect with other advocates.

Above and Beyond

I have been using Influitive to manage our customer advocacy program for around 4 months now and it has has so far been tracking right on target with all of our performance measures. Although it does require a significant time investment to take advantage of, I really can't think of any other marketing automation tools that I have found to be this easy to use. One of the things that has taken me by surprise with their service has been the speed with which the company is able to innovate and deliver new features. They very much have their fingers on the pulse with their clients needs. Changing software providers is very costly and this level of customer responsivness gives me a great deal of confidence that we made the right decision in choosing Influitive as our Advocacy Marketing software. I am the Customer Advocate for ANZ at a Fortune 1000 financial services company.

Pros

Amazing post-sales support. There are always problems with complex software roll outs, but these guys have knocked it out of the park. Their technical support staff are the best I have dealt with at any company, for any reason. They are extremely quick to respond and genuinely helpful when they do. Influitive's On boarding specialists are insightful and capable of navigating new customers around common rollout issues, and their account managers maintain a high degree of ongoing contact and are excellent sources of advice. Even their self serve knowledge base is good enough to deserve a shout out - and this can be a vital resource when (like us) you are based many, many time zones away.

Cons

There were a few teething problems with some of the software integrations in the early stages that lead to some nail biting moments. Although there are customisation options available that allow you to create a Hub reflect your company's branding, I would like to see more flexibility in terms of what can be customised.

Advocate Marketing Made Easy

We were already running Influitive for our customers when I came on board. With the success of our customer portal, we decided to also launch it for our associates. We have generated case studies, videos, product reviews, referrals, references, etc. via Influtive and has given us a chance to really get to know our customers. The success coaches I've worked with are awesome. They have helped us brainstorm campaigns, show us new features, and are quick to respond with support questions. We've had a great experience using Influitive and they are keeping up with the latest trends by releasing new integrations and features each month.

Pros

Ease of use, SFDC integration, Quick to respond support team, great advocacy coaches

Cons

Wish it had a content calendar and the ability to post custom copy for social shares for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn instead of just Twitter.

The software of choice for customer advocacy

Pros

When I was tasked with building a customer advocacy program, I evaluated the solutions on the market, and nothing provided everything I wanted, except Influitive. Gamification, communication options, rewards, easy-to-understand challenges - Influitive had it all. And...it's easy to use, from the user and admin perspective. My customers and colleagues alike love it, and I can't imagine achieving the level of success I've seen with my customer advocacy program without it.

Cons

Like any software, Influitive has its bugs. While they're annoying, there's probably only been one that's caused me considerable concern over the last three years. Influitive also doesn't give full control to admins, but they do listen to their customers, so I see this changing.

Great tool to connect with Customers

We worked with our client and evaluated several platforms and chose Influitive. We used Influitive to create a customer advocacy program for a hardware and software company that sells B2B. Our top need was to support the field organization with references and secondarily to "rise above the clutter" of other vendors.

Pros

Our customers love the program we set up. We had a core group of loyal and supportive customers, but the program has enabled us to nearly triple the pool of supporters. The nature of the challenges enables customers to do as much or as little as they want, but the engagement is much higher than I expected. The integration with Salesforce is great (though I would recommend cleaning up Salesforce as much as possible before you launch), reporting is robust and easily customizable.

Cons

The Discussions area has a lot of potentials, but it functions more as a "bolted-on" product versus a nicely integrated feature.

Drives scalable engagement and change

Pros

Influitive's AdvocateHub helped us drive measurable and meaningful change for several clients. It provides a way to identify, engage and motivate happy customers (and even turnaround those who aren't yet natural advocates). You can use it to assist in just about any strategy - for example, as an onboarding or educational tool, as a way to gather customer insights, as a way to collect user-generated content, and so on.

Cons

It is a bit pricey, but it saves so much time vs running an advocacy program manually. It is better suited to some industries/audiences vs others, but you may be surprised as to who will actually participate in a gamification experience.

Fantastic and always improving

If you're just starting a new program, you can't do better than Influitive's AdvocateHub platform. The only reason I gave it 4-stars for features is that as your program matures, you'll start to run up against platform limitations and things can get a little stale/repetitive. Even so, there's no better platform that I've found.

Pros

- Robust platform, and continuing to improve - Best customer support ever - Our customers love it (it's fun and engaging) - Drives measurable business results for us

Cons

- Can get a bit stale for mature programs. That said, there's no better program in the category.

Great Gamification Platform

Influitive has a definite purpose in the marketing arsenal if you are interested in providing your customers with a way to stay informed with what your organization is doing and rewarding them for their efforts along the way.

Pros

Easy to use and super responsive and helpful support team and coaches UI is rather easy to use and straight forward User VIP hub is a great place to borrow ideas and to get inspired for campaigns of your own Great for targeting social customers and is very easy to use from a customer perspective Great options for integration with existing marketing platforms like SFDC and Marketo

Cons

Can be a challenging platform to leverage engagement from all industries (like tech and/or security) Requires a significant amount of time to run effectively, which can be a challenge if Influitive is only a portion of your business objectives.

The Best Advocate Marketing Platform Out There

I have only been using Influitive for a few months (although the hub I am working on has been around longer), and I have found it so easy to learn. The customer support team and my Influitive coach are always there to answer my questions and provide guidance. There is no other platform that my team and I have encountered that has the same capabilities that Influitive has. Perfect platform for a customer loyalty program.

Pros

-User Friendly -Amazing customer support team -Platform great for finding references, writing reviews, finding speakers, etc. -Great way to reward your customers for being advocates for your brand

Cons

-Targeting issues (although Influitive does send you updates when they are found/fixed) -A lot of time is spent on managing the hub including producing content, engaging with advocates, responding to their questions, fulfilling rewards, etc. (so make sure you are prepared for this commitment)

Influitive Advocate Hub is advocate marketings most important tool

Our company decided a year ago to focus portion of our team on having our customers tell our story and speak in the industry for us instead of just traditional marketing we had been doing. Our return on customer advocate marketing has been dramatic. I do not think you need to change and throw out your traditional marketing methods but our advocates give us the testimonials and other assets we leverage. No one wants to be sold anymore we want to hear reviews and learn from others who are in our shoes and thats what influitive helps you focus on!

Pros

Simple for clients to pick up and use. It is also extremely versatile so it supports my advocate needs for all departments.

Cons

It takes a serious commitment from the company to adopt the software and for it to be successful. I suggest bringing in someone extremely excitable and a go getter to lead the introduction of the Hub to the company. Show each department how it benefits them and your entire company will benefit from one simple solution.

Great for building good will and relationships with customers

We're still fairly new with Influitive - less than 6 months in to our Hub. There have been a lot of learning experiences, but it seems like we're beginning to move in the right direction. For example, we started using Influitive with expectations as to how we would see ROI, and we've had to shift around our expectations with regards to what we're getting out of this. It will certainly still be valuable, not just in the way we originally anticipated.

Pros

It gives us a fun and lighthearted way to connect with our customer base! Our company has a fairly aggressive sales strategy, so our customers sometimes grow weary of working with us. This is a much more fun and easy going way to connect with them - we're building trust!

Cons

It's still somewhat new, so they are working out some kinks and adding more functionality. It's good in some ways, because we the customers get to influence some of the changes and new functions that are being added, but at the same time, some features (such as certain reports) aren't yet available.

Build an Army of Brand Advocates with Ease (and Fun!)

Influitive is our platform of choice for communicating with 40k+ customers who use HireRight background screening services around the globe. The platform allows us to drive customer retention, reviews, references, and referrals, while building a relationship with customers. We are more than pleased with the platform and see nothing but opportunity ahead.

Pros

The Influitive team is amazing - they are very supportive, helpful - you really get a sense that they care about your program. Customers are spreading the word about the program too! They are recommending colleagues to join and talking to HireRight team members about the value gained from participating.

Cons

There is a time commitment to launching the program and managing long term, but it's worth every bit of energy. Who doesn't want more customer reviews, references, and referrals?

Offer Your Customers the White Glove Service They Deserve with Influitive.

WebPT is an Electronic Medical Record for over 60,000 Physical Therapists, Occupational Therapists, and Speech-Language Pathologists. We were looking to scale our ability to provide the white glove service our Members deserve, while ensuring their involvement in a community to generate amazing, organic conversations between them. We also wanted to streamline our ability to capture this information for customer generated content, while also making it easy for them to join reference programs and refer new customers.

Pros

- Provides a social community for customers to engage with one another. - Rewards them for the things they're already doing - Shows our customers we appreciate the efforts they take when engaging with our brand. - Rewards/points gamification is an awesome and fun feature. - Great information with lots of ideas. - A strong community of their own members for support. - Support team is awesome.

Cons

- Unfortunately their software has quite a few glitches, making inviting new customers and creating new challenges, challenging. - Onboarding process wasn't the smoothest. - Lots of resources, but no direction as to where to start first. - Small irritations like, can't delete segmentation groups or advocates we nominated.

Results after implementing Influitive have been incredible

Pros

Since implementing, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of customers who create case studies with us, give feedback on third party review sites, participate in PR-related activities, and complete reference calls on our behalf. Influitive helps to keep our advocates happy and engaged.

Cons

Set up can be a bit challenging especially if you're integrating with other solutions (e.g. Salesforce, Marketo). However, most of the challenges were on our side and Influitive support was always quick to respond by email or phone to any of our issues. I would also say that this isn't a "flip the switch" type solution - if you want the results, you'll have to actively manage your AdvocateHub to keep customers engaged.

Good for Customers, Marketers, and Prospects Alike

I've worked with Influitive at multiple companies. I've implemented them at two of those companies. Each time I've had an excellent experience with the implementation team and the customer support team. Adam Gerard - a customer success manager - is one of my favorite people in B2B. Truman Tang is equally awesome. If you invest with Influitive, you can feel the weight of their company behind your success. They want you to win over your influencers, and they want to see you thrive as an advocate marketing specialist. Influitive will help your business and your career.

Pros

Ease of use; implementation is painless; ongoing innovation; great transparency; excellent community of practitioners.

Cons

I don't have many issues with Influitive. The software isn't perfect but they are ALWAYS working to make it better. That might sound like it's easy to get left behind, but they've managed to keep a consistency in the user experience that doesn't alienate legacy users when updating.

The Good and The Not So Good

Pros

Overall great platform with challenges well integrated with the entire platform from local challenges contained to just the hub to social challenges for a wider impact. The gamification is second to none which helps engage members as well as retain them long term.

Cons

My largest issue is with administrator accounts being a separate account type to users and the lack of ability to upgrade and downgrade accounts. This leads to the issue of moderation of the discussion forums being an admin-only role where as we would like to grant this right to trusted community members without granting them admin rights for what I hope are obvious reasons.

VIPKID Teacher using Influitive

I am able to communicate with colleagues and the company easily and know my voice is heard. I am also able to learn more about the company, earn points and trade the points in for rewards.

Pros

I love the option to flip between challenges, discussions, and rewards. These are very important to be able to access easily for my job. I love that the links have GIFS and aren't just pictures. I am able to communicate with colleagues and the company easily and know my voice is heard. I am also able to learn more about the company, earn points and trade the points in for rewards.

Cons

Currently, I don't have any dislikes for this website. It is very useful to me and other VIPKID teachers.

Efficient way to nurture happy customers & create brand advocates

Referrals, increased customer reference pool, increase NPS.

Pros

Influitive provides a perfect platform to activate your happiest customers and turn them into brand advocates in the market. If you put in the work it can automate your referral and customer reference programs and also reward them for their actions. Influitive pays for itself simply from the ease of the referral feature. It can also be used as an upsell tool for your sales reps.

Cons

This is a great tool but it needs to have staffing behind it to see results. This isn't a platform that runs itself unfortunately. We have also seen some integration problems between Influitive and Salesforce.

Thought leaders who built a great product

We have had a very good experience with Influitive. We love that they provide not only a product but a ton of educational content for a topic that doesn't get enough attention - advocate marketing. I love learning from the experts at Influitive while running my own program, and applying their suggestions every day.

Pros

I like the support and the educational content that they release.

Cons

I struggle to prove ROI sometimes because of the reporting, but they recently made a ton of improvements to help with that!

The BEST Way to Connect with Customers

We implemented Influitive a year ago and have just signed on for another year. Prior to creating our advocate hub, it was extremely difficult for our marketing team to keep in touch with customers, find out what they need, and ask them for input. (We are a niche software company that makes reporting and document components for other B2B software companies.) After setting up the mutually beneficial platform, however, we are all better for it. Our company has a better grasp on our customers' needs -- e.g. customers use the program to give suggestions on how to improve our products -- and we are able to translate their good will into useful ways, such as reviews on third party review sites like G2 Crowd and IT Central Station.

Pros

Influitive does what it promises: helps us connect with customers and get them to advocate for us. The platform is easy to use and is constantly introducing new features and upgrading current ones. Support is on the ball and overall we're extremely happy with this program.

Cons

We've had a harder time than anticipated getting customers to submit referrals via the platform. This isn't necessarily Influitive's fault but so far that piece of the puzzle hasn't been solved.

Influitive, the Hub (almost) everyone should sign up for

We're using it for customer advocacy and have rolled it out to around 30 customers to start with. It helps us engage customers with the help of gamification, get them to do content marketing for us and we hope to increase references and referrals via the Hub. Eventually, we would like to launch it for employees as well and give a strong push to our content marketing strategy.

Pros

The Hub integrates seamlessly with Salesforce.com and helps you request references from Salesforce itself. Also referrals can be tracked via the integration and only when the referral converts to a customer, the referral challenge is considered successful. It is a great tool for content marketing efforts. You can get your advocates to write blogs, do video testimonials, and even appear at events via the challenges It is a cool way to reward your best advocates by giving them perks and rewards for their efforts in helping you get new customers or just market your product to their peers The customer support is unbeatable. ask them a question within business hours and they will reply to you in minutes.

Cons

AdvocateHub needs to add more challenge templates so that admins don't have to spend too much time in thinking what to write for a particular challenge Would be nice to see a customizable Hub to have a look and feel in sync with the company website they should have a daily report for admins to track the progress of the advocacy program

a critical piece of the marketing technology-stack

Influitive is a critical part of our marketing technology stack. The platform allows us to organize advocates in one tool, track their activities, easily reward and recognize advocates, and dynamically adjust our asks (for reviews, feedback, etc.) to deliver what our business needs.

Pros

Customer love it! Library of integrations Excellent training / onboarding materials Simple reporting Consistently deliver improvements, and provide insights (and the opportunity to influence) their roadmap

Cons

For organizations with very strict Info Security requirements/processes, the SFDC integration might be limited.

Influitive changes the way we market to our customers

Pros

Influitive has a been a great resource for our team to help manage our growing customer marketing initiatives. We're able to segment, activate and reward those who love our product and keep them engaged throughout the year in an meaningful way while not exhausting them with all things company related. We have seen tremendous ROI from the time we implemented the program to where we are today.

Cons

We would love to have more customization features without a bunch of little add on costs. To add a custom header with a photo for instance means an upgrade and more cash.

Truly connect with your customers with Influitive

I have been using Influitive for several years, and from my CSM to Support to engaging with others has been a wonderful experience. This platform allows you to creating a meaningful program, with longevity in mind.

Pros

The ease of use to allow my team to foster relationship with customers and peer to peer.

Cons

Various Administrative tasks are not optimal

Time well spent

Influitive is a platform that will reward direct efforts towards customer engagement. With an incredibly detailed onboarding process and a culture of using their own platform to engage with their customers, Influitive makes it relatively easy for anyone to start an advocacy program for their business. If you're looking to get to a customer conference someday or build towards a referral stream the best time to evaluate Influitive is the present.

Pros

- Rich platform for both engagement and reporting - Detailed onboarding and guidance - Feedback for multiple teams from willing customers - Simple pathways towards greater engagement - Measurable ROI (after ramp period) - Quantifiable engagement beyond social media metrics

Cons

- Long ramp time (weeks to months) - Expensive first bite with longer payback period - Most effective with a dedicated customer marketing or customer success person behind it

Good Clean Fun

I absolutely love Influitive's Advocate Hub. It makes obtaining customer case studies, testimonials, reviews and feedback so seamlessly simple! It's a fun, engaging platform that allows us to build rapport with our most influential customers. We have seen a significant amount of improvement in content and quotes than we can so easily pull.

Pros

Easy to use both on the back end and customer facing. Great coaches and support for anytime you have questions. Ability to create SubGroups - huge for a Regional Marketing Strategy standpoint.

Cons

Sometimes the sequence of building out challenges and their stages can be challenging, it takes some strategy surrounding each one. Also, I wish there were more opportunities for other users from similar backgrounds to share their experiences and best practices. For example, I work in ed tech, I wish I had an opportunity to connect with other ed tech users within Influitive as part of the best practices of onboarding.

Great for Marketers!

Pros

Overall, the platform is great! It gives you a easy way to get feedback, points of view and help create a great relationship with your privileged customers. Plus, when it comes to SEO, it really can make a difference. Having people talk about you online, comment and write content for you is just amazing.

Cons

Honestly, the platform is great. I did have some troubles with integrations like Disqus, but in the end the only challenge is to get your people engaged. Engaging your people is the main objective and can sometimes be a hard thing to do.

This is the future of marketing!

Pros

I love the discussion board, and so do my clients. We save time supporting each question by directing clients to ask and answer in the hub. I've seen hundreds of discussions bloom into full conversations, helping us generate more super users!

Cons

I wish the challenge targeting was more in-depth. I would love to build out workflows and more customization.

Customer support is unparalleled

My experience is somewhat unique in the advocacy world. I needed a number of highly technical, personalized innovations in order to meet the needs of a new initiative. The representatives at Influitive worked with me almost from day one to design, build and implement these integrations, meeting as often as we needed. They went to bat for me regularly, and both my personal and company's success is a direct result of their help.

Pros

Mostly ease of use. Customer service. Ability to be creative.

Cons

Can be slightly tedious.

A revolutionary way to connect with your customers

Influitive is the only player that allows you to connect with your customers globally, on a daily basis, and solicit organic advocacy activities on their own term. The platform has revolutionized customer engagement and has helped us to produce best in class content to bolster our brand narrative, support the field, and grease our pipeline. The team of SMEs are their to guide you every step of the way and act as true partners to help us to evolve and innovate. 5 stars.

Pros

Ease of integration with other products, connectivity with our systems, and ease of use for our customers.

Cons

Reporting is a bit clunky and inconsistent