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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

1. Identifying and targeting strategic customers

Unlike traditional advocacy programs that often wait for teams to request customer stories, we take a more proactive and strategic approach. We focus on quality over quantity – seeking out customers who are the right fit for our advocacy efforts rather than simply responding to inbound requests. 

We work closely with CSMs to identify customers who are ready and willing to engage, ensuring their journey aligns with the advocacy opportunities we provide.

2. Nurturing and growing relationships

Once we’ve identified the right customers, the next step is nurturing those relationships – both with customers and internal stakeholders. 

Being part of the customer success function gives us a natural advantage here, as we work closely with CSMs. But beyond that, we also maintain strong connections with product, product marketing, brand and communications, social media, and other teams to ensure advocacy is integrated across the business.

3. Activating customer stories

This is where advocacy comes to life. Activation involves creating high-quality content – whether it’s video testimonials, written case studies, or sales enablement materials. 

With just three of us on the advocacy team, efficiency and impact are critical, so we focus on producing stories that deliver the most value.

4. Distribution and measuring impact

The final step is ensuring that the customer stories we create are used effectively. This means maximizing their reach both internally and externally, making sure they support sales, marketing, and broader brand initiatives. It’s also about measuring success – tracking engagement, impact, and return on investment to continuously refine and improve our approach.

Prioritization and strategic alignment

A common challenge in customer advocacy is prioritization – how do you stay focused and avoid being pulled in too many directions? 

To prevent our strategy from becoming reactive or diluted, we developed a qualification criteria framework. This ensures our efforts align with the company’s broader strategy while allowing us to proactively deliver the stories our stakeholders need – before they even ask for them.

Rather than waiting for requests to come in, our goal is to be ten steps ahead, ensuring that we already have the content, advocates, and assets needed to support different teams. 

A structured approach to story selection

We break down our advocacy efforts into three distinct categories:

1. Strategic stories (60%)

The majority of our focus – around 60% – goes toward high-impact, strategic stories. These are carefully chosen to align with key priorities, such as:

  • Core products and regions
  • Key verticals and partners
  • Recognizable, well-known logos

These stories are always-on, meaning we proactively seek out these opportunities rather than waiting for them to emerge. They are typically video-led, with additional written content and supporting assets created as needed.

2. Credibility-building stories (20%)

Around 20% of our time is dedicated to expanding credibility. These stories may focus on more niche products, emerging verticals, or areas where we’re beginning to gain traction but don’t yet have an established track record. 

While we prioritize them accordingly, we recognize their value in supporting future growth. These tend to be more written-focused, but we still create supporting materials where needed.

3. Brand awareness stories (20%)

The final 20% is allocated to brand-building initiatives. We collaborate closely with teams across content, PR, and social media to create compelling assets that position GoCardless in the way we want to be perceived in the market. 

These stories help shape our public presence and reinforce our brand messaging.

Understanding the right timing for advocacy

One of the most powerful tools we use at GoCardless is what we call the value pathway – a visualization of the customer lifecycle that helps us determine the right time to approach a customer for advocacy. 

Timing is everything when it comes to capturing authentic, compelling stories.

For example, just after a customer has implemented our solution, we might begin sowing the seed for future advocacy. However, we typically wait three to six months post-implementation – after they’ve had time to take payments and realize the value of our solution – before making a formal request. 

Of course, there are exceptions. If a customer is using a new product, we may engage much sooner, sometimes within a week of launch. Key moments like renewals, upsells, and cross-sells are also ideal opportunities, as customers are often in a highly positive mindset.

Additionally, we stay closely connected to customers who are part of beta testing programs, ensuring we capture their feedback and successes early on.

Collaboration with customer success

CSMs play a critical role in helping us understand the value for the customer, not just the business. They know their customers best – whether they are seeking brand exposure, positioning themselves as thought leaders, or have other motivations that can shape how we pitch advocacy opportunities.

To foster a strong two-way relationship with CSMs, we:

  • Hold regular one-to-ones to ensure alignment
  • Involve them in our editorial panel for customer stories
  • Share insights from customer interviews that they may not hear otherwise

Interestingly, customers often open up to us during interviews in ways they wouldn’t with their account teams – even when they’re on camera. This has become a valuable feedback loop, allowing us to bring fresh insights back to customer success teams and deepen engagement.

Beyond storytelling, we also create meaningful surprise-and-delight moments for our advocates and are exploring discovery events at various customer levels to build even stronger relationships.

The impact of a strategic approach

Looking back at the challenges we set out to solve, the transformation has been significant. By shifting from a reactive, ad-hoc approach to a strategically aligned customer advocacy function, we’ve seen real, measurable improvements.

From no strategy to strategic alignment

We’ve moved from having no clear strategy to being fully aligned with our go-to-market (GTM) plans. Rather than scrambling to find suitable customer stories when a request comes in, we now operate a customer-led pipeline – one that prioritizes the right timing for the customer. 

This ensures that advocacy happens at a point when they are seeing success, making their stories more authentic and impactful.

As a result, we’ve built a robust catalog of over 80 customer stories – all relevant, approved, and easily accessible for stakeholders. Marketing and content teams no longer need to come to us for approval; they know they can self-serve from this library with confidence.

From siloed activities to a centralized approach

Before, customer advocacy efforts were scattered across different teams, leading to customer fatigue and a lack of visibility on who had been approached. 

Today, we’ve centralized our approach, ensuring that engagement with customers is thoughtful, well-managed, and maximized for impact.

This has also restored faith among CSMs. Initially, many CSMs were hesitant about advocacy efforts, feeling like they were repeatedly approaching the same customers with little to show for it. Now, they see the real value of customer advocacy – and many are proactively bringing suggestions to us.

Because they understand our focus areas – such as open banking – they are now identifying and recommending customers who align with our strategic goals, making advocacy a more collaborative and efficient process.

From no customer value to a customer-first approach

Perhaps the most significant shift has been in how we approach advocacy opportunities. Before, customer value was an afterthought. 

Now, it is the first and most important factor we consider.

Every time we invite a customer to become an advocate, we lead with the value for them. Each pitch is tailored to their specific goals, whether it’s brand promotion, thought leadership, or another benefit. 

We also ensure that we’re only making the request when the timing is right, aligning with key moments in their journey.

By embedding customer-first principles at the heart of our strategy, we’ve built an advocacy program that not only serves the business but also delivers real value to the customers themselves – which, in turn, strengthens their relationship with us.

This transformation has proven that when customer advocacy is done right, it’s not just about telling great stories – it’s about creating an ecosystem where customers, CSMs, and the business all benefit from a well-structured, thoughtful, and value-driven approach.

The numbers behind our success

While we’ve always prioritized quality over quantity, the consistency of our output has been impressive. We’ve been publishing an average of 28 new stories per year; each story isn’t just a standalone piece – we create multiple assets to maximize impact. Every customer story includes:

  • Video and written content
  • Sales enablement slides
  • Social media content
  • Distribution across all key channels

This ensures our stakeholders can easily access and utilize content where they need it most.

We built a powerful advocacy library

Beyond just increasing volume, we’ve also dramatically improved the relevance of our advocacy materials. We now have four times more relevant stories available for our GTM teams – stories that truly reflect where GoCardless is today.

When we first took over customer advocacy, we inherited a backlog of outdated content, including case studies dating back to 2011, when GoCardless was first founded. 

Many of these no longer reflected our business or our customers’ needs. We undertook a massive content audit, removing irrelevant stories and replacing them with high-impact, up-to-date customer narratives that truly showcase our value.

How we measure success

Like many others, we faced the challenge of defining meaningful KPIs for customer advocacy. We needed a way to quantify our impact on revenue, which led us to focus on influenced bookings as our primary success metric.

How we track influenced bookings

We measure influenced bookings by cross-referencing:

  1. WinWire data and Salesforce records – Identifying successful deals.
  2. Gong transcripts – Looking for meaningful mentions of our customer stories in sales conversations.

We set a high bar for what qualifies as an influenced booking. A simple mention of a customer story isn’t enough – there must be clear evidence that the story was discussed in-depth and had a tangible impact on the deal.

Additionally, we count influenced bookings from demand generation events, where a featured customer played a significant role in moving a deal forward.

We set an ambitious target – 30% of annual global bookings – and we’ve consistently hit that goal every year since introducing this KPI.

Advocacy is a win-win for customers and your business

Another key measure of success is how willing customers are to engage in advocacy. Our numbers speak for themselves:

  • 95% of customers say yes to participating in advocacy.
  • Only 3% declined but said “not now”, meaning the door remains open for future opportunities.
  • 100% of customers we’ve worked with before said yes again when asked.

While we don’t have the capacity to ask every past advocate to participate again, every single customer we’ve re-engaged has been happy to do so. That’s a testament to the value-driven, customer-first approach we’ve embedded into our advocacy efforts.

Showcasing advocacy at GC Live

One of the highlights of our advocacy program is GC Live, an annual event where over 900 GoCardless customers from around the world come together to hear updates on our strategy. 

Customer voices are always a key part of the event, and this year, we incorporated video-led content to showcase real-world success stories.

By continuously refining our approach and keeping customer value at the core, we’ve built a sustainable, impactful advocacy function that delivers tangible benefits – for our customers, our sales teams, and the entire business.

What’s next? Expanding into customer engagement

As our customer advocacy program has matured, we’ve recently expanded our remit into customer engagement. 

We realized that we had a wealth of engaged customers who weren’t being leveraged across other areas of the business – many of them were thought leaders, product experts, or simply great advocates for GoCardless. Rather than letting these valuable relationships go underutilized, we saw an opportunity to connect them with different teams and initiatives.

We started small, testing the waters with a breakfast briefing featuring three customers, inviting a broader group of our merchants to attend. The response was positive, so we began moving into more vertical-focused events, working closely with our demand generation and sales teams.

We approached these teams with a clear opportunity:

  • We had engaged customers ready to share their expertise.
  • We had budget to support customer-led initiatives.
  • We could collaborate to drive attendance and business impact.

This collaboration has evolved into GC-hosted events that are now fully cross-functional within our UKI group. These events are not just about advocacy; they have become a core part of our demand generation strategy, helping to drive both new business and expansion within existing accounts.

High-impact executive engagement

One of the most successful new initiatives has been our key client dinners – exclusive, high-value networking events that bring together our most strategic executives and senior customer decision-makers.

These events are held quarterly, in intimate, high-end settings designed to foster meaningful conversations. One standout venue was Sexy Fish in Mayfair, a visually stunning location featuring an indoor coral reef.

The impact?

  • In just two dinners last year, we influenced over £1 million in revenue.
  • Senior execs from our customer base are eager to attend and engage.
  • The appetite for these events continues to grow, reinforcing the value of direct peer-to-peer conversations.

Given their success, these dinners are becoming a core part of our executive engagement strategy, strengthening relationships and deepening trust at the highest levels.

Merchant accelerator events: Best practices and value realization

Looking ahead, we’re also launching merchant accelerator events – sessions designed to help customers get the most value from GoCardless.

These sessions will focus on best practices, bringing together:

  • Existing customers to share real-world insights.
  • GoCardless experts to provide strategic guidance.
  • Practical workshops to help merchants maximize their use of our platform.

By evolving beyond traditional advocacy into broader customer engagement, we’re creating more opportunities for connection, learning, and business impact – both for our customers and for GoCardless.

Key lessons learned

Not every business will be able to move their advocacy team into customer success, but the principles behind our approach can be applied no matter where you sit in the organization. 

Here are the most important lessons we’ve learned along the way.

1. Customer value must be at the heart of everything

This might seem obvious, but it’s worth emphasizing – customer advocacy only works when it delivers value to the customer, not just the business. 

Every time we invite a customer to participate, we ask:

  • What’s in it for them?
  • How does this align with their goals?
  • What kind of recognition or exposure do they value?

Our CSMs play a crucial role in helping us uncover these answers, ensuring that advocacy is a mutually beneficial opportunity rather than just another request.

2. Executive buy-in keeps your strategy on track

A strong advocacy program needs executive alignment from the start. Without it, your strategy can quickly become fragmented by competing internal priorities.

When we developed our strategy, we took it to our CXO team for feedback and approval. We also aligned on how success would be measured. This has been instrumental in keeping us focused – when different stakeholder groups challenge or push for different priorities, we can always refer back to the agreed strategic objectives.

3. Customer advocacy is a team pursuit

Advocacy isn’t a single team’s job – it’s the result of cross-functional collaboration. From the first digital ad a prospect clicks on to their onboarding experience, every department contributes to creating an advocate-worthy customer journey.

Our work wouldn’t be possible without the demand generation team, SDRs, sales teams, finance, billing, and implementation teams – every touchpoint along the customer journey influences whether a customer will be willing to advocate for us. 

While our advocacy team sits in customer success, we actively collaborate across the entire organization to make sure advocacy is deeply embedded into GoCardless.

4. Help your CSMs build their brands

One of the best ways to strengthen your advocacy program is by elevating your CSMs. When their customers succeed, they succeed – and when they are seen as trusted advisors, they’re more likely to have customers who are eager to advocate.

We actively support our CSMs in building their personal brands, both internally and externally. Whether it’s helping them share success stories, highlighting their work in customer engagements, or encouraging them to take part in industry discussions, we recognize that their visibility and credibility directly contribute to advocacy success.

Final thoughts

By putting customer value first, securing executive alignment, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and empowering CSMs, we’ve transformed advocacy into a strategic, high-impact function at GoCardless.

Customer advocacy isn’t just about getting great stories – it’s about building a culture where customers want to champion your brand because they’ve had a great experience. When you get that right, everything else falls into place.

This article is based on a presentation given by Catherine at our Customer Marketing Summit, London 2024.

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