I was the go-to person every sales rep messaged when they needed a reference or a customer quote. Every time, I'd be looking for something I knew was in either a deck or a folder, and I just couldn't find it quickly enough. We had a lot of great customer proof, but no great way to put it in the hands of our sales team.

Over time, sales would stick to the few examples they'd heard before, and none of our new assets were gaining traction.

That's the problem I set out to solve with my foray into AI and automation. And solving it made me think harder about where automation actually belongs in customer marketing – and where it doesn't.

Like all marketers, I'm being encouraged to embrace AI and automation in my work. I've created some internal tools that have really elevated the way my customer marketing programs work. I can surface customer proof faster, find the right advocates at the right time and scale things that were previously 100% manual.

But the more I build, the more I find myself drawn back to why I chose this career path in the first place: the people. It's something I see in our vision for PandaDoc as well.

Why the human-automation split makes

At PandaDoc, we build document automation software and the philosophy is the same. We help teams get documents signed faster, but the point is the relationship it represents. Two people deciding to trust each other enough to move forward.

So yes, we automate where we can, but business is still a relationship built on trust. That's not something that's going to shift with automation, and the more automated the world becomes, the more that human touch will matter.

It's why receiving a package in the mail gives you a dopamine hit, or when a friend gifts you something you mentioned to them months ago gives you the warm and fuzzies. Someone heard you out and they care. Being able to create that feeling is everything.

The ones who can figure out where to automate with AI in service of those moments are the ones whose customer marketing efforts will stand out.

What do I automate?

There's a version of this conversation where AI and automation are the bad guys. We've all had our moments where we've wanted to cuss out Claude for hallucinating, or produced content that read like it was written by someone who's never met an actual human.

As AI continues to be the hot topic of conversation on LinkedIn, in meetings and, frankly, even when you close your laptop for the day and turn on the news or scroll through your social media feed, I'd encourage every customer marketer to ask themselves what's sacred in their role, and what should never be automated.

There's a pretty clean line between what should be automated and what's off the table in customer marketing. The operational stuff – finding testimonial quotes, scoring advocates, tracking engagement, routing reference requests – is fair game. It's work that needs to be done for the program to function, and doing it manually means spending time on admin instead of on your customers.

But creating authentic relationships with customers is different. When you check in with a customer just to see how they're doing, or clock that they've gone a little quiet and reach out to say "hey" – that outreach should always come from you genuinely noticing, not from a health score threshold being reached.

Those touchpoints can't be automated because a workflow can't replicate what makes them land. The purpose of getting the operational layer running smoothly is to free up more time and attention for what really matters.

What I actually built with AI (and why)

The sales rep problem I described at the start is what pushed me to start building. I wanted anyone in the company to be able to find the right social proof without having to track me down every time. 

So I built internal tools using Claude that surface approved customer proof in a searchable, filterable library.

A sales rep preparing for a call can search by industry or use case and have something relevant in under a minute, rather than waiting on me. The human part is what comes after: the judgment call of which customer to approach, whether the timing is right, whether you have enough information about what's happening in their world right now to make an ask.

The savvy marketer’s AI companion guide

How to create deliberate human moments

The human moments that create advocates don't just happen. You have to truly invest in them, especially as the rest of marketing gets more automated and the baseline for what feels personal keeps shifting.

We started logging gifting activity earlier this year as an experiment. If we send a customer something – coffee, a small gift at a moment that feels right – we log it. We don't have the data yet on whether those customers show up differently in health scores, renewal rates and advocacy behavior, but we're building the discipline now. We do it because a customer who feels seen is more likely to become an advocate than one who only hears from us reactively.

We sent a customer a gift basket for an award they received, and they posted about it on LinkedIn on their own, tagged us and talked about what it meant to them. I now have a great connection with that person; we swap G2 tips and bounce ideas off each other on Slack. That kind of moment comes from someone feeling like they were actually thought about rather than dropped into a campaign.

You can create the conditions for that to happen more often, but it can't be automated, and I think any team that tries is going to find that customers notice the difference very quickly.

The marketers who do this well

Over the years I've noticed that customer advocacy attracts a specific kind of talent. Someone with deep empathy and genuine care for what others need (side poll: anyone else an eldest daughter? 😅)

I still think about customers I worked with at a previous company. People who went out of their way to speak at events, take reference calls and who genuinely became part of how I understood what great advocacy looks like. Most of them have moved on to different roles, different companies, different seasons of their life, but I still cheer them on when something good happens for them.

Cheering them on from the sidelines isn't benefiting my programs in any way, but I think it says something about how all customer marketers should hold this work. Customers aren't a resource to be optimized and shouldn't be treated as one. They're people who trust you with their name and reputation when they signed up to endorse your product.

The customer marketers who are genuinely good at what they do are usually people-centric and curious. Interested in what customers are building and happy to hear about a win that has nothing to do with their current program.

The Customer & Commnity Engagement Playbook

Where the line is

Automate what gets in the way of having more time with customers. Keep humans in the loop for anything that involves a relationship decision – who to ask, when to ask, how to frame it, whether now is the right time. Whether a customer seems like they're in a good place or whether something's going on that means an advocacy ask wouldn't land. Whether the reference pairing you're considering actually makes sense given what you know about both people.

The more AI-produced content, outreach, and communication people receive every day, the more customers will value the human connections they've built. Customers are becoming more adept at recognizing when they are being processed and when people are really listening. The teams that figure out how to use automation to create more space for real connection are going to build the kind of relationships that are more than just a data point.