Influitive - Avis

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

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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

A proven partner for over seven years

Commentaires : For over 7 years, we have had a positive experience with Influitive. Our community of educators continues to grow each year as does our member engagement. We've had good connections with our CSMs and generally have a quick response to reported issues. Before we renewed our contract this year, we did evaluate other companies and systems and still believe Influitive meets our needs the best in regards to customer experience.

Avantages :

We have worked with Influitive for over 7 years with our customer advocacy community of educators. The platform is relatively easy to use and the reporting provides us with key data points to share within our organization. Our members enjoy the quick consumable content and earning points towards classroom supplies, books, gift cards, and company swag.

Inconvénients :

As with any new software platform, we've had a few bugs and issues in the last few months. We're working with the support and product teams to resolve our issues. We wish the content library of campaigns were more robust and updated consistently to take some of the extra work off of our plates.

Buggy, Unreliable Software. Support is Non-existant

Commentaires : 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).

Avantages :

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).

Inconvénients :

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.

Producing Great Results!

Commentaires : 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!

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Growing your program with Influitive...

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Great Product = Great Results

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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!

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Fantastic Platform and amazing support team

Avantages :

Whenever I require assistance or have any queries, the support team and my CSM are always quick to respond and incredibly helpful. Additionally, I really appreciate the integration with various platforms, including SFDC, and the fact that Influitive is constantly adding new features and requesting feedback from clients. It's user-friendly and provides an excellent platform for our members (partners) to interact and share knowledge.

Inconvénients :

There's constantly room for improvement, but the account team is superb at swiftly resolving any issues, and the product team is diligent at keeping users in the loop with frequent updates.

Influitive Experience 2024

Avantages :

I like it how they are constantly elevating the platform, customer support, ease of use and the integrations. We track almost all acts of advocacy via Influitive and it has been one of the best decision.

Inconvénients :

Nothing much as of now that I can recall.

Great platform!

Avantages :

It's easy to use once you know what you're doing! It's a fun way to get your customers involved and a great way to source advocates for various activities.

Inconvénients :

Not all the integrations work all the time. We've had third party review integrations not work every time and our integration with Salesforce isn't seamless.

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

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

The perfect tool for driving and managing customer loyalty

Commentaires : Excellent! From start to finish (although we're nowhere near done yet!).We've delivered huge value to the business through the generation of peer reviews, product feedback, social amplification, event registration, and so much more. Not to mention the relationships we continue to build with our customers.

Avantages :

The platform is designed in such a way that it's almost impossible for advocates to not feel engaged. As we strive to deepen our relationships with our customers, the gamified nature of the platform is a key driver.The functionality on offer enables us to drive this engagement through targeted content, giving advocates a near-personal experience.The integrations with a huge variety of products is essential and ensures we are joined up.Most importantly, the team are fun to work with and always on hand to offer support and guidance.

Inconvénients :

Influitive are always making improvements to the platform with regular program updates. These ensure that there are very things to dislike. One area that no-one seems to have cracked is how to engage the C-Suite in a program of this nature. That's the golden egg, but I'm not sure there's an answer.

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

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Best advocate program!

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Building Advocacy be engaging customers and building relationships

Commentaires : I have had a great experience with Influitive. Even with my multiple reporting questions. They are always willing to help and offer support.

Avantages :

I love the ease of Influitive. I was added as an Admin within the last year and I felt it was a very small learning curve. I can easily find support articles for assistance and if I still have questions my CSM - [sensitive content hidden] is super helpful and available. Also, the VIP community is a great resource to connect and share with other experts. I really really love this community and the ability to connect and grow.

Inconvénients :

Reporting is still a struggle for me. I really want to create a story for organizational leaders and often I struggle with where and when the numbers are pulling.

Great platform for engaging customers

Avantages :

I like how easy it is to use overall. I can figure most things out without going to support or looking up articles. I also love how responsive and helpful my CSM [sensitive content hidden] is. I email him at least once a week and he always responds very quickly and is thoughtful with his answers. I love the templates that they provide for challenges and campaigns. It makes content creation a lot easier because I can either use the templates or pull some inspiration from them.

Inconvénients :

Sometimes the admin side of things are frustrating. When I want to go back just one page it'll sometimes take me farther back. Also, a lot of the templates are designed with the assumption that everyone has the discussion forum.

Results after implementing Influitive have been incredible

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

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

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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

Great product for a successful customer community!

Avantages :

Influitive is an invaluable tool for our company that allows us to communicate and care for our top customers!

Inconvénients :

Throughout several years of using the product, there have been some product features not being active/available that would have made life easier. However, Influitive is great at listening and improving the product and adding features that users would like to see!

Truly connect with your customers with Influitive

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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

Inconvénients :

Various Administrative tasks are not optimal

This is the future of marketing!

Avantages :

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!

Inconvénients :

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

Best platform for a Advocacy program!

Avantages :

Influitive Advocates Hub is one of the best platform to manage and engage your Advocates. Below are the points which makes this platform a best fit - 1. User friendly tool to built engagement campaigns (Challenges) 2. Organised Referral campaign 3. Best in class Customer Support team

Inconvénients :

With a lot of Pros, the platform also have some Cons. Here are few - 1. Reporting in the platform needs more attention 2. Multi-Challenge data export in 1 compiled file, can help the admins a lot.

Influitive is THE tool for Advocate Marketing

Avantages :

The employees at Influitive are amazing. Their support team is always there to help. The app itself is pretty slick and easy to use, for the most part. It just makes it super easy and clear to the advocates what they need to do and what they get out of it (gamification, rewards, education, recognition).

Inconvénients :

There are integrations with Salesforce and Marketo and some other systems. I had some trouble getting all of this set up to work properly. The documentation is a little scattered and unclear, and it was kind of difficult to get a single point of contact to work through these technical issues with me. But once we pushed through it, it works well!

Influitive is Extremely User Friendly

Avantages :

Influitive is extremely user friendly and easy to learn! Our customers love the rewards based challenges and the overall community experience. We also get a lot of positive feedback on the look and feel of our hub. It was super easy to set up.

Inconvénients :

I have two major pain points with Influitive. I don't like how the overall discussion area experience. It is a little clunky and I receive quite a bit of negative feedback from my customers. My other pain point is how difficult it is to add images/formatting to challenges. It's also not easy to test the overall customer experience in my hub.

Powerful client engagement & gamification tool

Avantages :

The Advocate Hub has transformed our ability to make client and product engagement activities fun and enticing for everyone! It's been a great way to promote our products and services as well as solicit great feedback, ideas and development efforts. Integrations with our platform and salesforce are icing on the cake!

Inconvénients :

A few limitations on system integrations and a rocky go-live were small prices to pay for our overall ROI to date