Influitive

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!

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.

Without Rewards, Influitive is a Good Community Platform

Commentaires : We use Influitive as our main customer hub to share information, news, content, events, product updates & more. The model of sharing information with customers and using the discussion boards works well. However the rewards component of the hub is more of a challenge since it's tough to see the value of what you're getting from customers compared with the money you're spending on rewards.

Avantages :

Good community platform and discussion boards - the fun aspect makes it easier to engage with customers.

Inconvénients :

The rewards do not always generate genuine responses from customers and it's hard to correlate value between the money you're spending and the feedback and participating you're getting from customers.

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.

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.

Great Engagement Tool

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

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.

Top of the line advocacy platform

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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).

Inconvénients :

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.

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 vendor to bring your community together!

Commentaires : Brilliant! We are always looking at ways to improve our customer retention, engagement and revenue and Influitive allows us to target different audiences with tailored content no matter the vertical or geo. We can engage and build relationships with customers around the world, helping enable them and create brand advocates.

Avantages :

This product is really easy to use for your community needs. The team is hands-on with software and feature development to bring changes and improvements to the software.

Inconvénients :

As with any company, features and updates have to be prioritised and what we see as a priority might not be reflected or mirrored within the greater landscape. Sometimes updates can take time to come to fruition but with that said, you feel heard and valued with your suggestions to improve the features and software.

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!

Great customer advocacy tool!

Avantages :

We implemented this tool during COVID-19 and it was instrumental in creating a virtual community. We look forward to getting use out of it as our world continues to trend towards remote jobs.

Inconvénients :

It can be a little clunky sometimes just creating easy challenges. It seems like it's a bug that comes and goes

Influitive enables us be engage our customers!

Avantages :

Influitive enables us to interact with our customers in a personal and customizable way. As a result of engaging customers, we are able to identify the raving fans of our product.

Inconvénients :

The reporting end can get a bit confusing.

Leading Advocacy SaaS Software keeps getting better and better

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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

Inconvénients :

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

Advocate Marketing Made Easy

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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

Inconvénients :

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.

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.

VIPKID Teacher using Influitive

Commentaires : 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.

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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

I love using Influitive

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Best platform for a Advocacy program!

Avantages :

Here is the list of features and things I like the most in Influitive - 1. Easy to use, not complicated 2. Awesome customer service 3. Complete platform to run and manage a loyalty program.

Inconvénients :

Reporting is one area where work needs to be done...

Great tool for Customer and Employee Advocacy

Commentaires : Our company has been using Influitive for both Customer and Employee Advocacy. My primary focus has been around the employee advocacy use case. We rolled it out to our entire global sales organization to help them better collaborate, become more socially engaged, access sales trainings and access rewards through sales incentives.

Avantages :

Hosting your Customer and Employee advocacy programs on one platform allows for a cohesive strategy. It also increases engagement and adoption with both programs. Influitive's functionality is very robust. Your employees can seamlessly post on social media, while still within the application. There is a community section which fosters collaboration and enables your employees to share best practices throughout the organization. It is easy to create, manage and report on challenges. Customer Service is extremely responsive. Overall, we have been extremely happy with the platform.

Inconvénients :

The tool wasn't originally designed for Employee Advocacy, so there is some functionality missing, but their product release schedule is aggressive and they are constantly making improvements.

Easy way to engage customers

Commentaires : Influitive greatly helped us to streamline the customer advocacy program. I work for an agency, and thanks to Influitive, customer advocacy has become a huge part of my career. It was previously very time consuming to manually implement and manage a customer advocacy program for a single client before working with Influitive. Now, I am able to manage programs for multiple clients, all in a much more streamlined way in a fraction of the time.

Avantages :

Ease of use, excellent support, always improving the product and adding new features.

Inconvénients :

It can get a bit pricey, but worth it if you have the budget.

The Good and The Not So Good

Avantages :

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.

Inconvénients :

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.

Really cool company and product

Commentaires : They were great to work with and it is a great tool when you have an awesome product and great word of mouth already. This amplifies the word of mouth efforts of your customers and organizes all of the customer marketing initiatives.

Avantages :

The hub is super easy to use. The different customer asks are really easy to set up. It is also a really fun way to engage with your customers and get to know them better.

Inconvénients :

It is not a great tool if you are a small company. Customers usually become inactive after a while, so you need a steady stream of new customers coming in to keep engagement high. We are just to small for this to have been successful.

Has potential if you have the time and resources to invest

Avantages :

The customer support team is AMAZING and always willing to go out of their way. Influitive has great thought leadership content on customer advocacy and customer experience (blogs, articles, etc) as well.

Inconvénients :

The platform is pricey and requires a ton of administrative work - from day to day administration, to setting up and monitoring APIs, to creating the "challenges". If your company has the monetary and employee banwidth for it though, it can be a great investment.