October 15, 2021
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From the coffee shop to a therapy session, many parts of our lives have become transactional. At Genesys, we believe true connection isn’t about transactions at all, but about the magic that happens between people.
Genesys is a leading provider of contact center solutions. Our products orchestrate 70 billion remarkable customer experiences every year for organizations in over 100 countries worldwide. Our cloud, digital, and AI technologies deliver empathetic, human-centric, hyper-personalized customer experiences across every channel, all while improving employee productivity and engagement. We foster customer trust and loyalty through our Experience-as-a-Service vision.
The Importance of Branding and Identity
I didn’t know much about Genesys or advocate marketing before I joined the company, so I was grateful to have walked into such a supportive environment that puts customers first in every situation. I learned about nurturing connections with our advocates, building community, and promoting engagement to existing and incoming Genesys customers. Genesys had an active customer community in place, but it needed some tweaking.
GCAP—the Genesys Customer Advocacy Program—uses Influitive to discover, nurture, and mobilize our advocates. But our customers and internal teams didn’t fully understand the ins and outs of GCAP, so my first task was to spread the word.
The best customer communities foster a sense of identity and establish a connection between customer advocacy activities and your company’s values.
I started with a refresh of the GCAP landing page on our company website. It was outdated and didn’t reflect our recent rebranding and focus on empathy and “Super Human Service.” I then worked with our branding team to revamp the community’s look and align it with our messaging on Experience as a Service. Consistent branding on every page of GCAP helps create a cohesive experience for our customers and drive home our values.
GCAP is not only a loyalty and rewards program. It fosters a sense of identity. Customers who offer to serve as advocates aren’t just people who use our products but are part of a group of volunteers who share their passion for our platform. It’s my job to cultivate these deep experiences between our community members and consistently return the favor on the value they bring Genesys
Providing Reciprocal Value to Our Customers
A user conference is a great place to foster relationships between customers. But what happens when you can’t meet in person? In 2020 and 2021, Genesys Xperience was a virtual event due to the pandemic. In 2021 in particular, we planned a lot of events within the GCAP community hub leading up to the conference to get people excited and engaged. These events included our Spirit Week, comprising five different daily challenges, and a referral campaign that asked advocates to register their friends and colleagues for Xperience.
During the two-day conference, we ran an Xperience-themed channel with 16 different challenges and a GCAP Social attended by 100 community members. This event included an art class and opportunities for GCAP members to get to know one another, discuss advocacy, and share their feelings about Genesys and our products. We even rewarded some of our advocates for leading sessions during Xperience.
The event and the surrounding activities were an incredible success. Our Xperience programming resulted in a 40% increase in CGAP engagement that month and upped the fun quotient by echoing the festive atmosphere of our in-person conferences online.
Beyond events, educational content can help nurture our advocates. Fortunately, I have buy-in from internal stakeholders, including our product and content marketing teams. These teams author material that keeps our customers up to date on new feature releases, teaches them the benefits of our products, and invites them into conversations with and about Genesys.
Extend your advocacy efforts beyond your customer community. Invite your advocates to author blog posts, speak at conferences, and offer feedback on your marketing and training materials.
I also work with our UX Research team to source customers for surveys and research interviews to provide feedback about their experiences with our products. Our thought leadership and content marketing teams also validate blog posts, white papers, eBooks, and other output through the GCAP community.
Making the Most of Our Advocates and User Group Members
While GCAP is a great place for our customers to interact with each other, it’s not the only place they congregate. Recently, we noticed an overlap between members of our GCAP community and our Genesys User Groups. These groups are regional entities that meet every 6–8 weeks and bring together like-minded Genesys customers to discuss best practices, network and ask questions of product experts.
Recognizing an opportunity in this overlap, we started a User Group referral program in GCAP that rewards community members for every person they refer to one of these groups. We’re six months into the program and have seen dozens of GCAP members join each user group. These efforts have brought about a 9% increase in our overall Genesys User Group registrations.
This initiative sets Genesys apart. I don’t know of any other companies that use Influitive this way. As a company, we benefit from getting our advocates more involved with our company, and they benefit from getting more involved with each other.
Feature Updates and Multilingual Support
As we’ve grown GCAP, I’ve come to appreciate how Influitive has evolved their product. For example, Influitive just released new onboarding capabilities, which has allowed me to take a video of myself and welcome my customers to the platform. There is so much content available it’s easy for people to get lost or overwhelmed. Creating a personalized onboarding experience is a great way to orient new GCAP members and help guide them into the community.
One of the biggest challenges of running GCAP is multilingual content and support. When I started at Genesys, our hub was an English-only space, which was a big issue because GCAP is a global program. Many community members had to navigate the website in an unfamiliar—or at least secondary—language, and it was a barrier to accessing resources, completing challenges, and earning rewards.
Speak to customers in their language—literally. Reach out to our advocates in their native tongue to remove barriers within your community.
During the summer of 2020, Influitive added multilingual support to their offerings. This feature automatically translates and localizes the GCAP interface into one of eight supported languages, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I can then get my challenges, channels, and rewards translated as well. Reaching out to our advocates in a language they understand brings home the message of empathy and human-centric experiences—which, again, is what Genesys is all about.
I am also a fan of Influitive VIP, an online community that connects me with other advocate marketers who use the platform. It’s been a godsend, especially in the beginning when I was learning the ropes. I didn’t always know what challenges to do every week and I’d run out of ideas. In VIP, I can always find inspiration in the work of my peers. I can use the discussion boards to chat about best practices and explore innovative ways to use Influitive. I take a lot of what I see in VIP and replicate it within my own community.
Influitive tracks the results of our advocacy efforts and integrates seamlessly with Salesforce to route referrals directly to our sales team. It also integrates with ReferenceEdge, a reference management system we use to track customer advocacy activity. We sync GCAP points with Salesforce and the GCAP community hub platform so that we don’t overburden our advocates.
Empathy Is the Core of Advocacy
Influitive has provided Genesys with the tools to create an online space where our customers can get to know each other. It’s also given me a chance to know many of our community members on a deeper level. This welcoming environment consistently rewards our customers for their advocacy and engages them with educational materials that help them make the most of our products. It allows us to interact with our customers 24/7, not just at our annual events.
With Influitive, advocacy is fun. The platform lightens my workload because I can create, manage, and track our customer advocacy efforts with a single solution. It has helped me grow as an advocate marketer and supported my journey to put Genesys customers first, share our company values, and create an empathetic, human-centric, hyper-personalized advocate experience.
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