One Program vs. Separate Programs: What's Best for Customer Engagement?

Nicole Saunders · 2025-11-04 16:45:51.31354+00

Hi all, I'm curious to hear the community's thoughts on this: do you think it is better to have one program that engages, recognizes, and rewards customers for speaking, stories, sales references, posting on social, being a top contributor in the community, etc. OR to have separate customer advocacy, sales reference, and community contributor programs?

One Program vs. Separate Programs: What's Best for Customer Engagement? | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

7 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Alexie Glover
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I like to think about these questions from the customer POV. Dividing things internally is helpful to divide the workload, but from a customer's perspective, they're just engaging with your company, not the 1M different champion streams that exist behind the scenes.
👍1
Mary Green
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I agree with Alexie here, you can have it either way on the backend, but it should present to the customer as streamlined, logical, and simple. That said, I've done both. I find that when the customers get to build a good relationship with the team and their experience is always a priority, they don't mind. Communication needs to be clear about what to expect.
👍1
Alexie Glover
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I just think generally customers aren't thinking too deeply about whether they're engaging with Company's Advocacy Program or Community Program. From their perspective, they're engaging with Company. Over engineering it doesn't do anything to change your customer's experience—unless you're at a company like Adobe where there are a ton of different products, personas, and resources internally to make the division feel logical to the customer.
❤️1
Joel (Salesforce)
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I think there’s merit to both, and am sharing a few musings/thoughts below:
Clear marketing/storytelling of the program and its impact internally and externally
Lack of data equity amongst programs in the same portfolio
Outweighted resourcing to some programs vs others
Clear paths to engage different people from a company vs. needing to keep them it more high level to appeal to the most people
I’d have a central agreeement type so it’s standard based on how the people/person from a customer select to engage with your company
Nicole Saunders
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Thanks for the input, everyone! I appreciate your thoughts.
Evan Huck
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Yea there's definitely advantages in at least having a shared backend so that a "person" is the same "person" across the different programs - ie identity is resolved across the pillars - e.g.
If a customer just spoke at an event, that should be considered if you're deciding who to pull for a reference call
community participation is an interesting signal contributing to an advocate health score/profile of some sort
community is a great channel to source advocates
content is on the same spectrum as references (just different formats for leveraging the voice of the customer)
You can have both - ie distinct subspaces for different audiences/segments and ways to engage with your company, while still having a bespoke, unified, one company to one advocate experience regardless of how customers engage. And yea w/pts and gamification its a bit odd to have 2-3 different currencies and reward systems - it's a lot cleaner when there's just once currency for loyalty/rewards (with of course different values for different activities)
Kevin Lau
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I think it really depends on your goals and where you are in your maturity journey. What you described are mostly internal classifications — distinctions your team or leadership might care about, but your customers likely won’t. They just want to engage in ways that feel meaningful to them. If I had a team of 1–3, I’d start small and design around what the customer values most — whether that’s sharing feedback, gaining visibility, or building peer connections. Those intrinsic motivators are the foundation. If you skip that step, you’ll feel it later. Once you’re managing 15–20 overlapping programs, customers get confused about where they fit and how to engage. And internally, teams start asking, “Wait—what’s the difference between a Champion, an Insider, or a CAB member?” It gets complicated fast. I’ve been on both sides — building from scratch and inheriting complex ecosystems. There's also the hidden tax around operational lift. Every new program needs someone to run it, and it’s easy for customer marketers to take on too much too soon and start to feel burnt out.

Alexie Glover
·
·
I like to think about these questions from the customer POV. Dividing things internally is helpful to divide the workload, but from a customer's perspective, they're just engaging with your company, not the 1M different champion streams that exist behind the scenes.
👍1
Mary Green
·
·
I agree with Alexie here, you can have it either way on the backend, but it should present to the customer as streamlined, logical, and simple. That said, I've done both. I find that when the customers get to build a good relationship with the team and their experience is always a priority, they don't mind. Communication needs to be clear about what to expect.
👍1
Alexie Glover
·
·
I just think generally customers aren't thinking too deeply about whether they're engaging with Company's Advocacy Program or Community Program. From their perspective, they're engaging with Company. Over engineering it doesn't do anything to change your customer's experience—unless you're at a company like Adobe where there are a ton of different products, personas, and resources internally to make the division feel logical to the customer.
❤️1
Joel (Salesforce)
·
·
I think there’s merit to both, and am sharing a few musings/thoughts below:
Clear marketing/storytelling of the program and its impact internally and externally
Lack of data equity amongst programs in the same portfolio
Outweighted resourcing to some programs vs others
Clear paths to engage different people from a company vs. needing to keep them it more high level to appeal to the most people
I’d have a central agreeement type so it’s standard based on how the people/person from a customer select to engage with your company
Nicole Saunders
·
·
Thanks for the input, everyone! I appreciate your thoughts.
Evan Huck
·
·
Yea there's definitely advantages in at least having a shared backend so that a "person" is the same "person" across the different programs - ie identity is resolved across the pillars - e.g.
If a customer just spoke at an event, that should be considered if you're deciding who to pull for a reference call
community participation is an interesting signal contributing to an advocate health score/profile of some sort
community is a great channel to source advocates
content is on the same spectrum as references (just different formats for leveraging the voice of the customer)
You can have both - ie distinct subspaces for different audiences/segments and ways to engage with your company, while still having a bespoke, unified, one company to one advocate experience regardless of how customers engage. And yea w/pts and gamification its a bit odd to have 2-3 different currencies and reward systems - it's a lot cleaner when there's just once currency for loyalty/rewards (with of course different values for different activities)
Kevin Lau
·
·
I think it really depends on your goals and where you are in your maturity journey. What you described are mostly internal classifications — distinctions your team or leadership might care about, but your customers likely won’t. They just want to engage in ways that feel meaningful to them. If I had a team of 1–3, I’d start small and design around what the customer values most — whether that’s sharing feedback, gaining visibility, or building peer connections. Those intrinsic motivators are the foundation. If you skip that step, you’ll feel it later. Once you’re managing 15–20 overlapping programs, customers get confused about where they fit and how to engage. And internally, teams start asking, “Wait—what’s the difference between a Champion, an Insider, or a CAB member?” It gets complicated fast. I’ve been on both sides — building from scratch and inheriting complex ecosystems. There's also the hidden tax around operational lift. Every new program needs someone to run it, and it’s easy for customer marketers to take on too much too soon and start to feel burnt out.