How Phenom turned 8,000 customers into an always-on advocacy engine

Phenom is the leader in applied AI built to redesign work operations for hiring faster, developing better, and retaining longer. Founded in 2011, Phenom empowers global organizations to solve their unique industry and business needs across departments, teams, employees, and candidates.

The Challenge

As Phenom's customer community grew, so did customers' desire to engage with us. More people wanted to speak at events, share their stories, provide references, and help shape our products than ever before. It was a good problem to have, but demand for advocates was scaling faster than our ability to find them.

With a broad product portfolio and a packed calendar of advocacy opportunities, from reference calls and analyst conversations to speaking engagements, case studies, and product feedback, they needed a better way to connect the right customers to the right opportunities at the right time.

A process existed, but it ran on manual coordination and bottlenecked fast. References lived in Salesforce with no dedicated ownership and no consistent upkeep, so the data went stale and requests moved only as quickly as the people chasing them. Customer activity wasn't centralized, participation wasn't tracked, and we had little visibility into who had recently engaged or who might want to participate next. When a customer spoke on Phenom's behalf, there was no easy way to record it, recognize it, or find the next person like them.

So the team did what every team without a system does: they went back to the same handful of advocates, over and over. The customers we already knew carried the entire program, while advocates we had never met stayed invisible. Contact was limited to email, and most of it happened at key lifecycle moments like onboarding and renewal, or when a need arose. They knew they could build something far more meaningful.

Heather Klinger joined as Customer Loyalty Manager and was tasked with building that program from scratch. From the beginning, she knew the vision wouldn't survive spreadsheets, email lists, and manual work. It required a platform designed to scale advocacy while keeping the experience personal.

Rather than another transactional advocacy program, they set out to create an experience customers would genuinely enjoy: one that recognized their contributions, personalized opportunities based on their interests and expertise, respected their communication preferences, and gave them engaging ways to connect with Phenom across the entire customer journey.

Finding advocates, surfacing signals, knowing what customers need and when they need it: you cannot do that at scale without the technology. Before Base AI we had nothing, and the need kept arising, over and over.

As Phenom’s first foray into a customer marketing platform, Heather built the business case from scratch that included a vendor evaluation matrix. Base AI stood out on three criteria: a customer experience worthy of Phenom's brand, deep segmentation for a program open to every user from recruiter to CHRO, and analytics the team could bring to leadership.

The Solution

Phenom launched Phenom Fans on Base AI: a fully branded advocacy and loyalty hub that every customer can reach with one click from their Phenom product login.

Unlike programs that invite only a curated shortlist, Phenom opened the doors to its entire customer base. That decision only works with personalization, so the team built the experience around it:

• Personalized by seniority. Every member is categorized on entry. Recruiters see tips, product content, and everyday learning. Executives see speaking opportunities, peer networking, and personal brand moments.
• Target audiences for precise campaigns. The team builds segments from points, community membership, location, seniority, and product stack, then campaigns to exactly the right group.
• A living content layer. Tip Tuesday posts, product announcements, and educational resources, get pushed to member dashboards, so customers start their day in Phenom Fans instead of digging through email.
• Customer loyalty points, leaderboard, and rewards that customers genuinely compete over. Members earn points for engagement and redeem them for Phenom swag, charity donations, gift cards, curated Goody collections, and even one-on-one time with Phenom executives.

People want to be the top dog at their company. They talk to each other on LinkedIn: 'you overtook me in spot number one!' They get rewarded, it's fun, it's engaging. So many advocates tell us they start their day with Phenom Phans.

• References now run directly inside Salesforce, saving sellers valuable time by eliminating the need to jump between systems. Whether they're nominating a new advocate or requesting a reference, the process takes less than a minute. With advocate product attributes and multiple references per account, sellers can quickly match the right customer to the right opportunity.
• Engagement signals the team can act on. Base AI's analytics dashboards show who is active weekly and monthly, which companies have gone quiet, and how engagement maps to account health. When a red account shows no activity in the program, the team knows before it becomes a renewal conversation.

The Outcomes

In eighteen months, Phenom Fans has become a leading engagement layer for the company:

• 8,000+ customers joined in the first year and a half, spanning every seniority level from recruiter to CHRO.
• More active advocates this year than last. The team shifted its north star from membership growth to engagement, and the numbers moved with it.
• New advocates keep surfacing. The team thought they knew their best advocates. The program proved otherwise, revealing hand raisers and reference candidates at companies they had never tapped.
• Advocacy is now a board-level metric. For the first time, the team can tie advocacy directly to revenue: which references influenced which deals, which accounts support the most pipeline, and where the reference pool needs reinforcement by product, industry, and ATS.
• Engagement now predicts health. Accounts that participate, even quarterly, are measurably happier customers, and quiet accounts get proactive attention instead of a surprise at renewal.
• Phenom’s new customer reference program reactivated existing contacts and surfaced 32 net new references, nearly a 25% increase prior to launching with Base AI.

We present to leadership every single week and month. Now I can show which customers are influencing revenue and which accounts are providing the most references. Tying advocacy to dollars is something we could never do before.

The program keeps expanding into new territory. A mentorship program now runs through the platform, with members meeting monthly. At IAMPHENOM, the company's annual conference, the team opened a physical swag shop where advocates redeemed their points in person. Members who had competed on the leaderboard for months finally met face to face.

Having a platform that helps us connect with our customers on a deeper level is just so rewarding. There's an excitement, an energy, celebrating our customers and making them a little bit happier in their day. It's really special.