Editorial
The Gist
- Effective meeting timing. Plan customer advisory board meetings during optimal seasons and in easily accessible, central locations to ensure higher customer participation and engagement.
- Customer-driven agendas. Prioritize customer challenges in your agenda to ensure the meeting stays focused on their needs, fostering greater engagement and actionable insights.
- Actionable follow-up plans. Create a clear follow-up strategy with an Action Tracker to show customers their feedback is valued, driving long-term satisfaction and loyalty.
Following our story on the worst customer advisory board (CAB) meeting mistakes companies make, we wanted to look at the other side, as well. What happens when customer advisory board meetings go right?
After all, successful customer advisory board meetings are common and achievable with knowledge, organization and proactive planning. When done right, your company leadership and (more importantly) participating customers will rave about the lessons learned that can be implemented immediately to make meaningful impacts on everyone’s operations.
Here are aspects of the best customer advisory board meetings I’ve ever attended and/or facilitated directly. I’ve pulled elements from numerous meetings in order to highlight the very best from each into this list, and the lessons learned apply not only to customer advisory boards but also to any other customer engagement (i.e., conference, user group meeting) you may be planning or considering.
1. Choosing the Best Time and Place for Customers
First of all, customer marketers should plan their meeting at a time and location that works best for their clients. Best times are often in the spring and fall, away from summer vacations and the holidays, and marketers should avoid the end of the quarter for those impacted by sales goals or financial closings. February or October are good options.
The location should be a major city centrally located within a single flight in the middle of your customers’ geographical office sites. Chicago, Dallas and Denver are great examples. Less ideal options would be Miami, Seattle or harder to reach locations such as Asheville, NC, that require multiple flights to get there.
Finally, select the best resort hotel you can afford. It doesn’t have to be the Four Seasons (although I have attended meetings there), but no Motel 6s either.
Following a Customer-Driven Agenda
The best meetings are those in which the customer drives the topics and agenda. This is done by interviewing them to capture and prioritize their challenges and pain points, then bringing these issues into the meeting discussion to ensure their interests remain the focus.
The best meetings I have facilitated captured these priorities and mapped them directly to the agenda right from the top, and the customers were completely engaged throughout. The flip side of this is a meeting agenda focused exclusively on the host company -– your own perspective, plans, developments, product roadmap. Even worse are “updates” to topics that were covered in a previous meeting.
Also, be cautious bringing in third party speakers, who rarely engage with their audience and will essentially present their content and leave.
Related Article: 5 Reasons You Need a Customer Advisory Board
Forming Active Customer Advisory Board Breakout Sessions
The best customer advisory board meetings I have attended get participants up and out of their seats. They meet in smaller groups and even different rooms, tackling specific challenges and bringing their findings and recommendations back to the group at large to defend and debate.
Other great sessions place the actual product roadmap on a large poster and have the members vote on their desires with Monopoly money, sticky dots or notes. This leaves a clear and actionable image of where product teams should focus their development resources.
Finally, another customer took members on a facility tour, in which they demonstrated their latest and coming solutions. They had members prioritize in-progress features via a “March-Madness”-like voting competition.
Fascinating Social Activities for a Memorable Customer Advisory Board
The best customer advisory board meetings take advantage of their locations by providing customers exclusive access to facilities they may not have in their regular lives.
The best social activities for customer advisory boards I have attended include a tour of the U.S. Capital, Country Music and NASCAR museum tours, Kentucky Derby racing and bay and lake boat cruises.
Creating a Strong Follow-Up Plan
Host companies should not just have a plan to listen to their customers but also a robust plan for taking action with their customer advisory boards with the input and suggestions they’ve heard. That means a strong note-taker in the meeting as well as notes captured from all host company attendees. It also requires a detailed meeting report summarizing what was heard and what we call an Action Tracker document. This lists all possible actions that could be taken, prioritizing the top ones, the target deadline for when they will be completed and who (by name) will lead the effort.
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Companies should then report back to customer advisory board members on the progress and status of these -– even those suggestions that were not selected to be pursued. My best client holds monthly meetings on their actions progress, hears status updates from each action leader and provides updates to customers in each meeting. This always generates a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in their members.
Make the Most of Your Customer Advisory Board
Companies who incorporate these five elements will certainly be well on their way to making the best customer advisory board experience possible for their clients -– one that will deliver impactful and measurable results back to them.
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