Eight Must-Have Elements for your CAB Action Tracker Document

Once your customer advisory board (CAB) meeting is concluded, CAB managers should have a clear idea of what to do afterward. As we like to say, the follow up after a CAB meeting is just as important than the meeting itself.

Key here will be the creation of your CAB action tracker document. The CAB action tracker will serve as an efficient medium to prioritize, assign, track and report back to your CAB members the actions you have taken as a result of their input. We recommend creating this in a spreadsheet and labeling it with the CAB meeting date from which the action items are taken.

Here are eight must-have elements to be sure to include in your CAB action tracker:

1. Action items

 Be as specific as possible. Vague or general actions (“improve customer service”) will likely not make sense, not be verifiable or (worse) be forgotten.

2. Initial status

Upon initially listing your potential action items, you will want to HOLD moving on any of them until they have been reviewed by your internal CAB team. For each action item, confirm that it is indeed one you want to commit to – making it a GO actionable idea. Action items that are not deemed actionable for any reason can be labeled STOP – no action required at this time.

3. Priority level

Make sure to create a system to set priority level. Some actions will be considered urgent by your team, as they may be revenue-bearing or desired by multiple members of your CAB. For example, you can label these actions as HOT. Standard priority actions can be considered MID-LEVEL, while unimportant or vaguely aspirational ones can be labelled as BACKBURNER.

4. Action Type

Some actions (e.g. desired product features) may involve your product team, while others (e.g. account follow-ups) will fall to your sales/account management teams. Assign the department impacted for each and every action – there may be some trends to realize here. (e.g. CAB customers may be asking for more follow-up from their reps.)

5. Action owner

It’s very important to assign a specific NAME to each and every action item chosen to be undertaken. This person should fully understand the action at the time of review and commit to undertaking and completing it by the desired due date. This person will also be responsible for reporting progress and status of the action at the next CAB meeting.

6. Due date

In line with above, due dates should be assigned to each action undertaken. While some easier or “low-hanging fruit” actions can have aggressive due dates, others may take more time to investigate, implement or complete. For these, quarters (e.g. Q4 2025) may make more sense. But don’t get too far out – those with indefinite deadlines will tend to get deprioritized or forgotten.

7. Status

Carefully track the status of each action item: for example, either NOT YET STARTED, IN-PROGRESS or COMPLETED. This will allow the CAB management team to quickly, visually assess how overall progress is being made on the list of actions.

8. Notes and next steps

Include in this general field the background or origin of where the action was suggested, what session and which CAB member may have suggested it. Such info might come from (or even reference) the CAB meeting notes that were taken. Also include here the progress of the action, where any internal help is needed or being involved and what is still required to be done in order to complete the action.

Track those Action Items – Closing the Feedback Loop with CAB Members is a Must

Compiling, prioritizing, taking action and reporting back on the input received by your CAB members will be crucial to ensuring the success of your CAB program. Failure to do so will leave your CAB members asking, “whatever happened to this suggested idea?” Insufficient answers will have them questioning the value of their participation in your CAB program as a whole.

Thus, CAB managers should stay proactive with tracking actions — holding regular internal status meetings on the actions underway to ensure they are progressing – and vowing to provide a report their status to CAB members during the next planned meeting.