When it comes to initiating an agenda for your next customer advisory board (CAB) meeting, most companies have a lot of ideas of what they want to tell their customers – upcoming products, product use demos, corporate strategies, exciting sales or marketing programs, etc.
But this is the wrong mindset; companies should instead prioritize what they want to learn from their best customers. Focus on what CAB members would want to learn from each other to take back to their businesses to immediately implement.
Gathering input and feedback to corporate strategies and product roadmaps is an important element of any CAB meeting. If you want CAB meeting success, you must create a member-driven agenda that prioritizes the CAB members’ issues and challenges.
Where can CAB managers gather this information? Here are eight suggestions:
1. Member interviews
When creating your next CAB meeting agenda – and especially for those planning their first meetings, it’s important to interview your CAB members.
In the interview, you’ll discover and prioritize their top challenges and concerns. Such insights are important discoveries on their own accord. Share urgent issues with your management team to ensure they’re aware of them.
Conducting thorough CAB member interviews is the strongest way to ensure your CAB meeting agenda is aligned with their needs – and your meeting will be valuable to all attendees.
2. Meeting discussion
Often, CAB meetings themselves uncover topics that would be great to address in subsequent meetings.
In fact, well-facilitated meetings will often gather a “treasure box” of topics. You won’t have time to fully address all topics in your current CAB meeting that can, and likely, should be next time.
The CAB management team can discuss such topics immediately after a meeting ends. Be sure those topics are considered for the next gathering of CAB members.
3. Post-meeting surveys
pon conclusion of your CAB meeting, be sure to hand out feedback surveys for members to fill out. Take time immediately on-site for the survey while their feedback is fresh before they return back to their daily lives.
Surveys should include desired future meeting topics. These too are direct requests from your CAB members and should be highly prioritized when creating the agenda for your next meeting.
4. Customer engagements
Your customers likely have many touch points with your company: sales, support, implementation, etc. Ask these teams what the most frequent issues or desires that come up in these engagements.
Confirm with CAB members that these issues should be addressed in upcoming CAB meetings.
5. Customer survey/NPS scoring results
In addition to the above, your company may conduct general customer satisfaction surveys or net promoter scoring (NPS) initiatives.
Get the results of these and consider whether such findings can be a part of your CAB meeting agenda. Your CAB might be the perfect realm to dig into any issues deeper to learn how to best remedy them.
6. Benchmarking data
Does your customers’ use of your products or services generate data that can be shared (even anonymously) amongst your CAB members? Such information is always highly desired by your customers.
After all, executives like to benchmark their operations against their peers to gauge their performance and areas of improvement. They can even bring back such data back to their own management team to show how well (or poorly) they are performing compared to other companies.
7. Expert publications
Sometimes, new publications or reports by industry analysts, journalists or pundits shine a light on trends that your members will be interested in and want to discuss amongst their peers. Such industry reports and their data can be a springboard to CAB meeting topics.
But be warned about bringing expert third parties to speak at your CAB meetings themselves. Such experts can be dry and not engaging with your gathered CAB members.
8. Business news
Trends in the news can be top of mind for your customers, such as tariffs, government spending, new regulations, etc. While your members might experience various impacts of such trends, know that news cycles can be short, and policies and mandates can change quickly. And of course be careful not to turn your meeting political.
Customer-Driven Agendas Yield the Best Results
CAB meetings are forums for your best customer executives to address shared challenges and discover potential solutions.
Make sure the needs and wants of your CAB members are put first when creating your meeting agenda. Of course you’ll want to make sure these align to your company’s goals and objectives.
At Ignite, we’ll help you design customer-driven agendas that prioritize what your CAB members care about most — while making sure you get the strategic input and guidance your business needs. Contact us to talk with an Ignite CAB expert about your CAB program goals.
Ignite Advisory Group is the leading global authority on Customer Advisory Boards and Customer-Led Boards. Ignite’s proven methodology for managing and evolving Customer Advisory Boards includes a 4-stage process, encompassing 48 deliverables and measured by 20 metrics to deliver a clear ROI. To learn more about Ignite, visit our website, read our blogs, and follow us on LinkedIn. To find out how your company can benefit from Ignite’s CAB methodology and process, contact us today.