Virtual Fireside Chat with Ryder’s Stephanie Wicky: How Ryder Customer Advisory Boards Drive Priorities

In a recent webinar, Ignite’s Eyal Danon spoke to Ryder’s Stephanie Wicky, Vice President, Marketing all about customer advisory boards. Stephanie shared about how to sustain internal executive leadership engagement and how Ryder makes their CAB program work for them. Watch a video of the fireside chat below.

Here are some highlights from the conversation

• Advice to build executive support for a customer advisory board. It’s not going to happen overnight — be comfortable with that. Amplify the value of your board by getting real-time customer feedback on areas of focus for your company’s executive leadership team. Make sure meeting topics are very relevant. Get other internal champions to support your efforts.
• How to have your customer advisory board act as strategic advisors. Leveraging the CAB as strategic advisors is one of the most valuable functions of the CAB. Ryder emphasizes when they want the CAB to provide feedback from the point of view of industry advisors versus as a customer. Over time, Ryder has focused more on asking the CAB members to guide and advise Ryder from their industry “advisor hat.” Over time, Ryder has created a high level of engagement and partnerships with CAB members and those members are invested in Ryder and their relationships with peers. And creating a culture of transparency and trust around meeting discussions is key. 
  
• How to get internal stakeholders to follow up after a CAB meeting? The CAB program management team needs to drive the follow-up to show the value of the CAB. You need to have a post-meeting process and a plan in place. How are you going to disseminate that information that was learned and shared? And follow up on it?
• How do you keep virtual CAB meetings interesting and engaging? Keep it short, no full-day virtual meetings. Pick one or two key agenda topics — avoid jam-packed agendas. Stick to relevant topics. Cadence is important — don’t meet too often. And, a 15-to-20 minute industry perspective and future trends update from Ryder’s CEO is highly valued by CAB members.
• Should you allow salespeople to attend CAB meetings? No, the CAB is not the right place to sell and it’s not the right place to bring the vibe that you’re going to be selling. Ryder does allow two SVPs of Sales (division heads) to attend CAB meetings to listen, they don’t talk at the meetings.

 

Learn more about Ryder, Watch this brief video