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, and what CAB members would want to learn from each other to take back to their businesses to immediately implement.
While gathering input and feedback to corporate strategies and product roadmaps is an important element of any CAB meeting, companies should remember to 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 to discover and prioritize their top challenges and concerns. Such insights are important discoveries on their own accord, and can be shared with your management team to ensure they’re aware of any urgent issues. 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 that time limits will likely not allow to be fully addressed 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 and be sure they are considered for the next gathering of CAB members.
3. Post-meeting surveys: Upon conclusion of your CAB meeting, be sure to hand out paper surveys for members to fill out immediately on-site while their feedback is fresh before they return back to their daily lives. Surveys should include desired future meeting topics, as 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 come up in these engagements, and 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: If 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 to their peers to gauge their performance and areas of improvement, and 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 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 Advisory Board meetings are forums for your best customer executives to address shared challenges and discover potential solutions to them. While it’s understandable for companies to want to convey their own messages at CAB meetings, the needs and wants of your CAB members should be put first when creating your meeting agenda.