Designing a customer experience model that works, and finding a lever to get traction at a strategic level provides both challenge and opportunity for marketing leaders.
In a recent interviews conducted by Farland Group with leading Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs), we found that more than 85 percent of their companies struggle to bring their engagement strategies to life. We have found with B2B companies one of the most effective tools to push the envelope on your customer experience model and specifically to create a deliberate customer listening strategy is the Customer Advisory Board.
How Customer Advisory Boards Jumpstart your Customer Experience
Leadership: Customer Advisory Boards Start at the Top
Customer Advisory Boards, by design are led from the top and require executive commitment and involvement to make them successful. This has several implications. Most importantly, it signals the importance of your strategic customers to your company. And signals to the company that customer experience is worthy of executive attention and resources. This filters across other customer efforts and becomes embedded in the culture over time.
Conversation: A Systematic Channel for Listening.
From your clients’ lips to your ears – CABs provide one of the most effective channels available for listening to your most senior strategic clients, which is a core prerequisite to an innovative client experience model. The rigor around a well-executed CAB builds the conduit for conversation, and the trust to make it insightful, strategic and action-oriented. The peer discussions that ensue in the course of the meetings increase the benefits of listening exponentially.
Roadmap: To What Matters Most To Your Customers
Customers who engage with you over time through a CAB will give you all of the insight you need to understand not only what is important to them now, but how to shape your company and your strategic direction to enhance and enrich their experience going forward.
The principles behind a successful CAB – including co-creation, active listening and taking action on advice – provide a blueprint for how to enhance and strengthen your other customer experience activities. As you start to get results from your strategic advisors, you will have fuel to drive change with others using the same principles.
If you want to jumpstart your customer experience program in a way that gains attention and moves the needle with your most strategic customers, consider a Client Advisory Board.
For more information on building a Client Advisory Board, see our other posts on this blog, including the top five tricks and how to know you are ready for one.