How to implement a Customer Advisory Board

Ever wondered if there’s more to customer feedback than just interviews? Or perhaps you’ve been seeking a way to gain deeper, more strategic insights from your customers? In this article, you’ll read the what, why, and how of a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), and in the end, get a top-up with a real life case study.

The what and why of a Customer Advisory Board (CAB)

We are hopefully all familiar with the idea of customer interviews. Is a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) just another interview? Let’s think about the purpose and pain you have, for example:

• Any strategic decisions that you’d like guidance and feedback on via deepened talks with your customers?
• Got an idea you would like customers’ continuous and balanced input throughout the solution validation phase?
• Would you like to broaden your views of our customers and their world?

In such scenarios, it’s more effective to invite a manageable group of customers and have regular meetings with them. During this series of meetings, you can delve deep into your goals and pains, while having enough time in between each meeting to act upon their feedback and adapt the agenda of the next meeting. That is basically what a CAB is.

It’s about your goal, your customers, your organisation, and your market. Depending on that, the CAB size can vary, such as from 4 to 6 people, or even more. The frequency can vary, such as from once a month, 1.5 hours long, to every other month, 2 hours long, etc.

The Success Factor for Running a CAB

Depending on your organisation, you could be running the CAB with a UX Researcher/Team, completely by yourself, or with close “supervision” from your stakeholder, e.g., founders and sales. In any case, being clear about your goal is vital.

Why?

It’s a group meeting.

We may sometimes lose focus in a meeting, even more so in group meetings, having an end goal in mind makes sure that important items are covered, and irrelevant ones are excluded.

It’s a meeting with more than one customer.

Regardless of offering any incentives or not, your customers sit with you, engage in the topics you brought in, and often work interactively on a worksheet with you. Make it count. Additionally, customers have points to make. It’s rarely the case when a customer participates in an interview or CAB that they only “just checking what this is about”, likely they’d like to make some feature requests straight to the product team. It’s expected that they will try to interject. You can only get what you want out of this meeting, if you know what you want so certain, that any disruption or distraction will not affect you from getting it.

It’s a work-intensive meeting.

As mentioned above, typically a CAB runs once or every other month, 1–2 hours long. It’s not an interview where you can hop in on the clock without any preparation. Every CAB meeting requires preparation, be it a template worksheet, prototype building, or even just the appointment scheduling of back-and-forth emailing. These are all time-consuming activities. Again, make it count — what do you want out of it, how do you get it?

The Vanilla Extract of CAB

One drop of vanilla extract in 300 grams of batter makes your cake smell heavenly. What is the extract in running a CAB?

It’s the infrastructure that fosters customer openness:

• In our company, we have long paved the way to ubiquitous customer feedback channels, which are all fully active: online community, user summit, customer interviews, etc. Customers know they can talk to this company.
• Customers talk to each other as well. You’ll find that the customers who attend the same CAB will start to communicate with each other offline: how to better use the product, understand more use cases, and put things into perspective for themselves. We heard that in Germany, there are even meet-up events self organised by our own customers.
• The power of community is often not discussed in the B2B Product Management world. In social media, cryptocurrency, and gaming industries, the “user community” is typically a buzzword. One Northern Germany based gaming company told us, while other gaming studios spend 10–20 million euros a month for buying players, they nurture an active community and get constant loyal new users for free. Once users begin to talk to each other, the snowball starts rolling.
• They evaluate each other’s ideas. In our online community, we see not just feature requests. Often customers point out how some feature ideas wouldn’t work, thus better not be implemented. There are also cases where more than 10 customers join hands and all confirm they have exactly the same pain point. This is a goldmine of customer input for us Product Managers.

Case Study — First 100 Days of Implementing a CAB

TL;DR:

• Remember your goals. Set the right context for the customers.
• Grow with the CAB. Get comfortable and connect well with your customers.
• Be persistent and patient. You don’t get the ultimate outcome out of one or two sessions.

Here is how it went for one of the CABs that we organised:

Day 1: Knowing what goal we want to achieve

Day 5: Knowing what discussions can help me get there

Day 10: Knowing who I need for these discussions

Day 15: Started internal communication loops for assembling a CAB

Day 20: Continued: As a classic example, Sales allowed us to contact one customer while Consulting objected

Day 30: Finally able to send out the first batch of CAB invitation emails to customers

Day 35: The first customer responded with a “yes”!

Day 40: Waiting

Day 45: More waiting…..

Day 50: Four customers confirmed. We decided to wait no more, better kick it off and adjust

Day 55: Found a mutual appointment for all four customers, UX Research, ourselves

Day 60: Prepared agenda, interactive worksheets, demo materials, and presentation

Day 61: Synced with UX Research

Day 64: Rehearsal

Day 65: Kick-off meeting for that CAB, finally.

Day 65: Debrief and reflect

• The preparation was much needed.
• The goal and Big Picture, e.g., rapport and long-term relationship with the customers, matter more than the one or two questions that went out of hand or very well.
• The right CAB member constellation is vital. Uninvite the customer if found not suitable.

Day 75: Found a replacement customer

Day 80: Once again. Sent invites for the next CAB

Day 90: Prepared worksheets based on the current goal

Day 91: Synced with UX Research

Day 95: The second CAB meeting

• Showed the CAB a prepared wrap-up from the previous session
• Checked if still on the same page
• Started the new topics

Day 95: Debrief and reflect

• Our desired feedback was received quicker than in the first CAB. Dynamic would always change. Bear in mind, our long-term goal is more important than the feeling of one or two sessions.
• The replacement CAB member turned out to have missed the meeting. This happens. Be prepared for that in the future as well.

Day 100: build on the previous learnings, send an invite, and start again!

That’s a wrap on the ins and outs of CABs! If you found it insightful, hopefully you’ll give CAB a try yourself. Thoughts, experiences, and questions are all welcome in the comments section below!