October 2022 Round-Up: Understanding Your Customers

The customer experience is something every company strives to do perfect, and to do so, you need to understand who your best customers are and what they need. There are many ways to gain understanding from your customers, such as sending out an annual customer survey.  Another unique and in-depth way is to invite a key group of customers to participate in a customer council.

What is a customer council?
A customer council is made up of your top customers, and you meet once or twice a year to gain deep customer insights and market research. The council’s purpose is to give open and honest feedback on your initiatives and process.

Why do you need a customer council?

The research is clear on this: 80% of companies think they deliver a great customer experience, but only 8% of their customers believe this to be true. A customer council is critical in understanding how your customers feel about your customer experience and any areas you are excelling at or lacking in. You can also get valuable feedback on the products you offer, your marketing channels, internal processes, and any aspect of your business. These insights will help you prioritize initiatives to meet your customers’ needs - both current and future.  

These are the steps to set up and host a successful customer council

1. Set goals for your council - What are you trying to achieve? What are the main areas of your business that you want customer feedback on? Marketing, product offering, ideal client profile, business processes. It can include all of this!
2. Identify your top customers to invite. Consider your own ideal client profiles and try to pick customers that fit those. Invite customers based on the amount of business they have with you and/or how long they’ve been a customer - these will ensure you get valid and relevant feedback.
3. Have your council on a scheduled date, either in person or online. Have a few people from your organization attend - someone to lead the session and a couple of people to take notes. Ideally you want a mix of team members from leadership, marketing, sales and operations attending - their different takeaways will help paint a complete picture of how your organization is performing.
4. Create a process and a plan for your customer council meeting. Create a presentation deck with an agenda. Plan out and include all the areas you want to review and gain feedback on. Send out the agenda in advance so your council members can be prepared. Collect any assets you want to review, like website links, social media profiles and content, examples of products, etc.
5. Ask the right questions. Ask the tough questions. You want to know where you are doing well and also where you are not meeting expectations. You will only get better if you can own up to the areas you’re falling short at, and make commitments to change or improve. This transparency shows commitment and will help gain buy-in from your members as it shows you are receptive to all types of feedback (not just positive feedback).
6. Make an action plan: a CX improvement roadmap. Once you have all this feedback, turn it into actionable items that will change policies or procedures at your organization. This may take time and effort, but it will be worth it in the end to make improvements to your customer experience.
7. Send that action plan to your customers and keep them in the loop about any changes you make to your business processes or products. This builds further buy-in to the process for future years, creating accountability to your customer for the changes they would like to see.

We are conducting our own customer council this month and we're excited to hear where we're doing well and the areas that we can improve in. We will share the results and our learnings with you in future emails, so stayed tuned! You can also read this blog post for more info about customer councils, or contact us to learn how we can help you create and host your own council.

Get Started | Contact Us

Roket Gear | A Complete Go-To-Market Strategy

Roket Gear created the world’s first weighted hockey training system. The product was backed by research and they completed initial strategic direction and branding projects. They came to Roadmap to develop an in-depth strategy to reach three sales channels. To reach these customer sets we created sales and marketing plans, enablement tools, promotional items, and a website with an integrated customer relationship management system (CRM), developing a comprehensive go-to-market strategy.

Learn more about our approach to developing a complete go-to-market strategy for this team by reading our case study.

Read the Case Study | Roket Gear

Watch Now | Creating a Go-to-Market Strategy

Did you miss our latest webinar about creating a Go-To-Market Strategy? Don't worry, we have you covered! The webinar recording and presentation deck are now online! 

 A go-to-market strategy is how a company brings a product to market. A successful strategy has many components that touch on areas such as customer understanding, building awareness, customer acquisition and customer expansion. The key takeaway is that all of these areas are working together to drive your launch.

 Ready to learn more? Watch the webinar with Roadmap President Steve Whittington and download his slide deck to learn how to build the foundation for a successful go-to-market strategy and how this can help you strengthen your business. 

Watch Now | Go-To-Market Webinar