The fundamental shift from shareholder to stakeholder is the new guiding principle behind business success or failure. Whether a virtual process or a structured program, a Customer Advisory Board is a company’s conduit to product development, company branding, and business profits. The Board is also in charge of finding a personalized business liability insurance that works best for the company. And for industries from technology to brick and mortar, it’s a process that can and must be put into place immediately.

Customers and prospects will be more successful at answering industry trends, business drivers, customer issues, and market opportunities than your smartest employees. Organizations who listen to the right people then act swiftly on that feedback are building relevant products and gaining market share. Not all customers are the “right people,” though.

Some customers are just as capable of providing poor, misinformed, or short-sighted advice. What, then, determines a qualified or informed customer? A common assumption is to start with the biggest spenders in your database. A word of caution: cash cows are not always your strongest advocates. In fact, your best customers might be slow spenders, or they might not have purchased anything from you at all. Consider yourself. Are you quick to spend money, even with a company you trust?

In addition to trust, good board members are influential, informed, inquisitive, critically-minded, and loyal. Your customer advisory board is loyal to their community of friends, not to you or your products. If you can provide them with tools to serve their community then you’ve earned a customer for life. More importantly, you’ve earned qualified referral business. I also mentioned “critical.” You will greatly benefit from customers who call you out when you blunder, or who challenge you on a flawed policy change. These individuals are invested in you and your service offering.

Unlike a generic target audience or demographic, you should choose people whom you know, and who know you. You only need to assemble a few for each major category of products or services. These are spokespeople for your business, your products, your staff, and your company vision. They have the ability to manage your company’s brand.

What do you do with your Advisory Board? For starters, you don’t inundate them with obligations. A quick casual conversation will yield more valuable insight than any online survey. Many sophisticated surveys only provide answers to “your” questions, when in fact they may not be the right questions to start with. Don’t forget that their loyalty is with their peers and internal support groups. Following these types of conversations is more powerful than direct conversations with them. How do you follow these conversations? Provide them with a place to talk with like-minded individuals, or join their online communities. Social media makes meaningful conversations extremely accessible. Unlike eavesdropping, your customers WANT to be heard. They hope that their opinions and insights matter enough to grab the attention of somebody who’s in a position to bring those changes to light.

Action Items

Ask your customers whom they want to interface with in your organization. Involve as many as possible, but organize feedback so that it gets consolidated and acted upon. Set up an online community, or utilize existing social media channels to follow pertinent conversations.

Case Study

If you own an iPhone, you’ll understand this principle more fully. Apple spent more time with their street-smart customers than in researching the competition and employing leading technology minds. The iPhone is not merely an upgrade to smartphone technology. It’s a tool for anticipating the needs of its users, i.e. the number of seconds it pauses before auto-filling a word, or user-defined suggestions from common misspellings, or its programmed “wiggle room” for irregular human-touch commands. Unlike the competition, the technology doesn’t run ahead of hand-eye coordination. iPhone technology is built to be a conversation with its user. This is customer feedback in action.