CAPSTONE
CUSTOMER ADVISORY BOARDS
As a Sr. CSM, I had began the Experimentation Customer Advisory Board (CAB) as a project to get into management. The board was very successful, and my company asked me to do it full time. During my tenure, I expanded 2 North American CABs to 9 Global CABs. I standardized our CABs and brought them up to White Glove service & the stars.
Building a Program from Scratch.
Process Design
I created all of the processes for the Customer Advisory Boards myself, later approved by executive leadership. This included documentation of all processes, design, implementation, and feedback. The edits made to these processes were almost always additive - providing more context for process rather than having to change sections. This is because I considered each process from a strategic and tactical standpoint and attempted to preempt any issues.
Feedback Processing
As a new practice established by the creation of my role, there was a continual drive towards improvement. Meetings were held quarterly, which made for few windows to trial new practices. Nonetheless, I established a feedback process not only from our members but from our internal teams as well. Integrated into our recap and reporting session was a request from me to provide any feedback. I acted quickly and effectively on the feedback I was given, which established strong trust between myself, my coworkers, and the members.
Event Planning
I established and monitored all of the planning and review timelines for events while standardizing meeting dates. I also was in charge of organizing our in person events twice a year. This meant coordinating with venues, organizing hotel blocks, planning catering, arranging for technical setups, ensuring materials like name tags and printouts were available and pleasantly designed, providing resources and support for internal teams meeting with the boards, and hosting the event itself.
KPI & Goal Setting
Shortly after I was placed in this position, I was left without a manager, which means most of the time my work was self-motivated. This included establishing my own KPIs and goals for the program and publishing them to my intranet site so that others could understand and hold me accountable. Unlike my work, much of my results relied on others to do things, so I managed this project closely.
Member & Manager Onboarding
Each Customer Advisory Board (CAB) had its own internal team made up of the product owners, marketers, and a representative from Customer Success. I onboarded them with trainings, infographics, and documentation that I had created. This included practices on choosing members during CAB interviews, email templates for accepting or denying membership, timing for the planning cycles, and more.
Our members also had to be filled in on expectations and participation, so I created an onboarding presentation and document for them to easily be able to scan and understand. I trained them in to make sure any questions were answered.
Advocacy Management
Because I had established that our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) members had to do advocacy to maintain their membership, I also had to work with multiple departments to track down and create sufficient opportunities for that to be possible. This meant regular checkins and reinforcement of the messaging cross-company.
Internal Training
Since I was a team of one working an important mission, I also was in charge of educating teams about what the Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) could do for them and vice versa. I designed multiple varied trainings depending on department and involvement; for example, marketing’s training looked different from sales’ training, because their outcomes were distinct.
Member Requirements & Tracking
I expanded our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) functionality by establishing requirements for members. Each member had a two year term where they had to meet certain minimum requirements, and then they graduated to Legacy, where they could attend as they wanted with no requirements. Each board member was required to attend at least 3 meetings per year out of 4. They were also asked to complete 2 “advocacy asks” each year - this could be speaking at conferences, signing up for beta tests, doing a case study, providing a reference, or for our more private customers, work 1:1 with our engineers on projects. This lead to an explosion of advocacy, since we had 9 CABs with 10-12 members each, resulting in ~90 members doing roughly 180 advocacy actions per year worldwide. Each member was tracked in a live sheet with their attendance and advocacy.
Intranet Management
All of this information needed to live somewhere, so I deigned, maintained, and regularly added improvements to the intranet page for the Customer Advisory Boards. From that page nearly any resource could be found, with the exception of any private information.