Want to improve your business? Ask your customers how to go about it, in the form of a Customer Advisory Board (CAB).
Over the past several years, I've worked with several such boards: insurance roundtables, pharmaceutical forums, and not-for-profit boards. By far the most innovative was the recent Incentive Advisory Board, at a meeting sponsored by KSL Resorts and held on Maui. Here are several of the ideas that worked well at this event.
Select the best, brightest, and most candid customersThe primary job of your CAB is to give you critical business information about your performance. You want thoughtful people with something to say and the skills to say it. Don't pad the board with your best friends; get heavy hitters. Also, include entertainment and relaxation, but don't make these activities the focus of the meeting. At the KSL event, we followed a 75:25 ratio of work to play.
Give them innovative preworkGet your CAB working before they get there. Before our KSL meeting, we provided everyone with a "passport to the future," filled with questions for them to think about, like "What short- and-long-range trends keep you up at night?" and "What does KSL do well, and need to improve?"
Create a learning laboratoryStudies show that people listen at about 25-percent efficiency, and therefore miss the bulk of what's sent their way. This is a serious problem for firms using CABs. To improve on this, we had advisory board members talk in small groups of four apiece about what KSL did well and what it could improve. KSL incentive-niche salespeople assigned to these groups could only listen and take notes. In the second half of the session, the incentive sales team sat in a tight circle in the center of the room and discussed what they heard. Board members watched carefully, clarified any misunderstandings, and confirmed that they were heard correctly.
Don't forget "feed forward"Innovative CABs should also help you prepare for the future. At our meeting, we had three mixed teams (advisory board members and incentive salespeople) design the most desirable incentive destination for the year 2010. They selected the best geographical location in the world, outlined the property's characteristics, and talked about what the customer experience should be. Our guiding principle? If you want to predict the future, create it yourself!
Set up a transition team CABs want to see you make changes based on their counsel. This is done best by setting up a high-level transition team of company executives. At our meeting, four of KSL's top leaders announced the following agenda: They would review all the input, set priorities, choose an implementation schedule, and report back to the board quarterly on the progress being made.
There you have it: five steps to make sure your next CAB gets real results. When you add a great venue to this concept, there's really no better way to spend a few days improving your business.
Dr. Tom McDonald, a Ph.D. in psychology, speaks on "People Skills" needed for "Business Results." Reach him in San Diego at (858) 523-0883 or [email protected], or visit www.drtommcdonald.com.