Strengthen your relationships with your customers
Customer Advisory Councils are one of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers and continue to strengthen your relationship with them. Let’s look at how you might incorporate a Customer Advisory Council into your business and use it for a variety of purposes – both to the benefit of you and your customer.
A Customer Advisory Council is a group of your customers from a variety of industries and a variety of sizes of businesses that gather together on a regular basis (maybe 2 – 4 times a year) to discuss a variety of topics. Customer Advisory Councils must be of value to the customers who are participating on the council. Certainly you want to get some benefit from the council – let’s face it you put it together to help your business continue to be successful; but your customers need something out of it also.
Depending on the number of customers you have, select a number to have on the Council at any one time and have a plan in place to rotate customers on and off the Council to keep it fresh. Keep the number large enough to allow for sharing of information and active engaging discussions, but not so large that it is unproductive.
Make sure that customers know what they are contributing to the Council (such as ideas for new products or how to improve current products) and what you are intending to give to them in return. This may include access to products and services at free or discounted rates or access to research reports. Additionally, they have the opportunity to network with each other.
The more you are connected to your customer – through regular conversations and getting feedback – the more successful your customer relationships. Strong customer relationships = customer loyalty to your business. Customer loyalty = customer referrals to other businesses.
One of my customers started a Customer Advisory Council just last year. In just a year’s time period he has gained 3 new customers from referrals by customers who were part of the Advisory Council and has two new services being developed based on his customers’ recommendations.
Start the New Year off by establishing a Customer Advisory Council. How can I help you?
Happy New Year!
Hi Luis,
Glad you found the article on Customer Advisory Councils of value – hopefully it provided you some information for your class! Thanks for reading!
Best regards,
Gina
Hello,
Thank you very much for writing this article. It really was very helpful. I had the opportunity to talk about the Customer Advisory Council in my Management Quality class.