Category — IT Participants

Getting your customers to participate in a customer advisory board isn’t too difficult: customers love to sit on advisory boards.  They appreciate not only the opportunity to be heard and to have a relationship with a key vendor, but also the opportunity to hear what’s happening with their peers and to make important industry connections with your other users. 

However, ongoing advisory board programs do require a level of commitment in order to develop a great group dynamic. Typically we ask for a one-year commitment which includes four quarterly meetings.  My personal favorite is to kick the year off with an in-person customer advisory board meeting and then conduct three online meetings.

The best way to keep customers engaged with such an ongoing advisory board program is to show them that their feedback is actually impacting the company and its products. One way to do that is to start all customer advisory board meetings, except for the first one, with a summary of how the feedback from the previous meeting has impacted the company and its products.

But you can go even further and engage your customers even more. When I ran marketing at Freshwater Software, we had a product-focused advisory board (the “ThinkTank”) that was held bi-annually.  Participants were asked to come prepared with their top three product requests. During the meetings, we spent time reviewing those requests and prioritizing them. 

We used to end the meetings by voting on the top three features the group wanted.  We committed to customers that if they took the time to participate, we would guarantee that at least one of their top three features would get into the product. We were often able to get more than just one of their top features into the product. But the important point is that this kind of commitment drove active and passionate participation in the advisory board meetings.

“Thank you, I really enjoyed our conversation.”  This is the typical way in which customers end a market research call or customer advisory board meeting.

It still amazes me how many people love being involved in market research – especially customers.  They don’t see it as a chore or just another thing on the “to do” list. On the contrary, they love being involved and appreciate the opportunity to air their opinions.  Even when I talk to unhappy customers or to participants who clearly don’t connect to the pain we’re testing, they often end a call with sincere gratitude for being given an opportunity to be heard.

This is particularly important because people are often worried about asking their customers to participate in research.  Your company probably asks a lot of its customers already. They are asked to be sales references, PR references, and beta testers. Many companies are hesitant to add a research project on top of everything else they ask their customers to do.

But companies need to realize that customers LOVE being asked to do market research. Not all of them of course, but the ones that are not interested will say no quickly.  Most customers feel that being involved is empowering. They appreciate the fact that they get to voice their opinions anonymously and that there is no preparation on their side and no action items. In fact, involving customers in market research is a great way to increase customer loyalty.

Another incentive for customers is the participant stipend or honorarium – the money we give participants in appreciation of their time. Cash is always nice of course, but Dimensional Research also gives research participants the opportunity to direct their stipend to a charity of their choice. Just in the past month I’ve learned about several great causes through the choices of our research participants.

Happy New Year! 

I’d like to kick off the year by giving a special shout out to the research participants in 2008 who chose to donate their honorarium to a charity.  Dimensional Research gives all research participants the opportunity to direct their stipend (typically $50-$250, depending on the project) to a charity of their choice.

2008 was a great year for philanthropy among the IT professionals we had the pleasure to work with. From the big charities we all know, to the operations manager who just said “I like dogs, you pick”, here are a few of the organizations that we had the pleasure of learning about through our participants in 2008:

• St. Jude Chidren’s Research Hospital
• American Cancer Society
• Autism Society of America
• Boys & Girls Club of America
• United Way
• American Heart Association
• Capital Area Humane Society
• Camp Smile-a-Mile
• National Resources Defence Council
• Open Voting Consortium
• UNICEF
• Sunnyvale Community Services
• Heifer International
• UK Dogs Trust