How our customer advisory board is helping our business

My role at Knak has recently changed. I am now focusing on customer relations and I have a new title: Co-founder and Chief Evangelist.

It was in my new role that I chaired the most recent meeting of Knak’s customer advisory board, which was held in tandem with the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas in March.

Last year, when we created the board and went through the process of organizing the first meeting, Knak Co-founder & CEO Pierce Ujjainwalla explained why we had created the CAB and what we learned from that first meeting.

In this post, I want to follow up by showing how, one year after its creation, the board is helping us be better at what we do.

1. It’s making sure we hear our customers

Our customers are marketers.

Having been a marketer myself for most of my career, I understand what our customers do. I have been in their shoes, and they know I can be a strategic partner for both customers and prospects. I also have a lot of history with the people who helped us build our business, and I have built a good relationship with them.

That’s why my new role makes sense.

But we don’t want customer relations to be ad hoc.

The customer advisory board formalizes our commitment to understanding our customers and getting into their heads about their needs, questions and concerns. It provides a structure for doing that, by creating a forum for their comments to be heard.

To help the process along, I spent time before this year’s meeting talking with and interviewing every customer representative on our CAB, so that I could be sure we had a full list of the issues they wanted to raise and the time to address them.

There is something very powerful about having a selection of customers together in one room, discussing and strategizing together.

You are able to get more deeply into their heads than if you just rely on the regular interactions or asking them what they need, or if you have a quick conversation at a dinner or in the hallway at a conference.

At our CAB, people came together for the express purpose of discussing Knak and their use of it. We were able to bounce around big ideas, and get into discussions on big, chunky topics like artificial intelligence.

Knak's Customer Advisory Board Members & Leadership

At the CAB we weren’t just saying ‘What do you need?’ We were able to get our customers to interact with each other, and riff off each other as they explored new concepts and big ideas.

Knak’s entire leadership team took part in that CAB meeting, but we made sure the team spent more time listening than talking.

Having the leadership team give the customers their undivided attention is a very powerful demonstration of our desire to hear what our customers have to say.

2. It’s forcing us to be clear about what we’re doing, and why

We spent time at the start of the meeting explaining Knak’s history and vision.

But when you’re doing that kind of exercise in front of customers – people who know your product and can ask you pointed questions – it forces you to explain your vision clearly.

It also forces you to consider what the various elements of your vision mean for the customers you are addressing.

The pre-meeting interviews I did helped the Knak leadership team focus on customer concerns and develop clear responses to the issues raised.

We ended the day with a clear roadmap on issues to be addressed.

3. It’s fostering engagement with our customers

A customer who knows their ideas are heard is a more engaged customer.

But in order for a customer to take an active part in a forum like the customer advisory board, in order for them to feel comfortable stating their concerns and be sure they will be addressed, you have to have a good relationship with them.

I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know the CAB members before the meeting – if you haven’t broken bread with them on some other occasion, if you haven’t visited them multiple times, if you aren’t warmly greeting them as they walk into the room – they won’t be as receptive or as engaged.

To create the right circumstances for engagement, we made sure everyone on the CAB knew everyone else by organizing a social outing at the Las Vegas Strip High Roller Observation Wheel the night before the meeting.

That meant that when people arrived at the meeting, they got right down to business, with no time wasted on introductions.

And because I had done the pre-interviews, I was able to focus on customer concerns – again making people feel they were being heard.

All of that builds engagement.

4. It’s making Knak more customer-centric

At Knak, we have always prided ourselves on being customer-centric.

In fact, we like to think that a customer-centred approach is in our DNA, since our very first product was built in partnership with a customer. Over the years, listening to our customers has helped us grow.

But sitting in a room with a selection of customers, and sharing meals and social outings and time with them, can really intensify the process.

It’s not like a phone call. You can’t ignore someone who is sitting right in front of you telling you something about your product.

Being face-to-face creates accountability; it also creates dialogue, where you hear them and they hear you. Knak needs to know what its customers want. And if a customer makes a request that can’t be addressed, when you’re meeting in person you can immediately tell them why.

5. It’s helping our customers by letting them network with each other

Having a customer advisory board also allows us to give back to our customers by letting them foster relationships with one another.

Some of our customers (Meta, for example) are quite big. I know that if I were a smaller player invited to a CAB meeting like our own, I would want to get to know those enterprise companies. So we make sure we give people a chance to connect.

If that sometimes means spending time discussing topics that are of no interest to Knak, so be it!

Every one of our customers is important to us; they help us grow. So we figure we owe them something; that’s why we want the CAB meetings to be fun and to give them something that will be good for them independently of Knak.

Snapshots throughout the day - It's not all sitting in a boardroom!

Besides, if they get their voices out into the industry, it benefits them, which benefits us.

6. It’s building relationships

Let’s face it, a lot of doing business is about building and maintaining relationships.

Relationships aren’t about your product. They aren’t about software. They aren’t about your industry. Relationships are about people – how you connect with each other, and the experiences you share.

Relationships have value, but they are also just plain fun – just because we all enjoy human interaction.

I left our CAB meeting on a high, feeling we had succeeded in creating allies for Knak – and established some new human bonds in the process.

That’s relationship-building at its best.