Customer Steering Committee

Hopoatem
Hopoatem Vanilla Sprout
in Talk Community #1

Who partners with your customers and specifically organizes them into a "committee" of sorts to help direct and represent the voice of your larger community?

How do you organize this group?
What responsibilities do you expect from them?
How do you partner to customize the community experience for the community at large?

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Comments

  • Kirstie Macfarlane
    Kirstie Macfarlane HLV Staff
    #2

    Hey @Hopoatem - thanks for your question!

    Here at Vanilla we call this group our Advocates, and we organize everything with this group through our community.

    We have a special gated category for them, which we use to gather feedback and insights, host events and connect them with our product team.

    We offer these advocates first access to beta test new features, exclusive access to the product team to share their opinions and feedback, as well as sessions with our leadership team.

    In return our Advocates provide us with valuable feedback on new features, participate actively in our community to help other members, and contribute a Customer Showcase post with invaluable insights into their community experience and how they've made it successful.

    I hope this helps!

  • Kirstie Macfarlane
    Kirstie Macfarlane HLV Staff
    #3

    @jlefebre @ingrid_yost I know Acer does a great job of this, could you share some of your wisdom?

  • jlefebre
    jlefebre Vanilla Flower
    #4
    https://success.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/9373#Comment_9373

    Similar to the Advocate program here, we have a private forum for our super users where they can directly ask us questions, make suggestions on the design of the forums/widgets, and share their ideas on products or services. They also have access to some internal product-specific documentation they can use to assist other users.

    1 - How do you organize this group?

    2 - What responsibilities do you expect from them?

    3 - How do you partner to customize the community experience for the community at large?

    1. Ours is a group of our super users, members that have shown interest in our products and in helping others with their questions or offering solutions with how-tos or suggestions. Most of them enjoy learning from the questions other users ask.
    2. In our case it's very minimal, as we don't want it to ever feel like a job for them. Some of our super users give product/forum feedback, others are happy only answering questions.
    3. The super users have access to detailed product information they can use to answer user-specific questions (e.g., with the detailed documentation they can answer questions about alternate compatible parts, and even parts that should be compatible given the product specs but we didn't test).

  • Hopoatem
    Hopoatem Vanilla Sprout
    #5

    Love this, @jlefebre! Thanks for the insight.
    1. We hand selected our members to represent the customer segmentation of how they use our product.
    2. We expect them to "go-to-bat" for our organization as they expect from us that we don't "big brother" their comments (i.e. delete anything that seems/feels incriminating)
    3. We prompt them to respond to most of our inquiries first and the field the sentiment from other users - in turn we invite them to our yearly summit.

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