How Advisory Boards Can Help You Prepare for Difficult Customer Conversations
By Jennifer Arnold
Difficult customer conversations. We’ve all had them, we all dread them. The good news is that there is something to help you go in better prepared:
“Advisory Boards”
Whether it be an issue such as service changes, restructuring, supply chain impacts or key executive departures, or a full-blown crisis, Customer and Partner Advisory Boards can help you anticipate how customers and partners may react, understand their needs and expectations, test messaging, choose communication channels, mitigate risks, and even support you in discussions with other stakeholders.
A Partner Advisory Board can better prepare you to engage in discussions with partners about issues that may affect your channel, and help your partners communicate with their customers. This is especially critical because you and your partners need to be using consistent messaging and ensure you coordinate the timing of communication to customers and other stakeholders.
By having a diverse set of viewpoints on your Boards – diversity in the sense of experiences and approaches to strategic thinking and planning as well as gender, age, race, etc. – you will gain broader perspectives into how you may best address an issue.
Your customers and partners may also be able to help you identify risks you may not even have considered yet given they may have a broader view of the market and what your competitors are doing.
Ideally, you involve your Advisory Boards at all key stages:
- Make them part of your risk and crisis management planning
- Review your risk register and response plans with them regularly
- Have a plan for convening and acting quickly in the face of a specific issue, and
- Use their support in your recovery.
Advisory Boards may not be able to prevent you from needing to have those difficult conversations, but they certainly can help you make those conversations clearer and more effective for all involved.
If you’d like to discuss setting up an advisory board, or doing a ‘tune up’ on your existing programs to get better outcomes, reach out for a chat.
