Building an Online Customer Advisory Board: A Credit Union Case Study

um basically I'm going to be talking about you know how to set up a customer Advisory Board I'm going to talk about two key items as it relates to that first we'll look at what it is and some of the benefits of leveraging a customer Advisory Board um for your company some use cases that are out there and what the specific use case was at comedi America Credit Union the second topic I'll really dive into is how to set up a customer Advisory Board uh some of the challenges that you need to be aware of how to plan and prepare for setting up um an online customer Advisory board and the process that we used here right so before we go into like the first topic I did want to talk a little bit about Community America Credit Union um where I've been working the last four and a half years and where we put together this customer Advisory board that we're going to talk about so Community America Credit Union is headquartered in um Kansas City Missouri we have 32 branch locations throughout the Casey metro area um we've also launched in um the St Louis Market recently um as we're looking to expand our footprint we offer every type of financial product that you can think of that you can get from a bank um and then some including things like unique things like insurance and wealth management um services our big mission is to deliver peace of mind to our members and some of the unique ways that we go about doing this is we offer free financial coaching um we have what's called what we call Financial well-being coaches and they meet with our um members to help them learn how to credit um how to how to budget improve their credit and work on other financial goals we also have Community Access centers and what these are are we basically partnered with local community colleges and nonprofits in the area to offer space for community members to go and take work for development courses and finish out their high school education there's also access to free community rooms that have Wi-Fi um that people can um use for basically for like School Gatherings hostings and um other types of events and just a quick intro on me um so my name is anjanna Paul I've worked in banking for the past nine years um I have a product in research background um really enjoyed the industry and being able to use technology and customer feedback to move things forward my role here is a mix of ux CX and it's sprinkled in with some market research so I really feel like I get to dip my toes in a lot of different areas um I'm from the Midwest that's where I've lived most of my life um and although I've always thought I would move I'm still here I think it's a great place to live um and it's relatively affordable compared to other areas of um the US um I do love to travel recently came back from a trip to Japan and um follows my favorite time of the year you can see on the right I've got a picture of me um with Kai who's my um golden doodle and Santa Claus so those are just a couple things about me um let's go into what is a a customer Advisory board so basically a customer Advisory Board is made up of your customers um they could be a group based on a Persona or several personas that you have and that group provides you with regular feedback um it could be specific to a product that you offer um or it could be some other things as well um so some of the different business it depends on your business goals so some of those business goals may be maybe you're looking for something strategic um those are usually made up of high impact customers um that provide input on um different business decisions you may be looking to improve your uh customer satisfaction so you might look at like a cross-section of your customers to get feedback um on their level of satisfaction um find out what their pain points are if you're building um a new product or service or have an existing one that you're looking to improve a customer Advisory board can help you um gather feedback for that or you may just want to start getting unbiased feedback um because you haven't done so before from your customers and Prospects and you want to set up a Advisory Board that's another goal that a um Advisory board can help you accomplish all right so there's a lot of different benefits of leveraging a customer Advisory Board um to solicit feedback for your organization or your products um one thing that they can do is really help guide the product road map and help you prioritize features and capabilities can help you understand consumer Behavior to increase customer loyalty ident identify buying triggers um or find new markets for your product if you're looking to put out a new product they're a great pull of users to use for like a a a beta test on your product um and when you're looking for that product Market fit a customer Advisory board can help you understand the underlying motivations for buying the products that they choose and help you learn about the different problems that they're facing um if you believe that there's some opportunities within your sales process an Advisory board can help you identify what those areas of improvement could be and probably the biggest benefit of having an Advisory Board is you can receive faster and realtime feedback from them okay so let's look at a couple different examples of um customer advisory boards and how they've been used in different um companies so the first example we have is MailChimp chimp which is an email marketing platform they wanted to discover their customers pain points and make use of their customers feedback to help them improve their CX so their Advisory Board is actually made up of 11 um Founders entrepreneurs and Market marketing leaders and they serve on this this board for h a full year then there's Maz which some of you might be familiar with it's a product Discovery platform that's used by researchers to gain uh research insights so the purpose of their uh customer Advisory Board was to is to um validate their ideas before bringing them into Market um MAA has a much bigger Advisory Board it's made up of 90 of their members that fit their target audience and these uh members meet monthly on a 30 minute Zoom call to share their feedback last there's GitHub so GitHub is a cloud-based platform that allows uh software developers to store and manage their code they set up a customer Advisory Board to encourage learning and collaboration through devops Transformations and they have 30 members of their board uh basically consists of Executives or champions of devops within their company and these members meet on a quarterly basis for two hours at a time so last year at comedian America talking more about like use case here is we started working on a new um digital investing project which was really exciting because it was the first digital product that the credit union came out that was built fully inhouse by our developers um developers so our uh research team did a lot of uh market research we looked at the data of our uh members that signed up for competitor products and we actually went out and talked to them to find out their motivations for signing up for those Services uh what they they liked about them what they didn't like so much about them um and we did several rounds of interviews and testing before any development work actually even started but with product and development teams they work in agile Sprints to build new features continuously so we saw that there was going to be a need to do research throughout that product development process um we have we do use a testing platform that gives us access to participants across the US um but there aren't a whole lot of users that are our current um customers within the Kansas City area and we've really found a lot of value of talking to our customers when we initially reached out to them um to interview them and talk about the competitor investing products that they use so we really wanted to M like Leverage that feedback one of the options that we looked at um into doing this was um creating a market research online uh community so these Community platforms allow you to interact with participants um and they complete different tasks activities and discussions it's used a lot in qualitative research but you can use it for Quant as well by increasing the number of participants um that you have on board we really did like uh the community's platforms but we were really hesitant to um dive into it because it was expense it was pretty expensive um it would be our first time using it and we already had an existing platform that we were paying for um as well so it kind of felt like uh doubling our expense there so instead what we thought is hey let's leverage what we have um and how what we know to build a way to gather insights from our members at a small scale and we thought we could do that by um basically setting up a customer Advisory Board so now we'll go into like how we set up um a customer Advisory Board and um some best practices uh so this is actually not the first time that our team has um had experience with customer advisory boards I specifically work in the Innovation lab and years ago we worked with some third-party developers to help us create a tool that we called um the college College Road map basically what this tool was it was a platform that was designed to help parents and uh students help plan and pay for college we set up two different advisory boards for this one was made up of about 10 different um career um High School career counselors who asked us who we asked about um a month before launching the tool um to sit down and use it and then we met met them in a meeting at a branch location um to give us feedback on the tool we also worked with high school students so these students actually um we employed over the summer um to create our board um and then they gave us feedback throughout that product development process of creating this tool but the customer Advisory board that we were looking at to build this for the investing product is was going to be a a lot different um first of all it was the first one that we first time that we were specifically targeting our own um members to join there are other qu there were other challenges and questions we had um we had as well so some of the ones that um we we had questions about or um had challenges were was we're living in a postco world where participants are less inclined to do inperson meetups um and that's the way that our other advisory boards had been set up so we knew we had to go online we were since this is the first time we were doing it there was also some concerns about how if the partici participants were going to be engaged or not um and really give us that feedback that we were looking for we didn't really know the time frame of how long um this project was going to last we we had a tentative idea but we we couldn't really nail down at the time um how long we would be it would be before we launched then we had questions about you know how many participants should we should we start with and what's the right amount to compensate these participants for participating and then there's also the question of who's going to manage the day-to-day um and pay these participants so basically before we jumped into recruitment there was a lot of planning and preparation that we had to do so some of the things that we first did was we identified a team member within our team here that would um be responsible for managing the day-to-day so that would be basically engaging with the um me The Advisory board on a um on a regular basis we had to decide on a platform for where what we would use to bring together this online customer Advisory Board we actually did decide to go with slack um because of um as we reviewed other options that offered um the most of what we were looking for and then determining the group of customers that we wanted to re recruit so we already know the Persona of um the the customers who we wanted to attract for this new investing product um and had their data um that we could reach out to them we also had to draft a communication plan so there was several different Communications that had to go out um as far as like recruiting um as well as canned responses for certain questions and things like that so we made sure that we lined all of that up um and then set up a really good um recruitment process um for getting for for bringing on these new board members then we also did some of the organizational things like creating a tracking system so building like a calendar of the different activities that we knew that would be involved with um the board as well as being able to track um each of the participants who um participated in different activities as well as compensation and then we wanted to keep a a profile of each of the members of our Advisory Board as well um in case we need to refer to it at any time so here's kind of what the process looked like that we followed for our program so this is the recruitment process we basically identified about 25 2,300 of our customers that matched our Persona to recruit via email we sent one email to uh these individuals um with the plan to follow up with a second one if need be however from that first email we actually got um 43 people to sign up to learn more about joining the customer Advisory Board and then out of those 43 we had 22 who actually signed um the NDA agreement and then 19 of them joined our slack Channel and then um throughout the the first we actually had 18 total who participated um throughout um the customer advisory board our testing structure this is kind of how it worked so when we had an opportunity to get feedback on a different design or we had a question um we basically set up we figured out what type of structure work best research method work best and then we communicated it out um to the slack Channel and then we also sent um an email followup to all the the members as well um we used to like capture the results we used user Zoom or alcher which is a survey tool to um capture the feedback depending on what type of um research method we chose and then we tracked the responses using Excel spreadsheets and we paid out participants um within a week of their completion of the uh feedback activity um as far as the results what I would say is from February to August we completed for uh the customer Advisory Board completed 14 different activities um feedback sessions there was 72% average participation and it cost us roughly $5,000 to pay um our participants as well as for the monthly slack Channel um the customer Advisory Board helped us identify roughly 16 usability concerns and helped inform seven uh design decisions we also found that using the customer Advisory Board also evoked um high levels of buyin um for the feedback that they um had um from our business product and uh development teams as well looking back on the experience of setting up and utilizing this customer Advisory Board I think the thing that we learned the most was the two things that we learned the most was um incentives we probably paid out um higher incentives that were necessary um for each of these different um activities we we ranged between1 and $15 where I think I think we could have probably gotten away with paying $5 um for each of these activities and we learned that using that two-channel approach of communication was highly effective so when we um put up an activity in our slack Channel and then sudden an email within I would say an hour of the email we got over 70% of the responses um done the most surprising thing that we found was just the engagement level of our um participants and the level of detail of their feedback um they gave really great feedback and they weren't afraid um to tell us when um certain things didn't look as good as they could have so next year what we're looking to do is actually um use create like a new customer Advisory Board a bigger one um to work on some of our bigger prestigic project strategic projects and some of the things that we need to do to scale would be basically the organization of um the backend thing processes so improving the way we track our participants and the compensation um having some type of tool to help us pay um and keep track of participants and then um because we're looking looking at um scaling this and having more participants um involved we would want to do some type of test to ensure that they would um give us good detailed feedback so just some of the thing the three things that we found um as far as success factors for setting up a effective customer Advisory Board is that you have to have a lead your leadership team fully brought in so I have a luxury of having a manager who's really good at communicating up and getting them to see the Val getting them to see the value the need for our Advisory Board you also have to have one dedicated manager of The Advisory Board um having that point person to check in and communicate with your um Advisory board members also streamlines the process um both internally and for your members so they know who to talk to when there is a question um there was a lot that we didn't know when we set up our customer Advisory board for instance we didn't know how many times um a month that we would have to solicit them for some feedback um but we set up um how you know how we communicate and we try to set up their expectations as much as possible and Define that approach as much as possible to have to have it work as as good um as it could and that's all I have um if you have any questions I can take a couple questions um also be happy to uh connect with you on LinkedIn as well oh I see a question in the chat so I'll read it out um how did you pay the consumers this first year for their participation yeah so it was basically every time we had a one of those feed like feedback sessions um we would pay the participants who uh participated in that feedback session and that that could range from like $5 to up to $15 um we used Amazon gift cards too the the members really seem to like that as well yeah people seem to like gift cards and they seem to like Amazon gift cards a lot is what we learn um it's a little easier than Visa gift cards sometimes um the the E gift cards for Visa can be a little bit tricky especially for small amounts thank you for that question do we have any more questions in the [Music] chat while we're waiting I actually had some questions too so I know that you talked about in-person groups and online groups I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the the pros and cons of having an inperson group versus an online only group yeah I mean I think the biggest thing the pro having an inperson is you get to have all the body language as well um there it's a little bit less Bo um sometimes as well um to have them actually there um the pros and having you know like it you know online is basically people can do people can finish the feedback on their own time type thing so it's a little bit more flexible but sometimes you don't get as much depth as you would like um to get as you could if you they were actually in person with you in real time yeah absolutely and then we also had another question in the chat how did you keep these customers engaged over time yeah um I think we got really lucky with the people that we um recruited on they were pretty well engaged throughout the process um but um our our man the manager of this actually went through and would sometimes post different questions and things like you know our our football team won the Super Bowl last year so during that time you know coming in you know who's your favorite player or like are you guys ready for the game so just kind of like engaging him in that way when there wasn't really um anything um like feedback wise going on and another question here what did you find the right number of contacts per month um to keep engagement I would say if you can do some type like something um at least least I'd say three times a month that should be enough we usually had at least two or three activities available each month um and then in the months that we had um a little less we would go in and you know ask some questions and try to engage them in other ways um we also had some other teams from other groups who had questions um or wanted feedback from our members so we leverage them for that as well on top of leveraging for the investment product perfect I'm waiting for any more questions if we have them all right one more question here when you have a consumer Advisory Board and you contact them for feedback multiple times in your experience did you notice any bias in their feedback if so so how did you deal with that I'm asking this because when they are recruited they might have bias in their feedback um we really didn't notice um any real bias in the feedback that we were getting um from our members they were a little like um it's funny to say but our members are a little bit different because they're very engaged with Community America as a brand as well so I think that really helped helped us as well it's like they really have Good Feeling for our brand and that's what helped them be engaged and if anything they were biased because they love our brand yeah I can put my Linked In on the chat too perfect and then we have another question for you whenever you're ready do you have a group of participants that could serve as backups yes we do so so we kept that list of um people who we initially reached out to um and then we had a bigger list than that so in case we did need to um have you know add more people to it because we did find others who weren't um participating we could replace them with um new ones as well what do you find to be like a good group size or does it just depend on your like project objective yeah it really depends on your project objective um we've our goal was to have it around 15 to 20 participants this time around because this is really a test it was the first time we've done something like this um to see if it works for one and if it's effective like look at that and like if we need to scale which we're doing next year because the project size is a lot bigger and we have more um personas that we need to identify um with those projects so yeah I would say um it just depends how did I find out it's an a little bit of an assumption that I'm making because if we just had really good engagement and good feedback from our members that I don't think that they really needed a bigger carrot um to give us that feedback per se um but definitely we'll as we build this bigger board we'll test some of that those you know those ideals too all right any more questions from anybody okay it looks like looks like the questions have stopped but thank you so much for putting your LinkedIn in there and for this really amazing presentation um we'll just go on a break now until our two o'clock presentation but thank you again so much for sharing this with us thank you awesome it was great thanks everybody