A global cloud computing business wanted a more creative, collaborative approach to its customer forums. The brief was to design and facilitate ideation sessions that moved customers beyond product updates into strategic conversations about their mid- to long-term ambitions, problems, and opportunities, surfacing insights that could inform future products and services.
Our client wished to bring a more creative, collaborative approach to some of their customer forums and meetings.These events enable valued customers to gain product updates and build relationships with executives, and provide valuable insights into customer needs and pain points.
There was a desire to push for more strategic insight from customers, to reveal their mid- to long-term ambitions, problems and opportunities that may inform the development of future products and services. Gaining this insight could be achieved through collaborative, workshop-style ideation sessions that help customers stretch their thinking and uncover useful observations.
We asked all the customers to gather at the front of the room, and to position themselves along an imaginary line according to different feelings, opinions and viewpoints, including:
For each question we asked the group to comment on where they were standing and why. This activity served as a useful icebreaker by getting everyone standing up and slightly out of their comfort zone. It presented a novel way of looking at the variety of situations and outlooks experienced by customers.
The next session invited participants to come together and share their key challenges and ideas, and also to network together. Small groups discussed:
Participants were then invited to come forward and pick a topic, and were invited to lead a discussion with others who were interested in the same topic.
Allowing customers to spend time talking about their key challenges together enabled them to share experiences and compare these against those of their peers. They were also able to think strategically about their business and its future goals.
A final session aimed to dig deeper, by asking participants to identify any knowledge gaps, or answers they would like to have to important questions. What were they still curious about?
The events delivered a good outcome for both our client and their customers.
Customers were able to:
The client was able to:
The most useful thing a facilitator can do at a corporate customer forum is move the conversation off the product roadmap and onto the customer's own strategic outlook. The product update is what the host wants to deliver. The strategic conversation is what the customer actually values. Designing the forum so the strategic work happens first, with the product material framed as a response to it, flips the dynamic from transactional to collaborative.
Walk the Line as an opening exercise works particularly well in a customer forum context because it gets people physically out of their seats and visibly into a position before they have committed verbally. That visible commitment lowers the cost of speaking up next, which is the whole point.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
