Intentional participation in Advantage Report Voice of the Customer is the key to acquiring the most value for your organization. It helps to improve your customer engagement, create more committed partnerships, and foster an environment for sustainable success that propels companies to achieve their objectives.
When you become a sponsor of Advantage Report, your organization has a role to play. We understand that it can be challenging to determine how to optimize your results. Use the following guidelines to help you get the most value from your customer’s feedback, support your investment and maximize the return on your partnership with Advantage.
1. Upfront Planning
Ensure you confirm your participation in the Advantage Report process early. Our team can serve you more effectively if we have sufficient time to work through the necessary planning elements together before inviting your customers to provide feedback on your organization. With this approach, we can align with your requirements and set the process up accordingly.
2. Providing the Context of Your Business
Dedicate time to discussing with your Advantage Engagement Advisor about your organization, objectives, expectations of the process, and the barriers and enablers to successfully integrating key findings and insights from Advantage Report Voice of the Customer. The more you share about your strategy, stakeholders, and their needs, the better Advantage will be able to support your organization and provide you with the right experience.
3. Aligning the Outputs
Review the benchmark set, categories, channels, and other requirements before the program planning period closes. Consult with relevant stakeholders within your organization to ensure that their requirements are accounted for and that your report set-up meets your organization’s needs. Spend time reviewing the proposal with your Engagement Advisor for clarification.
It is critical to the success of your program that your teams complete the account contact list (ACL) that your Engagement Advisor sends to you. If contacts are missing, they will not be invited to provide feedback on your organization, so it is essential to put the right focus on this critical up-front asset. A comprehensive customer database will also give your account team, function heads and senior management assurance, during reporting time, that all your appropriate contacts were invited to provide you with feedback.
4. Planning the Presentation/Sharing the Insights
Connect with your Engagement Advisor to set up a pre-presentation meeting to update them on relevant details about your business and customer landscape. This will provide insight relevant to your customer feedback and help strengthen the narrative and recommendations in your Advantage Report presentation. Ensure that your Engagement Advisor knows the make-up of their audience—who you are planning to invite and what they will expect. Together, align on a reasonable date and time for the meeting, depending on the audience and their expectations. If multiple sessions are requested, the terms should be discussed with your Engagement Advisor in advance, and the presentations should be scheduled to ensure that they are conducted in a timely manner.
5. Aligning Your Team
Send meeting invitations for your Advantage Insights presentation to your teams, along with context and expectations. Remember that you want engagement and a desire to learn, understand and align as a team. Communicating your expectations will make your presentation outcomes more valuable and productive. It is beneficial to send out the program details (the list of accounts included in the feedback, your feedback timing, your benchmark set, and the list of competencies measured) to your teams in advance (your Engagement Advisor can supply you with this information). With this approach, everyone will come to the meeting with the necessary knowledge, allowing more time to discuss the insights.
6. Supporting the Workflow
Designate and communicate responsibilities to key organizational stakeholders as appropriate. For instance, you should have someone appointed to review your results from a national perspective. Functional leads in attendance should understand their feedback and work as a team on cross-functional opportunities. Account leads and teams should be ready to take their reports for a deep dive after the session.
Encourage all key stakeholders to review the 4 Steps to Success to help them understand how to act on your customer feedback. This material contains helpful information, tips, and templates to make the process simple, straightforward, and efficient. You can find the guidebook and more within the Advantage Learning Centre.
Appointing a project champion to manage the process and keep the teams honest on their action plan will have a tremendous payoff. The project champion will oversee the development of a process that ensures your organization acts with intention, your teams stay on track with their efforts, and that you positively impact your customer relationships and the commercial outcomes you attain.
Whether you have a project champion or your stakeholder teams manage their process, the most critical thing is to reflect and act swiftly.
7. Sharing Your Voice with Your Customers
Finally, support your customers by sharing your voice with them and have your business, functional leads and account teams complete the Advantage Report Voice of the Supplier survey. This enables your customers to manage supplier engagement and strengthen their relationship with you, contributing to the mutual environment of sustainable success and growth. Ask your Engagement Advisor how you can help improve your organization’s input; your customers will thank you for it.
You will also have the opportunity to understand how your organization assesses customer relationships alongside the opinion of your peer companies and competitors. You’ll learn if your customer relationships are more robust, weaker, or par. With this insight, you will be able to uncover, alongside the feedback from your customers, where the mutual opportunities reside.
With Advantage Report, we can help you strengthen your customer engagement and relationships through data, insights, and action planning. Contact an Advantage Engagement Advisor to discover more today.
