Building a Customer Advocacy Council

Just as organizations have long relied on customer advisory boards or user groups to secure input from trusted customers, they can deploy an internal customer advocacy council to steer the direction of their customer advocacy efforts (see Customer Advisory Boards: Charting Their Course and User Groups: Best Practices For Gathering Customer Insight). A customer advocacy council can ensure that the contributions of advocacy functions are visible throughout the organization. Customer advocacy councils should be staffed by representatives from a wide range of customer-facing functions. In this report, we outline how to establish and maintain an internal customer advocacy council.