Why Prepared formed a Customer Advisory Board

Note: this article first appeared in our bi-weekly LinkedIn Newsletter, Evolving Emergencies. Click here to subscribe and follow us on LinkedIn.

Yesterday, Prepared announced the formation of a Customer Advisory Board to help drive the company's innovation and product roadmap.

Josh Keeler sat down with Prepared's Head of GTM, and lead of the C.A.B., Madeline Mariuzza, to discuss why Prepared formed the C.A.B., what we hope to achieve, and more.

Josh: Let's get right to it - why did Prepared form a Customer Advisory Board?

Madeline: As Prepared’s Head of Go-to-Market, I oversee the Sales and Customer Success teams and am constantly looking for ways to improve the customer experience. I ask myself, "How can we ensure that the customer feels heard, served, and engaged from the moment they hear about Prepared all the way through our partnership?"

In order to answer that question well, you need to know who your customers are, what challenges they’re facing, and what they need. That is why we formed a Customer Advisory Board.

What do you expect to be the most valuable contribution of the C.A.B.?

Companies often rely on their customer facing employees to collect and filter feedback to the product and leadership teams. While it is important and helpful to receive feedback this way, there is no substitute for hearing directly from your customers.

Unfiltered, detailed feedback is invaluable. It allows the leadership team to ask new questions, uncover key pain points, and ensure the products we build solve real problems.

Beyond product feedback, what do you expect to learn from the C.A.B.?

You can have the best product on the market but if you don’t meet the customer where they are from an education, training, and enablement perspective, you won’t get far.

Our C.A.B. allows us to hear from the customer not just what they want us to build, but how they need to be served. Through ongoing conversations with our customers we are able to understand the context in which we exist and create communication and education channels that truly work for them. We are looking for much more than just product feedback.

How do you envision the C.A.B. growing Prepared's relationship with its customers?

One of our company values is Lifelong Community. Through our C.A.B., we are furthering our efforts to be the most customer-centric company in public safety; we're building a lifelong community made up of customers and employees dedicated to improving emergency response. We're getting to know our customers on a deeper level and connecting them to each other to create a space for meaningful relationships and innovation.

Ultimately, we formed a Customer Advisory Board because we know that, if you let them, customers will tell you exactly what they need. We are incredibly grateful to our Customer Advisory Board members for sharing their valuable insights and time. We look forward to all the exciting advancements in public safety this partnership is sure to generate.

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Thank you for reading Evolving Emergencies! To learn more about the Customer Advisory Board, read yesterday's announcement or reach out to our team.