Forum platform for Customer Advisory Board?
February 5, 2020 12:24 PM   Subscribe

I've been tasked with setting up a virtual Customer Advisory Board, and it's been surprisingly difficult to find a platform that meets our criteria. The board will consist of around 20 people; they need to be able to respond to question prompts in a way that allows them to see and interact with each other's responses. The solutions I'm finding are usually way too robust and expensive for our needs (e.g. zendesk, hivebrite). More details below.

I am a consultant who has been hired to set up and facilitate a virtual Customer Advisory Board for a client. The primary purpose will be to collect feedback about potential new products, services, marketing/messaging collateral, etc. We want it to be interactive, where a question/prompt gets posted and participants are notified and able to respond to the question and to each other. I'll be responsible for collecting and synthesizing their responses. I've been looking at community management software but these solutions seemed geared toward customer service and public-facing platforms.

If I could find something that does all of the following for less than $5,000 a year, I would be a happy camper:

1. It needs to be brand-able, or at the very least, look and feel professional enough for a national consumer brand.

2. It needs to be secure. I'm not a tech-y person AT ALL so it's hard for me to know how to assess this aspect. Users will need to be able to log in to access the forum.

3. It needs to be easy to use/navigate.

4. I would like to be able to interact with the board through the platform (e.g. I could send a message and it would send everyone on the board an email). It would be great if there was some way to set up notifications for when a new question/prompt gets posted or to send reminders to users who haven't responded.

5. I need to be able to post images and possibly videos along with text.

6. (Not a must-have but...) Some back-end functionality would be great too; e.g. the ability to export or sort responses.

Also would love if there's a term I could use to search for what I'm looking for! I've been using "community management software" but there's so much to sort through and it's been mostly wayyyy more than what we need.

Thanks, y'all!
posted by a.steele to Technology (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I think online focus group sites will do this for you. Try QualBoard. I was really happy with the platform when I used it for project similar to yours.
posted by pear at 5:50 PM on February 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


I have no personal experience with Guild (which is a fairly new solution I think), but it seems like a good fit for your use-case.

I'm on a customer advisory board for a large global software brand btw - and they use a private LinkedIn group for this purpose (they're not wildly happy with it, but it works - sort of).
posted by bifter at 5:21 AM on February 6, 2020 [1 favorite]


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