What's a Service Review Board?

Service review boards have gone out of fashion since the arrival of SaaS (SaaS being a lot less complicated than old-school outsourcing, and a one-to-many rather than a one-to-one solution).  There is still a lot of mileage left for service review boards, but in SaaS contracts, it’s not the buyer, it’s the supplier that should be asking for them.

A service review board, even if virtual, even if short, allows a supplier to find out how the customer is feeling, what’s working for them and what isn’t, the pain points the customer is experiencing (either in relation to the SaaS service or more broadly), what other opportunities may be coming up in the customer’s business, and what’s happening generally in the customer’s life – in and outside of work.

I’ve seen many suppliers lose business because they didn’t understand their customer well enough but I’ve never heard of a supplier that suffered because they understood their customer too well.