Customer Roundtables at Your User Conference: How to Run Them and What You Learn

At a user conference, the keynote tells customers where the product is going. The breakouts teach them features. But some of the most valuable conversations happen when customers talk to each other: trading workarounds, comparing setups and saying what they really think.

Customer roundtables give those conversations a shape, and give your team a way to learn from them. Here is how to run them.

What a customer roundtable is

A small table of 8 to 10 customers, a topic they chose, a trained leader and 30 to 40 minutes. Customers do the talking. At the end, each person shares a takeaway and one next step, and those are captured for your team.

It is not a focus group and it is not a sales session. Customers come because they want to learn from peers. Your team learns by listening and by reading what customers chose to share.

Why they work at user conferences

• Customers want to meet each other. Many have never met another customer who uses the product the way they do.
• Peers are more credible than vendors. A tip from another customer often lands harder than a feature demo.
• Your team hears views in customers' own words. Not survey answers, but what customers chose to share after talking with each other.
• Customers leave with ideas to try. Specific workarounds and setups they can use the next week.

Picking topics

Run a short topic poll with registered attendees. Good customer roundtable topics are about the customer's work, not your roadmap:

• Getting your team to actually use the tool
• Workflows that save the most time
• What you wish you had set up on day one
• Reporting your leadership actually reads
• Connecting it with the rest of your stack
• Running it with a small team
• Training new users quickly
• Cleaning up messy data

Fold the topics nobody picks. Give the popular ones a second table. More ideas: 75 roundtable discussion topics for conferences.

Choosing table leaders

Good leaders for customer roundtables include:

• Power users and customer advocates, who know the product and the work.
• Customer success managers, who know the common problems.
• Product managers, as long as they listen far more than they talk.

Whoever leads, train them. Two short trainings before the event and a 15 minute refresher onsite make a real difference. The leader's job is to get customers talking to each other, not to answer every question. See how to moderate a roundtable discussion.

Rules that keep it honest

• No selling at the table. Account managers can sit in, but not pitch upgrades.
• Leaders do not defend the product. If a customer is frustrated, the leader asks the table how they handle it.
• Share ideas, not names. Stories stay at the table, and takeaways customers choose to share go into an unnamed summary.

Full list: roundtable ground rules.

What to capture

At the end of each round, every customer scans a QR code on the table and shares:

1. Their main takeaway from the table
2. One thing they will do next

That is enough to build a useful picture by topic, from the customers who took part. If you record, be careful about how. Tables are recorded only with clear notice and consent, every round has a table that is not recorded, and anyone can ask to pause.

What you learn

About 10 days after the event, the takeaways become a report organized by topic: the themes, how often they came up, and unnamed quotes. No group smaller than five is shown on its own.

Teams use it in different ways:

• Product: which workflows customers struggle with, and what workarounds they have built.
• Customer success: which topics to turn into training, office hours or help articles.
• Marketing: the language customers use to describe the value, in their own words.
• Events: which topics to bring back next year.

It is your event and your customers, so the report is yours. See how we structure it in how to capture roundtable takeaways and write the report.

A sample customer roundtable block

• Welcome and how it works, 5 minutes
• Round one, 35 minutes
• Switch tables, 5 minutes
• Round two, 35 minutes
• Close, with a few standout takeaways shared with the room, 10 minutes

Want professionals to run your customer roundtables?

Round Table People handles the topic poll, leader training, table scripts, signage and capture, then hands you a report of themes from the takeaways your customers share. See what corporate hosts get, read about customer roundtables for software user conferences, or book a conversation.