How Vitec Turned Their Annual Customer Day into a Product Roadmap Vote

Most companies say they listen to customers. Vitec built a process that made it structurally impossible not to. Nordic software company Vitec used their annual customer meeting to run a transparent, app-facilitated voting process that gave customers direct influence over the features developed in the following year — and delivered on those commitments publicly.

The situation

Vitec is a Nasdaq-listed Nordic software company serving highly specialized industries: real estate and construction, facility management, banking and insurance, energy trading, newspapers, and more. Their business model is built on deep sector expertise and long-term customer relationships — not on winning new logos every quarter.

For a company like Vitec, the annual customer meeting isn't a sales event. It's a relationship event. Customers come not to be pitched to but to share experiences, understand where the product is going, and feel like genuine participants in a company they've built their operations around.

The challenge Vitec faced was a common one in enterprise software: how do you make customer input genuinely influence development decisions, rather than just being collected and filed? And how do you demonstrate to customers that their input actually changed something?

What they needed

Vitec wanted to create a structured process that would:

Surface the feature ideas and improvements customers actually cared most about
Enable customers to prioritize across competing options transparently and simultaneously
Produce a clear, ranked output that could directly inform development planning
Be visible to the whole room — so customers could see each other's priorities, not just management's interpretation of them
Create ongoing dialogue that extended beyond the annual meeting itself

How they used Ventla

The solution was elegantly simple: a three-step process built around the event, using Ventla as the voting and dialogue infrastructure.

Step 1 — Idea generation. Customers were organized into groups by product area. Each group developed a shortlist of five features or improvements they wanted to see. Vitec's internal teams did the same exercise in parallel, generating their own list of five priorities.

Step 2 — In-app voting. All submitted ideas were loaded into Ventla and opened for voting. Every customer voted for their top three, regardless of which group the idea came from. The voting was live and simultaneous — everyone participating at the same time.

Step 3 — Results presentation. The voting results were presented at the meeting: a ranked list of the features customers had collectively prioritized. The list became the starting point for a conversation about development planning for the coming year.

The transparency was deliberate. By showing everyone's priorities simultaneously rather than aggregating them behind closed doors, Vitec made the process feel genuinely democratic rather than consultative in name only.

What happened

The vote opened up conversations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. When customers saw the ranked results, they could react to them — discuss why certain features had ranked highly, explain what problems they were trying to solve, and engage with Vitec's responses about feasibility and timeline. The data became a shared reference point rather than internal intelligence.

Over two years of running this process, Vitec delivered several of the top-priority features from each year's meeting. That follow-through is the part of the story that matters most: customers voted, and things changed. The features that ranked highest appeared in subsequent product releases, with Vitec able to point back to the vote as the origin.

For customer retention in enterprise software, this kind of visible responsiveness is worth more than most other loyalty initiatives. Customers who can point to features they influenced are customers who feel genuine ownership of the product they're using.

What this means for similar organizations

Vitec's approach addresses a problem that many software companies, professional associations, and membership organizations face: how to make annual gatherings substantively useful rather than ceremonial.

The insight is that structured participation — not just open Q&A, but a process with defined steps, transparent results, and follow-through — changes how customers experience their relationship with the organization. They're not just attending. They're contributing.

The technology enables this, but it doesn't create it. What creates it is the commitment to take the output seriously — to let the vote actually change something, not just produce an interesting data point.

If your annual customer event or member conference ends with a list of "themes and insights" that quietly disappear into a planning document, the voting process Vitec runs is worth examining closely.

Industry: Software / Technology · Event type: Annual Customer Conference · Attendees: Hundreds across product groups · Region: Nordics

Running an annual customer or partner event and want to make input genuinely count? Talk to Ventla.