The Power of Building Communities

The growth of online communities for market research has been one of the biggest stories in the Insight industry over the last 25 years. Communities (some call them panels) have been at the forefront of the evolution of market research from a slow, clunky and expensive process into a dynamic industry where consumer insight can be generated in a matter of days and hours. 

The cornerstone of this has been the realisation by many clients, with significant customer databases as to why they would pay an agency to find customers they are already connected to? Well, it has been and continues to be clear to many – from major consumer news brands to utility providers – that building a community of your own customers has significant benefits. Here’s a Starter for 10 for why… 

1. Customers that are already engaged with your brand are willing to give feedback regularly for a small reward as they are invested in helping you grow
2. The speed of market research reduces from months to a few days enabling the customer to be at the heart of decision making on a more regular basis
3. You can ask a few questions at a time rather than cramming as many as you can into a one-off large questionnaire, which lowers response rates and data quality
4. It’s significantly cheaper, so budgets can run much further as you don’t need to pay for recruitment every project
5. With all the above, suddenly customer insight is open to multiple stakeholders in an organisation to enable more accurate decision making – and they start to realise that market research is no longer the preserve of a few and more than some dusty report that remains on a shelf never to see the light of day

Customer communities for market research done right can be rewarding for both the brand and the consumer, helping to form the bridge between the two by creating a successful business on one side and happiness on the other.

Let’s explain… 

Fuelling customer closeness (in a cost-effective way)

Building communities is easy so long as you have the technology And it’s more cost effective than running regular ad-hoc surveys, so a big thumbs up for conserving budgets. 

That’s because we take an ‘always on’ approach which typically sees short surveys run in a few days gaining really precise feedback on business issues. As a rule, these communities typically engage between 5,000 to 10,000 customers, but can be as low as a few hundred and are open to all forms of insight from NPD, UX, UI, path to purchase, service or product usage and understanding ever changing habits. It is this last point that makes communities so valuable for clients with the ability to easily and cheaply keep ahead of changing consumer needs. 

In addition, this gives customers a voice, with insights fed back into vital business decisions across topics such as new ideas and concepts, and optimising products or services, through to delivering a great experience.

And this hits on another very crucial point… The most important aspect of communities is that they fuel customer closeness. That’s because you’re questioning people who know your brand, in real-time. But the feedback on their views and the actions taken are often overlooked – and yet, very crucial. The ‘you said, we did’ is a crucial part of a community’s success and being seen to act on the feedback.

With a major UK news and content brand we saw a 20% increase in engagement amongst its community once we increased the number of interactions and gave regular feedback. With this success under their belt, our client was able to build two more communities with 7,000 members so that internal content teams could speak to their readership and gain insights quicker and more easily. 

When news of the power of community spreads…

What’s really exciting, though, is using a community to help change the culture within an organisation. This is a journey moving from where the customer never features in decision making to one where the organisation becomes truly customer centric. It is a partnership between the client, the Agency and the customer and when news spreads about the power of communities across business functions more and more stakeholders become involved, but it takes time. One major utility we are working with said: “Our community helped us to grow and promote our customers as a real asset in our actionable insight provision to key stakeholders across our business and more importantly, allows us to improve our experience for our customers.”

With more and more teams using it, this starts a cultural shift whereby market research is embedded as a standard practice across an organisation. And there are better data insights fuelling decision-making for the brand. 

While this typically does take a few years to fully take root, achieving this culture shift essentially gives your customers a seat on the board. So, you can sell them what they want and give them what they need. 

Speak to us if you’d like to find out more about the power of building communities.