Smart companies are using many different channels to listen to their customers. They are capturing the voice of the customer through their Customer Advisory Board Programs, user groups (technology companies), customer research and online customer communities. What is an Online Customer Community? An Online Customer Community is a private website where customers and the company can communicate and collaborate. Customers are invited to participate in this community and agree to online community guidelines. Many companies create one big space for sharing across their broader customer base and then design certain private areas for specific customer groups such as customers of a specific product or members of a certain CAB. Online customer communities can contain hundreds or thousands of customers and the size depends on the company's business objectives. Within an Online Customer Community, businesses can proactively engage their customers by: Starting a conversation on the Discussion Forums about an important business issue for customers, Sending out an online survey to a targeted segment of customers within the community (using the "user profiles") to gather specific product feedback and input, Inviting select customers (also using user profiles) to a face- to- face customer advisory meeting, to participate in customer research or to join a special customer program (beta testing program) to capture additional insight. Learn about how Charles Schwab is using their online customer community to capture input and feedback. They leverage this insight to guide their marketing strategies and invest in enhancing their customer experience online and in their retail establishments. Article Charles Schwab Online Customer Community

Learn more about Online Customer Communities- Interview with Sherri Dorfman from the CAB Summit Q. Why are companies creating online customer communities? A. While helping companies devise CAB Programs over the past 7 years, the most common concern that I have heard is about the expense of bringing customers together face- to- face. “We do not have the budget to meet more than once a year but have the need to collaborate with customers much more often as we make our product and marketing investment decisions”. Although these meetings are a very important part of a CAB program, there are other cost effective engagement channels that a company can use to gather insight from their customers throughout the year. Smart companies are supplementing their face –to-face event(s) with tele-conference/web conference and online customer communities. These online customer communities are valuable because they enable a company to extend their reach to customers across the country and world and expand their CAB program beyond a dozen giving them the best of both worlds; qualitative and quantitative insight. When management of Intuit's Turbo Tax Inner Circle community needed to make a quick and an important product design decision, they sent the two design ideas to Inner Circle members and asked "which design do you prefer and why?" The result was overwhelmingly in favor of the Product Manager's design AND fast - literally 1,000 people responded overnight. Within the span of a week, the team had come up with a question, fielded it to customers, and had an answer they could begin coding into the product." Read more