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."
Q. How can online customer
communities be used to extend a company's current CAB program?
A. Typically companies have a dozen members for each CAB program. With this small audience, they can meet face-to-face
or connect via conference call to intimately understand customer needs and explore new ideas. The company can then bring their
insight and ideas to their online community to further define and validate the offerings, marketing strategies and tactics
with this large customer audience. Companies can also take new ideas that surface in the online discussion boards and forums
into the CAB meetings to probe, understand and evaluate suggestions. And ideas of interest can be further refined before they
are brought back to the online customer community in the form of a survey or discussion initiated by the online community
moderator.
Smart companies devise a CAB Program Plan,
which outlines and synchronizes both their online and offline customer engagement activities. Oracle truly
believes in the importance of integrating their online and physical advisory programs, bringing information back and forth
between the two voice of the customer channels.
Q. Beyond the typical features in online communities such as discussion
boards/forums and online surveys, which feature do you feel brings the most benefit to the company and customers?
A. As a database marketer, I would have to say the
extended profiling and targeting communication capabilities. Imagine that you are the VP of Product Development interested
in speaking with customers who have experience with select products and have indicated their plans for investing in a new
product category. You can search the user profiles to find customers meeting these product usage and interest requirements
and send out a targeted communication to invite them to participate in a private online discussion area with their peers.
This can be a new customer community group that you create on a temporary basis (i.e. during your product development stage)
or on an ongoing basis if there is value for these customers to stay connected and share information and experiences.
Customers can also initiate a search using these extended user profiles to connect
with peers in the community who have experience with specific products. programs and projects that they are trying to figure
out. After your customers define their peers of interest, they can send out a targeted communication to begin the conversation
to gather needed information.
Sunguard Bancware's
online community, for example, has found that the ability to create ad hoc groups -- sometimes as private forums
- to address specific, timely issues can be very helpful.
Q. What do you believe is the biggest missed opportunity with online customer communities?
A. When I speak with companies about their online customer
community, they often talk about the value that their customers gain from participating in their community. "Customers
share and get knowledge and build relationships (i.e. network) with their peers". Then I ask about the value that their
company is gaining by offering this online community. Their response is "we conduct several online surveys/polls to get
feedback from our customers". Many companies do not realize the tremendous insight that they can gather by tapping into
their customer's online conversations on the discussion boards and forums. There are several reasons why companies do
not do this. They may not have the internal resources or time to manually review, interpret and distribute this valuable insight.
Some companies hire a resource outside of the company to manually review, evaluate customer comments and highlight opportunities
in an online community summary report for management. There is at least one online community tool with analytic capabilities
to comb through these customer conversations, focus in on emerging and important themes and alert members of the marketing
team about the opportunity.
