How "Community+CXM" makes "1+1>2"!

None can debate the fact that #VOC insights across key touchpoints in a customer journey are critical for the success of any #CustomerExperience Program. However, in an era where digital privacy is an area of concern for most individuals and #GDPR #CCPA Compliance is a regulatory mandate, standard outbound workflows of distributing #surveys have been severely challenged. The global averages for #ResponseRates have been dropping consistently across the industries (and channels)

The only efficient & effective option left to get quality insights for your #VOC #CX programs is then to create a #community of #BrandAdvocates (#Customers who have a psychological contract with your offering, high #BrandAffinity and are opting in to your database/ community for providing #Research insights.). Further, if these very advocates get an option to talk to and share insights with each other then that further fuels the scale up of the community (In a self sustainable manner).

When you manage such a customer community yourself, you can:

• Scale up research – you get a group of respondents ready and willing to participate and provide deeper insights
• Improve response rates?– your community members have opted in so they’re more invested in your research and your organization. You can always further incentivize them with options to interact with each other and to get live & quickest updates on your offering
• Build deeper insights?– by going back to the same group again and again, you can build rich respondent profiles to help target the right people with the right study
• Reduce the cost of research?– you manage it yourself, so there’s no expensive agency fees to worry about

But this isn't all. These customer communities (#InsightCommunity not #ResearchPanel) when clubbed with a #CXM/ #TXM Platform, this combination further helps drive two very distinct and critical areas of transformation:

1:1 Personalization

A?recent study ?by Accenture reveals that 75% of customers are more likely to purchase if offered personalized services based on their individual preferences. Several industries today are shifting to a hyper personalized approach to serving their customers.

#Hyperpersonalization is basically the concept of gathering real-time behavioral #insights of customers to customize products/ services/ experiences mapped to their needs & expectations. For this, brands need to have a deeper understanding of #CustomerJourney #JourneyTouchpoints #CustomerExpectation #Persona #Preference. For example, an ecommerce brand can analyze a customer’s previous interactions with their brand and create a personalized multichannel setup for a seamless online and offline shopping experience.

While an #InsightsCommunity helps an organization

Progressively profile community members to identify key profile attributes (Triggers, motivations, preferences) and create behavioral Personas (Much richer and better than demography/ segmentation based personas)

a CXM Platform further helps

1. Get deeper feedback about preferences from each touchpoint across a customer journey
2. generate Actionable Insights and assign/ track actions for closed loop analysis (For e.g.: If the #VOC insight highlights the gaps in sales team's understanding of the offering & value proposition, a CXM Platform can create a case for sales enablement and assign it to the L&D Team. Once the L&D team confirms that the enablement has been provided, the CXM Platform can then trigger the surveys again to test if the enablement improved the #CustomerExperience)

Between these two platforms then, we have a combined value of

mapping #CustomerPreferences to #CustomerPersona which is foundational to 1:1 Personalization

The benefits of 1:1 Personalization are immense and '#CXM + #InsightsCommunity" combination is a must for success:

Customer Co-Creation/ Innovation

Prahalad & Ramaswamy defined co-creation as “the joint creation of value by the company and the customer; allowing the customer to co-construct the product/ service experience to suit their context.” The concept has been around since 2020 decades and yet has taken over a decade to catch on.?Co-creation is not a customer advisory board on steroids or a clever sales and marketing tactic. It’s about jointly creating value , for all stakeholders involved (Including Customers & Employees).

Most people link Customer Co-creation to sourcing of ideas for product/ service innovation. This is very far from truth. There are many other ways for companies to co-create with customers:

• #ProductInnovation: The most popular example of product innovation co-creation is?LEGO Ideas , where fans submit ideas for new LEGO kits. Another great example is?Muji , a Japanese retailer whose co-created products have included a spectrum of consumer goods, from flavored pretzels to the BodyFit chair.
• #ProductImprovement: DHL asked customers to collaborate with them on ways to?improve DHL’s supply chain ?which resulted in Parcelcopter - a drone delivery service - and an augmented reality app to improve inventory.
• #ProcessImprovement: Inspired by requests from super-elite flyers to improve?AA's loyalty program ?AA began collaborating on process improvements. This resulted in launch of their app - the?AAdvantages awards map ?- to easily show customers geographically where they can fly with their points.?
• #Marketing #Content: Converse encouraged fans to share how they?customized their personal pairs of Chuck Taylor All Stars ?for a chance to be featured on Converse’s social media channels. The “Made by You” campaign celebrated what Converse knew their fans were already doing and in turn, fans felt appreciated and valued.
• #BrandManagement: In 2018, LEGO posed a new challenge to the LEGO Ideas community to?design the trophy for the FIRST LEGO League , an international competition for elementary and middle school students to build LEGO-based robots to help solve issues related to real-world scenarios. This challenge brought multiple LEGO initiatives together: LEGO Ideas, LEGO Education and even LEGO Robotics.

There are enough and more examples to prove the necessity & value of Co-creation exercises. But these and other examples show that Co-creation is very difficult to drive and takes a lot from the organization to make it successful:

• Stakeholders won't participate in co-creation program unless it produces value for them
• Stakeholders being able to interact directly with one another is must for co-creation success
• Effective co-creation needs mutual trust & transparency
• Co-creation needs consolidation of insights and organizing around a single digital platform

Imagine now if you have an Insights Platform that helps you

1. Recruit passionate brand advocates in a digital community where they could interact with the brand and each other
2. Progressively profile members for behavioral persona mapping
3. Engage members with surveys, focus groups, brand communication, incentive programs, etc.
4. Share - as a give back and close loop - insights from the surveys, product roadmap, brand decisions, etc.

and alongside you also have a CXM platform that can

1. consolidate feedback from the insights community and map these to specific touchpoints across the customer journey
2. create actionable insights from the member feedback and create/ track specific cases against related functions to close the loop
3. create research program covering ideation, prototyping, validation & testing & 1st Launch feedback based on the participation of & feedback from Insight Community members
4. Consolidate metrics & performance trends from all the concerned research programs and track ROI

Now you have a "CXM + Insights Community" to drive Co-creation in a structured manner with consolidated governance & reporting.

Consolidation of Insights Community Platform and CXM (TXM) Platform is thus a must for success of any #CustomerExperience Program. The consolidation would give a 10x value advantage over singular #CXM #TXM Implementations and would have a higher acceleration path to #value realization.

-Ashutosh Karandikar

Author is a CX Consultant and helps enterprises accelerate growth (Acquisitions, Retentions, Up/ Cross Sells & Referrals) through interventions around Product/ Service - Market Fit, Go To Market Strategy and Customer Experience Transformation. To get started you can schedule a quick 30min sync up with him by?clicking here ?or send a DM on LinkedIn.