Market research online communities or (MROC) can be used in a wide array of intelligence gathering. Incorporating them into your strategic plan can help with many different processes in your company, from HR employee engagement to customer experience management and idea generation for new products. The benefit of an online research community is that you will inevitably conduct more research for less money, and have access to results as they happen. Here are some ways that experience management platforms or MROC's can help you connect to your customer.
Understanding the customer journey and the experience that customer takes in the journey is crucial for gaining new customers and retaining existing customers. An insight community offers tools to collect feedback from usage of your products to the interaction on your social media platforms. Using qualitative discussions or bulletin boards can provide a great way for your customer to share their experience. Group discussions also can gather the best ideas from the group and allow you an outside perspective on troublesome problems that your internal management team might have been unable to find solutions to in the past.
Humans are creatures of habit and MROC's can allow you to explore the different habits or rituals that your customers participate on in a daily basis, and that may not stand out to the customer as unique, when asked about in a traditional focus group. By using diary studies where users can film their natural routines and habits you can better understand where your product is used and how. Allowing you better understanding so that you can tailor it even better for your intended audience.
While using MROC's to gather feedback on products is a great idea, getting feedback before going through production is even better. Concept testing and exploration can allow iterations on design ideas to happen before the product is produced saving time and money, and providing the customer with a better product. At Insightrix we use our community software with clients, to help them come up with new advertising materials, allowing a small group of customers to explain what they feel would be a good advertisement, rather than having companies guess.
At Insightrix Communities we believe that customer engagement should be an on-going process and that it should be tracked through a software that can be trusted. If you would like to find out how our surveys, and discussions can be used to collect the best customer feedback on an ongoing basis please do not hesitate to contact us.
To learn more about what Insightrix Communities have been up to, check us out on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn!