One of the selling points of Insight Communities is that they create a little bubble. A bubble away from the noisy landscape of social media where you can lead the conversation, choose the members and get useful insight. A bubble is still a bubble and not necessarily representative of the wider world. Without data integration it’s difficult to understand how issues which may come up within the community relate to the wider world.
The quickest way to relate Community members to your brand’s definitions on customer lifecycle is by integrating your CRM data. This way you can easily conduct research to people at different stages, incorporate sales intervention for better results and ensure your community is speaking the same language as the rest of your business.
"Brands want comprehensive information about their customer's problems, interests, and priorities from start to finish and integrating your CRM with your community is a great way to do this." Marcus Silversides, Head of Data
Understanding what your customers have been up to is useful in figuring out what they might do next. If you have transactional data such as website visits, email opens, purchase history, loyalty card data etc this is a great asset to add into your community. Close your feedback loop by cross- referencing buying activity with community members. What’s their feedback on recent purchases? What drove them to you versus your competitor? How do they perceive your brand vs what do they buy? Identify the factors which predict or drive changes in customer life cycles and you can unlock more accurate customer value models.
A community can draw in data from your other research projects. Segmentation is a great example of this. If your members can be accurately allotted into segments and if both sets of data can easily mesh, then the segmentation can inform the insight community’s work without being dependent on it. Our clients also combine brand tracking info their communities.
One thing we often talk about when it comes to data is analysis paralysis. The point in which you have so much info you become blind. When it comes to layering up our building blocks of data it’s important that you ensure that these blocks fit together.
All your data should work to a ‘shared language’ that builds up a full picture. When you’ve built up your blocks your Insight Community will make it much easier to access, interrogate and humanise data.
Access is easier as all your customer experience data is in one place. Your community is more than just a repository for data as your team can have direct contact with customers and who can explain, in real words, what the data says. And an Insight Community humanises data by giving vivid contextual and qualitative information alongside powerful analytics.
