Turning an Insight Community into a strategic asset
An Insight Community becomes a true strategic asset when the customer using it generates continuous understanding, rather than remaining within individual research projects. This means aligning Community research with business priorities, integrating it with relevant customer data and existing knowledge, and helping stakeholders use the evidence in their day-to-day work.
Data-, knowledge- and business-integration each play a role.
Data integration
Your Insight Community is a ripe source of Attitudinal data including customer sentiment, opinions and predicted or claimed behaviour. Traditionally it has been hard to marry attitudinal data with financial data e.g. predicting sales or revenue. Data integration can allow for findings to be more impactful and directly actionable. For instance, you might run a project on your Insight Community which defines a new offering with potential to increase customer value and loyalty. Data integration with your CRM means you can tag exactly which customers in your database are the most likely to buy into this offering and target your marketing communications more efficiently.
Data integration can also make your Community insight more targeted and accurate – by integrating behavioural data such as Transactional, Loyalty or Behavioural data, you can target surveys to customers who’ve used or bought one of your services within the last few days, or been exposed to a piece of advertising, rather than relying on their recall of using or viewing it (as recall is notoriously unreliable).
A Community creates the opportunity to draw in data from other research projects too. A common example of this is appending consumer Segmentation data. If Community Members can be accurately allotted to segments, or if both sets of data can mesh with other data such as CRM data, then the segmentation can inform the Insight Community’s work and vice versa.
Overall, the more data integration, the more an Insight Community becomes deeply linked to the ‘real world’ of customer behaviour and needs, and also to the aims of the business. But integration needs to go beyond technical integration.
Knowledge integration
Knowledge integration turns an Insight Community’s individual research projects into a connected resource the business can draw on over time. Linking Community findings with existing research, segmentations and briefs helps teams build on what they already know and identify where fresh customer input is needed. The strategic value lies in making each project useful beyond its original brief, rather than leaving its findings in a standalone report.
Business integration
The ultimate aim of an Insight Community is to become a resource which makes it easier for the organisation to function, to grow, and to achieve its financial goals.
This won’t happen overnight and it certainly won’t happen automatically. There’s no roadmap to getting there and given the dynamic nature of organisations and their goals, a one-size-fits-all guide would be counterproductive. I’ll outline some of the barriers to success and the foundations that need to be in place for business integration to be achievable.
Get stakeholders involved: To get the most value from your Community you need to train a cross-section of the business in what the insight platform is, how to use it and how to draw data from it. Teaching them a little on how to read that data isn’t a bad idea either!
Cross-pollinate: With different business users all using your Community, it becomes increasingly important to marry together research outputs with business outcomes. Research outputs tend to be reports, summaries and recommendations where business outcomes tend to be decisions and actions. To get from one to the other it’s important to build:
- Collaboration spaces where data can be annotated and discussed.
- Co-creation and workshopping tools to build on data.
- Data visualisation and insight dissemination tools.
All of these are designed to increase the active role key stakeholders and consultants have in interpreting, shaping and sharing the insight. This means better informed decisions, taken more quickly and confidently, which fit clearly within existing strategies and goals and are easier for the wider organisation to understand.
Manage change: Whenever you are changing the way in which your organisation works, you should consider employing some form of change management and the same goes for launching (or re-launching) a Community. You need to have a project owner, sign off and support from your C-level management, a plan and timeline for the change to take place and some reinforcement to make sure it sticks, such as a launch event and ongoing comms into the business and reminders of how to engage. The point of good insight is to make better informed decisions, but without the right tools, training and appetite within the business this can often feel like another hoop to jump through. Your brand will get much more value out of an Insight Community if every part of your organisation can understand the benefits, can easily access and understand the data.
Bring in expert consultancy: Many brands are now integrating consultancy into their managed Communities. This might include:
- Community consultants, such as our Client Services team, can understand the strategic goals and immediate pain points of a brand and give guidance in aspects such as growing your Community or extending its capabilities or organisational reach.
- Insight consultants who specialise in running Community insight, and can advise on the best approaches to use, as well as new and innovative tools or techniques.
- Specialists in Community Intelligence who can advise on your Community’s health, profile your member base, advise on how to grow engagement and proactively feed back member-based insights which strengthen your customer understanding and insight outputs.
- Onboarding and Project Management specialists can ensure a successful launch and can iterate how the Community is used, making operations more efficient.
About the author
Hannah Sealy is Head of Client Partnerships at STRAT7 Researchbods, where she leads client relationships and commercial strategy, connecting clients with continuous insight and customer understanding through insight communities and always-on research strategies.
