A desire to drive customer-led change
The client is a leading insurance company serving customers worldwide. With a customer-centred growth strategy, they are committed to ensuring that the voice of their customers is reflected across product and service innovation.
Their previous Insight Community was established to drive customer closeness and rapid insight, but member numbers and engagement were dropping, which was impacting projects. Stakeholder engagement with the Community was also dipping.
A refreshed, renewed approach was needed; the client was looking to transition the Community to a new partner who could re-energise member and stakeholder relationships and chose to partner with STRAT7 Researchbods to make this happen.
Transforming a stalled Community into a thriving asset
The potential challenges involved with migration meant we had to work closely with our client while taking the heavy lifting from them. They are a small, agile team within a global business who don’t have the bandwidth to take time out of their regular roles to plan a Community transition.
Existing Insight Community members were largely disengaged and a clear strategy was needed to communicate the benefits of joining the new Community, bring them across and provide a positive and engaging experience, starting with their first time logging on.
As well as bringing existing members over to the new Community, new members needed to be found and recruited, to balance the Community and ensure it was truly representative of customers across their varied portfolio and markets. Recruitment presented its own challenges, with siloed CRM systems across different markets making customer data disjointed and difficult to access, and an email invite campaign tricky to co-ordinate by the client’s centralised insight team.
Driving collaboration with customers was a key objective for the Community. The client had a large group of stakeholders, spread across the globe, with different time-zones, languages and focuses for each – which presented challenges in engaging them with the Community.
Rebuilding Community engagement through expert onboarding
- Experts in transitioning
Transitioning a Community requires technical expertise, careful project management and stakeholder alignment. We brought experience from 100s of builds and transitions, meaning we anticipated challenges and maintained momentum. Our specialist Onboarding team managed the entire transition with detailed planning, clear milestones and communication touchpoints. This end-to-end coordination kept the client focused on priorities while we prevented delays. Time-intensive tasks were identified early and expedited to avoid overruns.
- Building relationships
Stakeholder engagement was central to success. Onboarding sessions aligned teams on objectives, surfaced local needs and built excitement ahead of relaunch, ensuring stakeholders were ready with insight questions from day one. We also managed all recruitment activity, working with local marketing teams to combine customer lists, cleanse data and coordinate email invitations across markets.
- Positive initial experiences and a buzz around re-launch
Pre-launch activity created anticipation, and research requests were developing ahead of go live. When members first logged in, they found plenty to get involved in – setting the tone for ongoing engagement. Our good practice guide on writing impactful invites has ensured that every invite is optimised to attract attention.
Delivering stronger insight and renewed stakeholder buy-in
The Community was relaunched to great success, exactly on schedule. The recruitment drive means the member profile is now representative of the whole customer base, and engagement is at an all-time high. We’ve ensured that interest and engagement is balanced with research needs; members tell us they love the Community environment and engagement tasks which talk to their wider lifestyle and family life as well as their insurance needs.
Internal launch events created a sense of occasion around the relaunch and the value of the Community has been re-established. A diverse set of stakeholders are now asking to tap into the Community and we’ve seen a rise not only in research briefs, but in direct engagement with customers through co-creation activities and customer closeness sessions. This has resulted in stronger insights out of the Community, more business-focused recommendations and stakeholders that are already bought into change and feel they know their customers inside out.
More members and more engaged members mean faster turnaround on research projects which makes for happy stakeholders too.
The success of the Community has driven increased demand: more members to support a growing volume of research, greater variety in projects and expanded engagement across internal teams, all delivering even more valuable insight to inform business decisions. We’re now exploring new recruitment channels and ways to incorporate non-customer voices to support the client’s ambitious growth plans.
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