Do you have clients that want to enact change within their business, add services, profit centers, or do away with product or service offerings? How do they determine how their existing customer base will react? Did they make the decisions to make changes by listening to their customers in the first place? MediaPost issued an article called "Deepening The Dialogue" that details how our clients should get in touch with customers on a regular basis to get feedback using Chrysler as an example...
"What we've found," she says, "is that the people closest to a brand can be the most vociferous critics of the company. So it's important going in that brands don't expect sugar-coated comments because that's not what customer collaboration creates. Fortunately the most sophisticated brands understand this and encourage honesty and transparency as the way to yield real insights and value." Brands contemplating a move into customer collaboration, she cautions, need to be prepared to make a major cultural shift in their own behavior.
"Brands attempting to mount a community need to know that consumers who are making a serious commitment of their time can't be given fluff," she adds. "If a brand is serious about obtaining real value, they can't just have a PR spokesperson give a canned response. For customers, the value is in having a real voice in the decision-making process and a chance to speak directly with key members of the brand team."
There are a variety of formats that can work in setting up a collaborative community, Gates explains, from discussion boards where consumers can initiate topics and engage company representation, to "spot" polls on timely issues. Chrysler also uses is a regular monthly "executive session," a live chat with about 30 members, and a very senior-level company executive. For instance, recently Chrysler had a vice-president of design talk about some of the new design features the company was making and considering. It was at one of these sessions that Chrysler first released information about its ENVI electric vehicles, one of the best-kept secrets in the automotive industry.
The payoff, though not perhaps so easily calculated as click-through rates, conversions and other conventional ROI metrics, is in cultivating a dependable set of "other eyes" to reality-check decision-making.
"What brands have told us is that such interaction helps bring the customer voice into the process and allows them to show customers how they are listening, which we like to call 'closing the feedback loop,"' Gates observes. "One client said to me, 'It's amazing how often huge decisions, very risky, momentous ones, have been made on the basis of six people working in isolation.' Brands can very easily get into a bubble, which especially in the economy is very dangerous. One way to burst that bubble is to engage 30 or 40 of your best customers and ask what they think. "
Armed with this information, your clients could create a community online, have a coffee club to discuss topics, host a "go-to-meeting", bring in a focus group to the business after hours, or develop an interactive blog. The point is to take the initiative with their customers to talk.