COMMUNITY IS FUTURE OF VOC

How communities are changing the innovation game

Feedback drives innovation

Let’s start with the obvious: when your customers experience friction with your brand, they want to tell you about it. That’s incredibly valuable feedback for you — so if you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

Now, the less obvious: the old approach to gathering this feedback — meetings, surveys, focus groups, and feedback sessions — is inefficient and outdated. And while surveys are undoubtedly important, they don’t capture every pain point your customers want to tell you about. There are two main issues with the old approach:

1. The old approach can’t give you context

When you have context, you can focus on the problems that people have, not the problems that your products have. Focus groups and feedback sessions tend not to give you this context, because they too often focus on ways to improve the product or specific design decisions. This takes the solution out of context from the problem, i.e. the situation where the product is being used. Even feedback that gets repeated again and again, when it doesn’t have context, won’t help you drive real innovation.

37% of respondants say they’ve ignored a survey request because they had already given feedback somewhere else.

2. The old approach can’t give you real-time speed

Surveys and other traditional feedback mechanisms don’t capture people’s feedback about pain points while the pain is happening. When we take the time and resources to set up a fabricated situation, we miss out on the realtime frustration that so often drives invention.

If you can capture that spontaneous invention right when it’s happening and give a way for that person to show you exactly what they are going through, you can harness that frustration at scale across every customer and potential customer. That’s when real innovation starts flowing.

So, how can brands capture that power? Brand Owned Communities

The solution is to give people a space to innovate whenever inspiration strikes — and incentivize them to share those insights. The top 25 social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Reddit, Quora, WeChat, YouTube, and more have over 17.5 billion daily active users around the world. People spend billions of hours every day on these sites venting and sharing frustrations with little to no hope of anyone hearing them or doing anything about — and they know it.

The key isn’t to get your customers to stop complaining. Rather, it’s to create a space where they feel they’re being heard to impact change. This is what communities do!

1. Harness the power of frustrated masses

Public social networks, unsurprisingly, gather people to share their common frustrations. When your brand is on the hot seat, it creates a huge wealth of information that you can use to improve customer experience and products, services.

The problem? Brands sometimes can’t participate in — or even find — these conversations on public communities. A brand-owned community harnesses the power of frustrated customers and gives them the power to impact change.

2. Accelerate ideation and innovation with gamification

Once you’ve created a space for people to share ideas, the next step is to maximize creativity and productivity within the community. You can incentivize people with non-monetary rewards, but many brands go a step further, offering contributors early access to new products, executives, discounts, and indirect payments.

Adobe’s crowdsourcing superpowers

Adobe, a leader in this space, uses their community as a major source of ideas. The Experience League connects customers with their peers and gives a place for the customer voice to be heard through ideas and voting.

A new leader board for the community provides another area for members to highlight their achievements and contributions. By encouraging more engagement, any member can make it to the top 10!

Building a winning community

One of the most amazing things about online communities is how quickly they can scale. Unlike in-person or over-thephone brainstorming, which set limits on the number of people who can contribute, asynchronous online groups can include any number of people without worrying about interruptions or time limits.

The bottom line here is that when brands use asynchronous, democratic, incentivized communities to source ideas, they can reduce the costs of innovation while increasing the outputs.