Rolph Droste is Insights Expert at Beautiful Lives, a “boutique” innovation consulting agency. The firm is using CMNTY’s self-service community platform to collect customer insights online. In this article, Rolph explains how that works.
The Challenge
In the online community space, self-service communities are gaining popularity. Often they are being used to decrease the load on customer service departments. But today we are looking at a different kind of self-service community: the Do-it-Yourself customer insights community platform.
Related Post: Why CMNTY is a Great Alternative To Lithium Community Software
Concept Testing
Ralph Droste
Rolph is often asked by brands to test concepts: “They want to know what consumers think about a certain product name, price or idea before the put it into the market. Depending on the needs of the client we may propose combining in-person and surveys and use them to build off each other. But nowadays we are also deploying online research communities. We had run communities before and have received a lot of emails from participants asking for more. ”
Self-Service Community
The platform Beautiful Lives used before was limited and a bit clunky so they decided to do a trial using CMNTY Platform. “Many other providers don’t offer a full self-service community solution. You need to tell them you want to run a project and they need to set it up for you. Also, any changes you want to make need to be requested. This prevents having a smooth project flow.”
The Solution
Rolph continuous: “We chose to use CMNTY for many reasons. First off, it’s a self-service community platform. Second, we like how that it looks visually, because we think that helps engage members. On top of that, when like that it offers a wide range of interactive modules.”
Google Translate Integration
Beautiful Lives also used the built-in Google Translate functionality. It saves you time running to the translator when you do research in different countries and languages.
The Results
When running a self-service community, it’ important to keep a tight and synchronized schedule with your moderators. This way you can create momentum and move freely from one activity to the other.
Ralph explains: “We often started with an activity and then used that as a jumping-off point to dive into deeper discussions. We analyzed the real-time data we got to give feedback to each moderator so that separate conversations could all go in the same direction at the same time. It might seem like a lot, but with the right technology, which we have with CMNTY, we feel that it’s very easy to be successful!”
Interested in starting a self-service insights community platform? This article is a great starting point.
