Posts Tagged ‘forrester’

Congratulations to Experian, Progressive and Vanguard for winning Forrester's inaugural Voice of the Customer Awards in NY yesterday. It's great to see that organisations that gather feedback and turn it into actionable insight to generate ROI are being recognised. It's a major task to gather feedback from the customer masses, and then collating and reporting on it at such a scale.

This new form of marketing is largely supported by some traditional skills combined with great new technologies including:

• Cloud Computing and the rise of the Software-as-a-Service business model
• Increased access to faster broadband
• Maturing social networking behaviours and social media tools
• API's that allow you to integrate mutliple systems such as CRM

All three companies awarded a prize emonstrated hat the voice of the customer was too valuable to ignore, and that by listening to and valuing individuals, the resultant insight and opportunities could propel the business through increased sales, greater advocacy and generally being regarded highly as a business that listens and acts upon what their customers are telling them.

At Dub we provide the tools to allow brands and organisations to do just this, whether it is your customers, your staff or even your suppliers that you want to engage and listen to.

I was saddended not to see any European businesses in this list, surely you are out there. If you are, and you think you should be represented in a more European-centric award scheme, let me know and we'll see what we can do about it.

A report just out, published by Forrester and titled 'Past Present & Future of Market Research' came our way today, as we've been sited as an example of how to use private online communities to capture the views, opinions, experiences of consumers via our forward-thinking, task-based engagement platform.

The report sites three major trends in Market Research (MR) as being 1) Global market research spend is increasing year-over-year, 2) Online surveying is here to stay, and 3) Market research is transforming to market insights.

Naturally, we're delighted to learn of the increased spend in market research, though it is the the third and final point that I'm going to discuss further. Traditionally, market research has been contained within departments that can, on most occasions, be somewhat disconnected to the wider decision-making process within an organisation. Often, MR is commissioned to validate ideas or hunches, and fails to deliver more powerful and engaging strategic influence.

Dub's work in developing online customer communities overcomes this by creating a forum and a voice that can deliver hard and fast research, but also a stream of actionable insights that, by the power of technology and design, can be shared throughout an organisation in a more digestible and engaging manner. As such, it's ability to shape decisio-making, promoting organisations as more 'listening' or 'customer-centric'.

Insights, information and data garnered from online customer communities can include new ideas for product and service innovation, sales leads and new business opportunities and advocacy, among other things. So, while it ticks the research box, it goes much further and brings with it new relationships, sales increases and greater innovation capabilities.

We recommend you consider this, and other reports from Forrester to keep in touch with the advancements of online customer communities, or alternatively subscribe to this blog!