Uncertain times: make the right - customer-driven - decisions in dialogue with the customer

During this special period, for example, the Blauw Research Community helps organizations with specific issues make the right -customer-driven- choices. As a result, our clients know what impact COVID-19 has on clients in vital sectors such as retail, finance and transportation. Fortunately, for many organizations there are also more positive reasons for deploying a research community. It is a very suitable solution to optimize the customer experience and to add customer value based on insight. Understanding the customer is a crucial weapon to distinguish yourself. Especially now!

As has become extremely clear in recent weeks, we as consumers, citizens and organizations do not live in a vacuum and cannot focus only on ourselves and our immediate environment. The world, the competition and therefore the change is far too big and often moves faster than we think. To respond to this in the right way, to maintain or increase your position, you will have to know very well what customers expect in order to differentiate not only at the product or service level. But also by providing a great customer experience.

CX Research Community: approachable dialogue with the customer

With a Customer Experience Research Community, you can ensure that your decisions are based on a solid understanding of customer attitudes, behaviors and motivations. After all, customers can give you the best advice on an optimal customer journey and customer experience from their own experience, outside-in. Through a research community, you connect directly with your customers, and you can engage in dialogue in a casual and fun way. The community members are engaged members who answer or converse on various topics and or issues. There is a lot of interaction between the participants, they interact with each other about the questions asked, but also about topics without you specifically asking a question.

By actively engaging and stimulating cooperation among members, you come to surprising insights. This can be for a short period of time with specific issues or topics, or on an ongoing basis. By being in contact with a larger group of customers in this way and continuously "listening" to what your target group is saying, you get valuable input. This continuous input and a flexible, agile (short-cycle) way of working, helps you make decisions that affect the sharpening of your service, customer experience or value proposition.

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Example: Think with the ANWB!

At ANWB, we make use of a panel of members, within which we engage in dialogue on various topics in a smaller community. Members converse sometimes as much as half an hour a day about mobility, tourism, recreation, social issues and other ANWB-related topics. The outcomes help meet ANWB's need for deeper insight and desire to find answers to the "why" of things. By incrementally asking thorough questions on given answers and through various (creative) assignments and questioning techniques, we gather deep insight. The community serves as a sounding board for ANWB and the results provide a richer foundation for planning and decision-making. But we also use the community to identify developments at an early stage and to find solutions to challenges (ideation). By designing an assignment within the community, we often get very surprising and useful ideas in the form of descriptions, photos or videos.

There are many more great examples of organizations making the right customer-driven decisions based on dialogue with the customer.

The Blauw Customer Experience team members and our community managers are happy to share their knowledge and experience about this in a personal conversation. In that dialogue, we also like to learn from you, so that we can make it a little better, smarter and more fun for our clients and ourselves every day!

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