This is how to respond to customer needs when society is constantly changing

More and more organizations are realizing the importance of structurally researching the customer needs of your target audience. Only when you understand what is going on in customers' daily lives can you respond to customer needs. But how do you research this? Blauw can help you set up a research community.

‍Examine customer needs.

Research community in short stands for: an online platform where you engage in a conversation with your customers by means of, for example, a forum topic or questionnaire, but also let your customers spar among themselves about topics or new ideas for your product or service. These customers are available at any time of the day. In a research community, you can conduct very diverse researches. For example, you can map out customer journeys, test user experience and optimize customer service concepts. Blauw collects all research results for you and processes them in a well-organised manner, enabling you to gain knowledge about the perception of your target group and the position you occupy within this perception in a simple and effective manner.

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In dialogue with the customer for short-cycle improvements

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 discuss various topics and or issues. There is a lot of interaction between the participants, they talk to 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.

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.

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When society is constantly changing

During times when not only society is changing, but also the customer needs of your target audience, it is all the more important to deploy a research community. By doing so, you maintain close contact with your customers and foster a strong bond of trust. You discover which customer needs change and which do not. You will discover whether you have overlooked anything and whether your services are still in line with customer needs. With all the knowledge you have gained, you know exactly what you as an organization need to work on and how you can best respond to (new) customer needs.

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