How to Develop an Ongoing Dialogue with Customers That Drives ROI

Insight Communities: A Proven Solution to Customer Insight with Serious ROI

This is the era of give your customers what they want or risk losing their attention or favor. Customer research is increasingly important to provide your company with the information it needs to maintain and attract happy customers. One challenge companies often face is the cost of implementing a reliable way to engage with their customers to drive insight that also provides a return on investment (ROI). Insight Communities are a highly effective and reliable way to engage with your customers and have been proven to drive positive ROI.

Insight Communities are an online research solution that is used to consistently engage with and provide insight on the desires and needs of your customers, stakeholders and shareholders. These communities are built to help companies answer the business issues at hand with engaged members who, ultimately, drive advocacy for their brand. Insight Communities are organizational assets that both inform business decisions and create brand advocacy among members.

Breaking Down the ROI of Insight Communities

There are many ways that the ROI can be measured—consider the cost savings of:

• QUICKER reaction time to customer feedback and demand—what is the short- and long-term savings of rapidly reacting to the situation or knowing your customers’ buyer journey and pain points?
• Launching the RIGHT product to market at a FASTER pace—how much does speeding up the development cycle and ensuring the RIGHT solution save?
• Making more informed/ACCURATE BUSINESS DECISIONS—what is the cost savings of NOT doing the wrong thing or validating the decision (risk aversion)?

Forrester Consulting completed a Total Economic Impact™ study on the ROI of Insight Communities to clients. In addition to the cost efficiencies and speed value propositions of Insight Communities, Forrester quantified the financial value of continually engaging with members in a community. The highlights include:

• $1.7M business value from increased customer insight
• 590% ROI
• $546K incremental profit and $4.7M increased sales from community members
• 39% increase in average order value and 70% lower churn rate from community members
• 75% reduction in cost compared to traditional market research methodologies
• 4–6 times faster speed to results

This reaffirms that Insight Communities not only provide fast and efficient consumer insight but also drive business action that results in incremental sales and profit for organizations.

These are just some of the reasons that organizations are implementing communities. The client stories about the impact of an ongoing Insight Community are powerful and continue to prove the short- and long-term ROI. Shifting the focus to consumer engagement is resulting in hundreds of organizations realizing significant returns and outcomes.

A Proven Solution for Customer Engagement

Five years ago, Insight Communities were more of a niche solution or emerging technology, but according to the latest GreenBook Research Industry Trends Report (GRIT Q3/Q4 2018), 80% of respondents stated that Insight Communities are either in use (59%) or under consideration (21%). This has led GreenBook to believe that insight communities are now a mainstream solution:

“Online Communities and Mobile First Surveys continue to lead the pack
as formerly emerging methods that are now in mainstream use.” (GRIT Q3/Q4 2018)

Ultimately, these two pieces of evidence indicate that Insight Communities are not only a solution that spreads efficient business insight across an organization but also an asset that drives revenue and profitability—thereby attaching real-world ROI to the value of the asset.

Contact me to learn more about how Insight Communities can become your most powerful asset.