Finding out how people really use your product

Understanding exactly how your product helps your customers is not easy. It will be different for different people and may not be what you expect.

A global telecommunications firm wanted to understand how customers adopted and used technologies that support flexible and remote working. They knew what buyers said when they spoke to them and what people said in panel surveys. But they didn’t know what people’s real needs were and how their products were really used.

We built an online research community of 300 director-level members from a range of business functions across Europe. Through a series of guided activities, and organic conversations in the communities we explored how people used the technologies and how business cases for change were built internally. We also solved a few problems some of the community members were having along the way – real benefits for everybody.

Informing the debate on beauty

Our client is a leading provider of health supplements and wants to emphasise the benefits that vitamins and supplements could have on health and wellbeing. In fact they think that a balance of good diet, supplements and exercise are the best way to stay fit and healthy at every stage during your life. They really wanted to share their passion for this and create a space where their passionate customers could meet and share in this.

We built a community based on beauty and health, letting members talk to each other, learn from experts, get exclusive content and discuss their health and beauty regimes. The site is branded by the client but is about the whole range of health and beauty issues.

We’re currently working on a private version of the site but will go public over the summer. In addition to letting our client talk to customers and non-customers and share their passion for health, beauty and wellbeing, the community will have specific benefits for them. The increased content will improve their organic search outcomes, and build stronger, ongoing engagement with customers.

Internal communities to maximise knowledge sharing

A large professional services firm had restructured and wanted to find a way for people with similar skill-sets, but in different teams or maybe different countries, to talk to each other and share knowledge and experience. We worked with them internally to understand what they wanted to achieve and how any solution might work in practice in their firm.

Through a process of workshops we explored how a community might help and how they would build, manage and encourage people to participate. Based on this activity we helped our client to build an internal business case for an online community, showing the benefits it would bring to the organisation and the implementation process.