17 Aug The New World of Active, Empowered Customers
In today’s world, the customer is more empowered than ever. Customers don’t want to be looked at as passive consumers of products and advertising. Calgary based, Chaordix uses their customer experience solution to turn passive consumers into active brand collaborators. Speaking to David Gardner, VP Marketing for Chaordix, it’s easy to see how customer experience is two-fold in their world. Chaordix used their software platform to deliver a customer experience solution to some of the worlds most admired brands such as Lego, Rust-Oleum, American Airlines, KPMG, Virgin Money, IBM and Ford.
Gardner believes, “customers want to be more directly involved, participate, and collaborate with the brands that they love. The brands that are really winning in today’s world – the ones that are getting the highest return on investment and are the most profitable – have really embraced this notion of customer participation.” When you harness the power of collaboration you can leverage active, empowered customers. Together, organizations can co-create innovative solutions with customers. When done properly, this can be a key business differentiator.
Co-creation and collaboration go far beyond product innovation or customer feedback. Gardner has seen innovative companies leverage customer engagement in really creative ways, “organizations are building solutions across the full gamut of customer experience, whether it’s through e-commerce, loyalty programs, product innovation or marketing content.” With changing customer expectations, more and more organization are creating or seeking tools and technologies to enhance customer experience.
Turn Crowds into Communities
Image Courtesy of Chaordix
Chaordix tends to attract Fortune 500 companies with large brand followings, and has worked with brand partners around the world. One customer brings back childhood memories for Gardner, “for Lego, we power an online community called “Lego Ideas” that has almost a million members. We bring together passionate Lego fans to come up with new Lego kit designs. The community itself will then vote for their favourite ideas. Once a fan-designed kit idea reaches 10,000 supports, Lego experts then review the design for licensing, feasibility, and commercial viability. Based on that review, several customer-designed Lego kits are brought to market each year, many of which becoming best sellers. The
Depending on the business challenge and what a brand wants to achieve, Chaordix can provide different types of co-creative programs, which follow the company’s proprietary methodology for innovation + creativity. For Lego it was very much about new product development, but Chaordix also designs programs to improve the customer experience.
“We worked with American Airlines a few years ago, where they built a community for their high-value business travellers,” says Gardner. We discovered through research and insights, that many frequent flyers didn’t know how to redeem and use their loyalty points. These high-value customers collaborated and ended up producing a digital app that shows how to redeem points for flights, interesting products, and promotional giveaways. It was all derived from actual American Airlines customers through the community that we powered for them.”
Image Courtesy of Chaordix
Customer Experience; Deliver What You Offer
Companies like Chaordix are held to the highest standards of customer experience by their brand partners. Gardner says it’s about investing in the customer relationship right from the start, “having an innate understanding of what our customers’ core objectives are, what their biggest challenges are. Really doing in-depth discovery to educate them on co-creation and our methodology that we use in our communities. I believe in meeting them in person, hosting workshops, and staffing our client engagement teams accordingly.”
Having experienced people to do the work has a huge influence on your ability to do good work, “we have experts innovation management, social sciences, market research, data analysis, community management and moderation.” Building the right teams have a massive impact on your ability to deliver a consistent customer experience. And of course, you’ve got to be willing to go the extra mile, Gardner states, “we pride ourselves on over-delivering for our clients. Everything from setting up the communities, getting the data and the analytics they need to understand what’s happening within those communities, and then having our own experts analyze the data and turn it into a really tangible, actionable insights.”
Having the right people and fostering ingenuity within their team has had tangible impacts for Chaordix. Gardner explained, “we’ve shortened our community launch time, through our technology and through our people we’ve been able to reduce our turn around to under a week, which is really an attractive, positive thing.”
Co-creative community platforms are one way to deliver value for organizations and improve customer experience. The new empowered Customer is demanding we change the way we deliver products and services. Great customer experiences happen when you can embrace active participation, anticipate the future needs of your customers and then co-create sustainable solutions together.
Learn more about tools to elevate your customer experience, join the CMA on September 12, 2018, for Enhancing the Customer Experience. David Gardner and four other expert panellists will be talking about unique tools and techniques they use to achieve better customer retention, lower operating costs, increased sales and faster growth.