In order to remain competitive, businesses must ensure their products or services are making a meaningful impact on their customers’ lives. Increasingly, businesses are recognising the value of engaging and collaborating with their customers to develop and improve their products and services to better meet their needs. Communities offer a unique, powerful and dynamic way to generate such insights and feedback in a highly scalable and cost efficient way. By tapping into the collective wisdom of their members, businesses can gain invaluable perspectives to inform strategic decisions, product features and enhance the overall customer experience. All of these combine to positively impact customer retention, lifetime value (LTV), acquisition, satisfaction and advocacy, and overall business growth.
There are primary ways a business can partner with their community to inform the development or improvement of their products and services:
.1Communities provide a platform for members to share their experiences, challenges, and suggestions related to a product or service. By actively listening to these insights, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of member needs, preferences, and pain points. Community Managers can either ask direct questions to their community, or observe and analyse organic conversations to pick out common themes to share back with internal product teams. Commonly this will happen within an online community, but some businesses are also choosing to utilise Customer or Member Advisory Boards to more formally and frequently gather feedback and insights from a strategic group of members.
.2Engaging with members directly allows businesses to gather feedback on existing products or services. This feedback loop enables companies to identify areas for improvement, prioritise feature enhancements, gain quick feedback on new features and iterate on their offerings more effectively. Many communities engage their superusers or advocates in product feedback, giving them access to trial new features or services before the wider community. This not only gathers highly valuable feedback for product teams, but also facilitates an even deeper connection between your brand and your biggest fans, increasing their loyalty and advocacy. Duolingo, the language learning app, has a dedicated community forum where users can discuss language learning tips, report bugs, and suggest new features. Duolingo actively engages with its community to incorporate user feedback into product updates and course improvements, resulting in a more user-centric experience.
.3By involving members in the product development process from the beginning, businesses can leverage their expertise and creativity to co-create solutions that better meet customer needs. As with product feedback, this collaborative approach has the added benefit of fostering a sense of ownership among members and increasing their loyalty to your brand. LEGO Ideas is an online platform where fans can submit their own ideas for new LEGO sets. Community members vote on the submissions, and if an idea receives enough support, LEGO considers turning it into a commercially available product. This crowdsourced approach not only fuels innovation but also strengthens the bond between LEGO and its passionate fan base. Fitbit similarly have a product feature request board that garners thousands of submissions from members, and allows members to upvote and comment on each other’s suggestions. Those suggestions then get filtered and taken to Fitbit’s product team and considered alongisde the wider product roadmap.
To effectively harness the power of your community for product development, consider the following strategies:
- Ensure there is a user-friendly space for your members to easily connect with each other and with you. Consider providing incentives for participation, such as rewards, badges, or exclusive access to beta features
- Actively monitor discussions, feedback channels, and social media channels to gather insights from your community. Demonstrate responsiveness by addressing member concerns and acknowledging contributions
- Encourage collaboration and co-creation by involving members in ideation sessions, focus groups, or beta testing programs. Solicit feedback at various stages of the product development lifecycle to ensure that member needs are incorporated from the outset.
- Highlight success stories and case studies that showcase how member feedback has directly influenced product improvements or innovations. This not only validates the value of the community but also inspires others to participate.
Communities offer a unique and valuable opportunity for businesses seeking to enhance their products and services through collaboration and engagement. By fostering a culture of openness, listening, and co-creation, companies can leverage the collective intelligence of their members to drive innovation, build loyalty, and ultimately, deliver greater value.