ENGAGING ONLINE USER COMMUNITIES

By Rodney Lim

CUSTOMER communities have spread like wildfire across the Internet. People are congregating on forums, blogs and social networks of all sorts to share their thoughts, give feedback, post photos and other content. They talk about their hobbies and activities, review products they consume, and organise themselves into customer or user communities that revolve around things that matter deeply to them.

In her book, ‘Outside Innovation’, Patricia Seybold calls for companies to embrace these customer communities. She gives a compelling argument for the opening up of an organisation’s innovative processes, and shows how companies can collaborate with passionate customers to co-design their products and services.

A successful collaboration venture should begin with a company making genuine efforts to appreciate what customers care about deeply, their problems and the results they want to accomplish. They need to identify customer communities that are relevant to them, and to embed themselves amongst these communities to gain profound insights about their customers

One way to develop an outside-in innovation is to invite lead customers or lead users enthusiastic, smart and visionary people who are influential in their own circles to help create products and services that accomplish the customers’ desired outcomes.

Companies also need to realise that most customer communities are really fan sites. Too often companies tend to be either hesitant about them or even shun them altogether for various reasons. Sure, they may write about a nasty product or service experience in detail for the entire Web to see, or they may hack your codes or steal your logo and paste it on their own blogs, but really, they must care enough to do it. In fact, in many user communities, people are helping each other by providing advice, troubleshooting and essentially performing many of the vital customer service functions that companies are supposed to fulfil. They modify, customize and extend products not because they are malicious, but because standard off-the-shelf offerings do not match their requirements. Thus, rather than opposing them, it makes more sense to work with them to reach their goals

This sort of user community activism is the basis of the open source movement, which has proven a powerful strategy for many players in the post-dotcom era. Netscape, left for dead after the browser war, has been reincarnated as an open source software in Mozilla to become a formidable opponent to the almighty Microsoft. The popular Wikipedia website, with its 12 million articles in over 220 languages is a community-created, consensus-based encyclopaedia that has revolutionised the way information is aggregated.

Another collaboration technique with customer communities is to provide design tools to empower customers to create their own solutions. Here, the company farms out the product design process to customers by equipping them with the necessary tools to configure their own designs.

Empowering customer co-design products has many benefits. It shifts a very tough part of the product development process to the very people who know exactly what is needed, so design failures are minimised.

Collaboration with online customer communities is fast becoming a necessary proposition because customers are no longer just shoppers and surfers. They want more say in the products and services they consume. They are essentially knowledgeable and capable, and are more willing than ever to pursue opportunities and activities to satisfy their desired outcomes.

The time has indeed come for companies to acknowledge that the customer is really in charge.

Rodney Lim is a lecturer with the School of Business and Enterprise at Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus. He can be contacted at rlim@swinburne.edu.my