Customer Inside: a practitioners' guide to online communities
26 June 2018

Customer Inside is the definitive guide to online insight communities from C Space, written in partnership with The Market Research Society and 135 insight, marketing and innovation leaders.

New and updated for 2018, the guide now includes commentary from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Jaguar Land Rover, Marriott International, Jetblue Airways, Philips Healthcare and Ella’s Kitchen plus new sections looking at how developments in data and analytics are driving innovation in online communities.

Why it matters  

Despite the widely held view that customers are a route to business growth, many businesses are still struggling to reconcile the promise of customer centricity with the reality of delivering it. The onus falls to insight teams who are under greater pressure to deliver more for less. 

This guide helps by highlighting best practise from insight teams in the world’s biggest brands about how they are using communities to deliver greater value to the business and further their own departmental ambitions at the same time. One surprising finding is that some insight teams are using online communities as a Trojan horse for the department, using the always on connection to create a movement around the customer in the wider business.

What’s inside

In Customer Inside we:

• paint a picture of the current community landscape, share best practices, as well as common pitfalls
• recommend steps you can take to avoid these pitfalls and offer some future areas of opportunity too.
• share some of the trickier challenges many of our clients have been grappling with and examples of how they are overcoming them, in order to turn challenges into opportunities.
• offer a perspective on the future developments and innovations that will move the industry closer towards becoming customer inspired - with companies that generate customer inspired growth.

Although we spend a lot of time in this report talking about the challenges of effectively running online communities, on the whole, it’s a positive picture. The idea behind them has never been more relevant.

Everyone we meet and talk to seems to agree that the future of brands exists in creating incredible experiences for their customers. The future of insight must involve marrying an increasingly intelligent use of data with an equally in depth emotional understanding in order to build meaningful change into the ways companies work and grow.

If you would like to be taken through the findings in more detail contact Sophie Usiskin at C Space susiskin@cspace.com

Download 'Customer Inside'

A practitioner's guide to online communities, published by MRS and C Space.

Download the guide