Businesses can focus on developing products that will help the company boost its sales and stay ahead of other competitors when they know what they need to deliver. Innovating new feature-rich products with the best design but complex functionality or irrelevant features that may not add value are usually disregarded by consumers. But having said that, there can be takers for such products as well.
Advantage of insights community
The insights community helps an organization not just help in the research and product development phase but even grasp the market size and measure how rigid the consumer’s opinions are.
If larger sections of the target consumers are flexible and can adjust, then companies can use this factor to their advantage.
For any insight team to use the platform to its optimum potential, there needs to be experienced staff at work and strategy. It has to be combined with diligent and consistent tracking of the data. Teams need to enable real-time customer engagement using an agile insights platform.
An insight community offers a platform where the exchange of ideas results in actionable pursuits that are routed to offer growth impetus for companies. Often an insight community acts like a genesis and an incubator zone for some of the utilitarian and functional discoveries and industrial innovations in the age of the internet and information.
Insight community has other peripheral advantages such as customer engagement that helps improve customer experience and build long-term relationships.
How to develop an agile platform for insights community?
Acknowledging the importance of the insights community and dedicating an experienced team to handle the platform is the first step any brand can take to establish a medium to connect with consumers.
Insight community aid the inference of sensitivity analysis concerning pricing, product feature enhancement, or the decision to drop a product from a range for any brand. Actionable decisions that help in penetration of the markets with a deeper comprehension of what the demographic population and target consumer needs and are looking for are possible through an agile platform.
But for an effective system to be responsive and serviceable, an insight platform needs to be constructed using a few parameters.
Here are a few points to choose the right factors to construct a purposeful insight community:
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Draw-up a checklist
Every brand has some unique requirements that may need tweaking of existing platform models. So if a brand is signing up for an enterprise version of an insight community medium, then efforts to customize it with a comprehensive to-do checklist is a good start.
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Easy Integration
Insight community platform findings should be integrated with other business intelligence and analytical tools. All the team members concerned with insights and business analytics should be empowered to trace the reports. Respective team members should have the access to create dashboard widgets if necessary.
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A common source of truth
For seamless integration and the ability of every stakeholder or collaborator to customize the data for a higher purpose and in the interest of a brand, it is necessary to store and record data from the insights platform in a central repository.
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Integrity of data
Consumers trust a brand with their data and their opinions that are shared in a group are still privy and cannot be made public without the express consent of the people involved. The platform where consumers come and pitch their voice needs a security feature-rich medium with proper authentication and sign-in.
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Open-source coding
Entities have started recognizing the power of open-sourcing knowledge. Talent need not be limited to the hired pool of exceptional personnel who work on a platform to make it better. There is every chance that another equally enterprising person located in a distant part of the world may be interested in a similar solution and can create a code that is beneficial for the brand. By allowing few codes to be sourced openly, HR managers can find their next best hire from a person who created the best line of software language programming.
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External collaboration
Insight community as such is an open-source medium where people voice their opinions without any barriers to free speech except for the requisite decorum and etiquette requirements. Every platform should be able to integrate product owners and other stakeholders to streamline priorities to avoid backlogs.
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Robust utilitarian value
An insights team collects the data, tabulates and organizes it, researches it, and then filters it to be used for functional purposes. Scores of touchpoints are screened to understand customers’ preferences and consumption trends. For an egalitarian usage of consumer insights, any company has to move towards a robust search option that saves time and comes up with accurate results for desired functions.
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Simplicity
As we fare up the ladder of technology, we should not forget the basic rule to keep it as simple as possible. Any insight platform that is tedious to use will never be able to achieve its purpose or potential. It is very important to keep the interactions and events on the platform simple, thought-provoking, interesting and consistent. Unless the platform is simple and easy to use
Conclusion
An insight community provides a valuable source of information that is useful for actionable decisions that help brands grow and scale their business. It helps in reaching out to consumers and engaging them proactively.
Every possible care has to be taken to build a leak-proof, secure and efficient system that can be used for positive outcomes. Loss in data translations has a negative influence and the opportunity cost created when a favorable event is avoided can translate into large sums of money and brand goodwill that is equitable in the future.
Realizing the importance of data efficiency is one thing but taking important steps to secure the data and use it in a relevant manner is a different thing. It is the journey between expectations and reality. It is essential to avoid silos and work towards integrated and unified data sources to design a robust and agile insight community framework.
