Collaboration Community Extended Participation

In order to maintain a high level of participation in your consumer collaboration community from both your consumer members and your extended partner network the participants much feel that they are realizing positive benefits.  From the consumer perspective they must feel they are realizing benefits from the direct feedback of the consumer members and benefits from the community host it the form of early sale notification or other types of special savings.  From the extended partner network perspective they must feel they are realizing benefits from the direct feedback of the consumer members and the data collected that can be used in analysis.  Finally from the community host perspective they must feel they are realizing benefits from increased sales and product and services feedback directly from the consumer members.

This can be a difficult balancing act across the participants and the host to ensure that there is a high level of perceived and real benefits provided to all of the participants.  This is where a robust continuous improvement framework will provide the greatest level of support.  After all, the process of maintaining and improving both the community and the resulting outcomes from both the community and the participant perspective is a process of trial and error improvements that is simply a continuous improvement process that requires the framework to ensure continued success.  The challenge in this particular incarnation of the continuous improvement cycle is the participation and suggestions of the consumer members of the community must be analyzed and determined using a ‘sense and respond’ process, which is essentially another type of continuous improvement exercise.

Reacting to the changes in the consumer community that are demanded from all directions can sometimes feel like an overwhelming task due to the rate and types of changes.  There are changes in technology, procedures, features and functionality, architecture and framework that are all sometimes coming together at the same time due to the nature of the community, the participants and the technology.  This reactionary environment requires an extremely flexible response procedure that embraces the change rather than ignore or fight the change.  This is where the sense and respond process fits in and provides a method and practice that supports the volume and frequency of change, I think of sense and respond as a type of agile continuous improvement.   

The consumer community build on the open cloud technologies that directly interacts with the consumer cannot afford to wait on long lead times or even medium term lead times to deliver new content and services.  This is where the sense and respond process will really shine and support the speed at which you will be required to deliver.  This also supports and even institutionalizes flexibility in the community and the interaction with your external partners to allow the benefits to be achieved more quickly, which will make everyone happy and encourage the continued support of the community and the efforts.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Extended Partner Collaboration Analysis

Data collected from the consumer community provides a vast reserve for analysis of trends and consumer desires across your extended partner network that can and probably will be disruptive to the current consumer trends and desires analysis practices.   Both focus groups and surveys have a critical failure point inherent in their architecture and that is the questions that are asked, asking the wrong questions can provide bad results that result in poor decisions and strategy.  These issues then have a tendency to snowball and feed on themselves resulting in additional poor decisions.  On top of it all, these types of analysis can be very costly and time consuming.  

The data and collaboration pipeline must be defined and configured as a two way feed; the data from the consumer community will feed the data store to provide the basis and data for the analysis and then the network partners utilizing the data in their analyses must have a means to request additional types of data.  This is the means to increase the value of the data, quite simply the feedback and revise loop in another example of a continuous improvement loop in this process.  This continuous improvement loop provides the framework required to improve and increase the value of both the community and the data provided by this community.

The key challenge that I see to this continuous improvement loop is the methods used to obtain new data requested by the extended network.  This requires a little bit of imagination in order to gather the intelligence and data in a manner that results in honest feedback and not just posting a survey on the community.  For instance, if you are interested in the perception of quality and usage of the product you could start with consumer purchase ratings and then add to that the option for a potential consumer to submit questions to the people that purchased the product or even the community at large.  You can see that it requires some imagination to develop an unobtrusive method to collect the data that provides value to both the community members and then it requires a combination of imagination and intelligence to collect and analyze the data.

The care and feeding maintenance of both the community and the extended partner use of the data derived from the community requires a continuous focus in order to maintain the value.  For one thing, the community members require the focus to provide new and fresh content and capabilities or they will simply walk away from the community.  The community support must take into account the objectives from their extended partners as one type of input for new content and services.  This provides a great basis for these new services and you can be sure that the extended partners will actively participate in developing these new services and content when they begin to see a return on value.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Consumer Collaboration And Extended Partners

The consumer collaboration community can make a very positive impact on both the relationship and the value derived from and for your extended partners.  The consumer community opens a new avenue of data directly from interested and engaged consumers that can be utilized to better understand consumer practices and objectives along with direct reactions to products and consumer services such as direct product delivery and product quality.  I see an opportunity to use the community members to eliminate the need for services previously provided through surveys and focus groups.  The combination of the consumer community and big data analysis can replace the majority of surveys and focus groups through the analysis of data provided directly from the consumer.

The consumer community provides the framework to support the participation and encourage retention of consumers on the site.  This participation from consumers provides the basis of data that will be available to analyze.  It should be obvious though that the value provided by this data increases as the volume of data collected increases.  The value and accuracy of research performed on the data is enhanced by the volume of data.  In order to gain the greatest value you must increase the ‘stickiness’ of the consumer site to increase the retention and consumer participation.  So the first order of business is building and maintaining a site that encourages and supports the participation and retention of consumers after they have found the site.

While the site is the gateway for consumer participation, you must also identify the objectives of your network partners in order to provide a focus and methods to support your extended partner requirements.  From the outset I see two important areas where the consumer community can provide information and guidance to your extended partner network; the quality of the product and accuracy in demand planning and forecasting.  The quality of the product takes on not only the quality in producing the product but also the methods in delivering the product in a presentable fashion.  The accuracy in demand planning and forecasting also includes the analysis of the product lifecycle in forecasting the needs.  This is where the the consumer community will really produce value.  The important aspect of both the quality and the improved demand forecasting is the data collection from a wide source of consumers; the more data from consumer response collected, the more accurate the analysis.  

Your consumer community will provide data from consumer interaction and reaction to other consumers and this information can provide an extreme value in the product lifecycle and accurately defining the consumer desires and more importantly when the product has run its course of sales and should be eliminated.  You can use the consumer data to identify when comments and interaction on products starts, as it builds interest and then as the interest declines to improve the demand accuracy and also identify new products.  You can use the consumer community to test and refine products in limited runs before committing to a large manufacture run saving a great deal of expense in producing a product the consumer will buy.

The data collected for analysis allows you to perform survey type analysis from consumer response to products and other consumers rather than simply form the survey questions.  This eliminates the risk that your survey is not asking the proper questions.  You can analyze consumer actions and quickly refine the questions without impacting the data and the analysis.  I see this as one of the greatest values provided by the consumer community.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?