Co-Creation Best Practices
Posted by Brian Koma on Thu, Sep 03, 2009
According to the
CE IQ study, organizations with the most loyal customers actively engage those customers in co-creation.
A new breed of customer now exists who demands to be heard and who wants to engage in a two-way dialogue with their vendors about issues that are important to them. As a result, organizations that have the most loyal customers include them in the ideation process around product and process improvement. Very closely related to this practice is having a formal process for obtaining customer input into the planning cycle, instead of relying on ad-hoc methods. Fundamentally, these organizations are engaging customers at every step in the process and, importantly, are providing customers with status updates on the ideas that they have submitted, as well as informing them if their ideas have not been put into an implementation plan.
In fact, each of the four co-creation best practices we studied are in the top 9 best practices with the highest correlation to customer loyalty out of all 24 practices reviewed.
How can your organization apply these best practices to build customer loyalty? First, create a formal process to engage in co-creation activities with customers, through quantitative surveys and through qualitative means such as social media and online communities. Share with your customers what steps your taking based on customer input, closing the feedback loop so that your customer are motivated to provide information on an ongoing basis.