If you search “customer co-creation,” you will get more than 44 million entries with some of the top descriptions including “Co-creation is driving innovation,” “How co-creation can improve your customer experience,” and “Innovation with customer co-creation.” The list goes on and on.
The Market Research industry always seems to latch on to buzzwords, with the latest being customer co-creation, collaboration and ideation. But for KL Communications, these have always been key words. So the real question is, how can we take co-creation past the latest buzz words in the industry?
CrowdWeaving®, KLC’s proprietary customer co-creation solution, allows you to work with your customers to generate, develop, design, and validate new ideas so you innovate faster and with greater success. While many companies may be claiming they offer “customer co-creation”, a few key components are necessary for successful customer collaboration:
- Strategic Client Partnership: While KLC stands behind its technology platform, what makes KLC different is how we interact with each client, no matter which part of the CrowdWeaving® solution they choose to do. We become an extension of each client team. We work closely with each client to fully understand expectations for each project. We listen and then recommend the best approach based off of our experiences.
- Customer Liaison: KLC not only works directly with each client, but also works directly with the customer. We interpret the customers’ ideas and feedback and turn them into actionable information. We also take our clients feedback and give that back to the customers to help them refine their ideas, to create a feedback loop that helps to strengthen ideas as well as provide insight into current needs, behaviors and trends.
- Distillation of Information: KLC offers more than just a data “dump,” we provide insights and recommendations based on what customers are saying, both up-front and between the lines. For example, we may run a CrowdWeaving® Ideation Session, and after the first phase we have a list of the top 10 ideas (based on passion and popularity). At KLC, while we do typically recommend moving forward at least the top 2-3 ideas, we also work with the client to see things from their perspective. Perhaps idea #22 has some interesting nuggets on which the client would like to expand…we help them do that. Without that extra layer, that idea may never have advanced to the next round, and a key emerging theme may have been missed.
As with all trends, key players will come and go, and the buzz words of today will be gone by tomorrow and replaced by newer, flashier ones. However, I know with KLC’s CrowdWeaving® solution, we will be one of the remaining players and with our approach towards customer co-creation, we will also be a leading player. For us, customer co-creation is not just a passing trend. It is, and always has been, our mission – to create with customers, as well as our clients.