How Customer Participation Builds Trust in the Age of GDPR
The term "customer
participation" is sometimes used interchangeably with "customer
engagement," but to do so misses the mark on why the former is so much
more than the latter.
What Is Customer Participation Anyway?
The best way to
understand customer participation is to see it as a higher level of customer
engagement.
Customer engagement is
an umbrella term for any type of communication between a business and its
customer, and there are differing degrees of engagement. Some tactics, such as
connecting with brand fans on social media or via e-newsletters, fall into the
lower level of engagement, because they tend to be episodic and superficial.
Customer participation falls
into the high-touch end of the spectrum, because it fosters ongoing
collaboration and communication between the customer and the brand.
Participation is more
than feedback and collecting insights/survey data. It's about actively
involving customers in important aspects of the brand and business—from
innovation to marketing.
Customer participation
encourages brand loyalty because it makes your customers feel that their
opinions are valued and that they are invested in the growth of your brand.
What Does GDPR Have to Do With It?
The
implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 raised
awareness about privacy concerns, including what brands are doing with customer
data and how they're protecting the rights of consumers.
To
comply with GDPR, many companies will simply revise a privacy policy and get
consumers to consent through a double opt-in process, improve their email
marketing practices, and enable a customer to withdraw their consent.
But that isn't enough: It's
the bare minimum of how brands should respect and engage with consumers. Brands
need to begin thinking above and beyond privacy and toward participation.
Instead
of worrying about how to get customers to opt in to receiving marketing
messages or completing surveys, the smartest brands—those that will not merely
survive but surpass the competition—are the ones that truly understand how to
create an experience that customers want to be part of, giving customers the
opportunity to work with the brand itself to create together.
The Value of
Co-Creation
Co-creation
has been talked about for years by academics and business professors who have
acknowledged it as the future of innovation. But by actually providing a
platform for innovation, creativity, and collaboration...
- You
create an engaged community that customers want to be part of.
- You
can incubate ideas grounded in research that are vetted by a small army of
brand fans.
- Those
fans will then be willing to put their passion, insights, and unique
experiences with your brand into practice to help you.
Co-creation
is a natural evolution of crowdsourcing—the practice of putting out an open
call for ideas to an interested group. But crowdsourcing has its limitations,
and that is where customer participation comes in.
Customer
participation takes advantage of our propensity for always-on access and mobile
and social connectivity, and takes from proven innovation and creativity
methods, such as design thinking and creative problem solving.
It
turns the process into a community experience that is interactive and
thought-provoking, and it makes the customer feel as if they're part of the
brands they admire. They become part of a team of equally passionate yet
diverse fans where their ideas collide and feed off each other. Those ideas are
built on and then implemented together, with the support of fellow community
members and key brand employees and stakeholders themselves.
Protecting What's
Important
What
brands should really be protecting is not just customer data or their own
authenticity, but rather the collective intellectual capital of their customers.
It's about viewing customers less as passive consumers of products and ads, and
more as valuable participants in innovation processes, helping to achieve
overarching brand purpose and promise.
Co-creation
creates more value for both sides than any social share or 10-second video view
could. It brings together a community of fans who want to be there to see their
ideas come to life, and to partner with organizations that share a common
purpose and values.
Real
products are being introduced into the market that customers have demanded and
co-created in an environment where the community supported their favorite
ideas. There's nothing more rewarding than seeing a product you designed now on
the shelves—or, better yet, sold out. A great example is LEGO Ideas: 20
fan-designed LEGO kits have been produced and commercialized—each of them
having started with an initial idea from a passionate LEGO fan. And LEGO awards
the creators a 1% royalty on net sales.
Customer
participation protects brands' relationships with their customers. It shows
customers that you want to hear, and consider, their ideas on areas like
product innovation and marketing.
How Customer
Participation Builds Trust
If
true engagement means caring, sharing, and being part of something, then
customer participation through co-creation checks all those boxes. Customers
will share more about themselves because they want to be there—to open up and
share their ideas, insights, and experiences—and be part of the community and
co-creation creative experience.
They're
also made to feel part of an exclusive club of the most passionate, dedicated,
and creative "prosumers" out there. They can be given early access to
co-created products and benefit first from process and product improvements,
including loyalty programs, that the co-creative community dreamed up and then
implemented together.
Not
to mention they can play a starring role in the marketing campaigns that bring
those new products to the masses—campaigns and content that are also
co-developed with real customers and fans.
How to Get Started
In today's competitive business landscape, the time to invest in
customer participation is now. Customer participation trumps customer
engagement. When you have built a community of passionate customers who get to
co-create a better future with their favorite brands, it makes the next
GDPR-like alarm a nonissue.
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