Five Types of Customer Product Wisdom
To deal with greater product complexity, customers have become more sophisticated and discriminating. They have refined comparison shopping, developed tricks to make products meet their wants and needs, learned how to work around product defects or shortcomings, and discovered clever, unintended uses for products. At the same time, they have leveraged collaborative technologies to share the wisdom of millions on product uses and features. This collective Customer Product Wisdom (CPW) now dwarfs what customer service representatives, product engineers and company marketers know or have documented about product usage.
Five Types of Customer Product Wisdom
The collective wisdom created and shared by customers typically falls into one of the following perspectives:
> Functional: How to use a product in intended ways (tips, tricks, lessons learned)
> Remedial: How to make a product work when it malfunctions (workarounds, improvised or short-term solutions, preventive maintenance, complementary products)
> Form-Related: Insights on product design, layout, ergonomics and packaging
> Repurposing: How to get use out of a product in ways not originally intended (one recent study reports that 97 percent of customers claim to have done this at some time)
> Comparative: How a product compares to competitive and alternative products from the above (functional, remedial, form-related and repurposing) standpoints
Ways to Leverage Customer Product Wisdom
CPW can bring actionable intelligence and value to each stage of the customer lifecycle. But to leverage it, companies should consider these important organizational changes:
> Add a new focus: learning from customers
> Sponsor or encourage open customer communities -- customers trust information from their peers, so identify and engage passionate promoters and detractors in these communities
> Develop and institutionalize business processes that proactively listen to customer communities, monitor product-related blogs and review Web sites to capture CPW and drive it into each stage of the customer lifecycle
> Designate a C-level executive to sponsor, create, lead and measure business units which use these processes
> Augment multiple channels -- including call centers, Web sites, sales force, and stores -- with collaborative technologies
Tapping into the wealth of available customer wisdom could benefit your company's brands, products, experiences and bottom line by providing new opportunities. Click here to read this article, titled "Customer Wisdom," in its entirety.
Five Types of Customer Product Wisdom
The collective wisdom created and shared by customers typically falls into one of the following perspectives:
> Functional: How to use a product in intended ways (tips, tricks, lessons learned)
> Remedial: How to make a product work when it malfunctions (workarounds, improvised or short-term solutions, preventive maintenance, complementary products)
> Form-Related: Insights on product design, layout, ergonomics and packaging
> Repurposing: How to get use out of a product in ways not originally intended (one recent study reports that 97 percent of customers claim to have done this at some time)
> Comparative: How a product compares to competitive and alternative products from the above (functional, remedial, form-related and repurposing) standpoints
Ways to Leverage Customer Product Wisdom
CPW can bring actionable intelligence and value to each stage of the customer lifecycle. But to leverage it, companies should consider these important organizational changes:
> Add a new focus: learning from customers
> Sponsor or encourage open customer communities -- customers trust information from their peers, so identify and engage passionate promoters and detractors in these communities
> Develop and institutionalize business processes that proactively listen to customer communities, monitor product-related blogs and review Web sites to capture CPW and drive it into each stage of the customer lifecycle
> Designate a C-level executive to sponsor, create, lead and measure business units which use these processes
> Augment multiple channels -- including call centers, Web sites, sales force, and stores -- with collaborative technologies
Tapping into the wealth of available customer wisdom could benefit your company's brands, products, experiences and bottom line by providing new opportunities. Click here to read this article, titled "Customer Wisdom," in its entirety.