Forrester Groundswell Awards 2008 Submission

Networked Insights Enables Community-driven Customer Intelligence for The Guild

The Challenge

Since re-launching the company in 2004, The Guild had been successful in channeling sales through its Web catalog, and in 2007, it was preparing to redesign their online presence to put forward a website that reflected what their customers wanted. The company was familiar the general market segmentation of their customers, but had no way of understanding what was driving their purchases and interest in the company's website. The Guild also struggled with understanding what was important to their customers; what kind of information did they seek from The Guild and how could the website accommodate these needs?

Founder and Artistic Advisor Toni Sikes, who has a master's in market research, said, "We had a lot of debate on this. I assumed people wanted to know more about the artist. Others thought visitors were looking for famous artists. And there were still other people who said it was about consumers making their homes more artful."

The Guild had tried to answer questions about its customers before. In 2006, it conducted focus groups and in-depth phone surveys, spending about $25,000. These traditional forms of market research produced inconclusive results, and The Guild wasn't able to modify its business strategies or site design at all.

The Guild needed a solution that would provide insight into why their customers were buying, what resources are used to inform their decision (time, money, opinions, reviews, etc), and how the purchase was meeting their needs or fitting their lifestyle, driving their loyalty to The Guild.

The Solution

When The Guild discovered Networked Insights, a provider of customer intelligence across social media, the company knew how it was going to solve its problem.

Networked Insights launched its Customer Interaction Network, on The Guild's website on November 7, 2007, calling it The Artful Community and giving customers a community where they could meet other like-minded customers, interact and share information. Going through The Guild's homepage, visitors had access to The Artful Community by filling out a simple log-in form. Once users were connected, they could create a profile and use the network to communicate directly with other customers, post comments and research specific topics, ultimately creating their own trusted networks within The Artful Community.

"I do want to say that I am really enjoying myself on [The Artful Community] and have made a good friend. Thanks for starting this community. This is my first experience with this 'chat' kind of thing. :-)," posted InSpired, a member of The Artful Community.

The Guild promoted its new community via emails to its subscribers and search marketing.

"We saw a strong per month new user and interaction rate at the launch of the community, when we announced its creation to our subscribers," said Pozdell. Growth of the member base was also largely due to word of mouth and member-to-friend invites.

Networked Insights has different incentive program models to encourage community member participation and sharing. One of which is a point rewards system The Guild uses, whereby customers earn points by completing profile information, posting or contributing to discussions, inviting new members to join the community, and so on. Those reaching 1,000 point would receive a gift certificate to The Artful Home.

During the first few months, The Artful Community grew to over 700 members, 60 percent of whom had never purchased products from The Guild's website before. Although not its primary function, the community was working as a strong customer acquisition tool. The community also had a high 12.2% conversion of new customers to sales.

Now, the community has grown to over 1,600 members, with an average of about 642 "active" users, who have either logged-in to the community, read, posted or rated messages, or communicated with other users within the last 6 months.

The Findings

Networked Insights' Customer Insight Platform* is the technology that allowed The Guild to gather actionable, real-time intelligence from the community and across the social media landscape. Using linguistic algorithms, the platform analyzes the interactions around customer conversations and identifies 5 key types of insights: the needs, content, competition, brand and products of a company.

Within just a few weeks of launching The Artful Community, The Guild was already surprised to learn some of the interests of their customers, particularly home decor. Looking at the community, The Guild saw that many interactions and discussion topics were centered on home decoration. "All kinds of people were answering questions, sending photos and offering advice," Sikes says. "It became clear that the primary reason people were coming to us was that to look for ideas to create a more artful home."

"Far and away the home decorating category has pulled in the most number of conversations," she said. "As a result of what we learned, we are going to focus first on ideas for home decorating."

In addition to general interest topics, The Guild was able to learn key demographic information about The Artful Community members. Pulling shared profile statistics from the community, The Guild discovered that the majority of the users are between 35 and 54 years old, 57% being between the ages of 25 and 44, which skews younger than their typical customer. The Guild was also surprised to learn the demographic breakdown of The Artful Community's users. It expected the members would be geographically distributed the same way as the current customers on their website, which is more concentrated in the west coast and northeast. Surprisingly, users of The Artful Community were split very evenly across the country, with members even in remote areas where The Guild has had little sales presence.

With the Customer Insight Platform* came new types of research reports for The Guild as well. Sikes said Networked Insights' use of graphically expressive charts and reports helped her understand and rank positive and negative discussions. "I'm incredibly impressed with the thought that has gone into the back-end report," she said. "None of us have time to sit around and look at reports we can't do anything with." The Guild is now able to identify the main influencers in the community and the types of sentiments that are being projected around different topics.

Using Networked Insights, The Guild was able to mine its customers' conversations and gain the insights it was looking for, helping to remodel the website and run its business with a clearer understanding of its customers.

More Information

• Visit The Artful Community
• Find out more about Networked Insights' complete solution
• Take a guided tour of the Insight Platform*

*The Customer Insight Platform has been renamed SocialSense.