Company Fact Sheet
Clients
100+ Clients, including Kraft, Unilever, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Hewlett-Packard, GlaxoSmithKline, InterContinental Hotels Group, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America. 500+ Diverse communities, from busy moms and road warrior travelers to high net worth investors and corporate IT managers.
Year founded, renewal rates and growth
Founded in 1999; 90+% of clients annually renew community contracts; revenues have tripled over the last four years.
# employees
400+
What’s a customer community?
An invitation-only, private online site where 300–500 customers or prospects engage in richly-textured conversations and actively provide insights and candid feedback about experiences, attitudes, marketing trends, and what will and won’t fly in the market. The success of communities comes from building ongoing relationships with and among community members, treating them as insiders, sharing ideas, seeking their advice, and incorporating their continuous input into business strategy. Customer-focused companies use communities as a strategic marketing asset to hardwire the voice of the customer throughout their organizations.
Why a community?
- Gives customers an ongoing role in clients’ business; customers engage with companies in an honest two-way dialogue and show them what they want
- Improves success of R&D, new product introductions, marketing campaigns
- Provides insights that trigger innovation, loyalty/retention and growth strategies
- Creates strategic marketing asset
- Creates word-of-mouth marketing, advocacy
What’s different about these communities?
- Invitation-only so that the community members can be insiders; more openly share ideas, emotions; clients know who members are; members get to know each other
- Private, password-protected; community is only open to sponsoring company, participating members and Communispace facilitators helping to deal with sensitive issues, competitive intelligence and legal and regulatory hurdles
- Deep trust and involvement among community members and clients; members view it as theirs vs. a company’s place; enables candid feedback
- Tone & style of community managers keeps community involvement and discussion interesting, thriving, and strategically relevant creating value for both members and clients
- Runs continuously, "always open" 2-way conversations
- Average community active for more than a year
Client profile
Chief marketing officers, VPs of customer insights
President & CEO
Diane Hessan, recognized expert in customer-centered growth strategies. In 2005, she was named one of 15 "best bosses" in the country by Fortune Small Business
Headquarters
Boston, MA; offices in Atlanta, Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Sydney.