The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset by Bill Lee

Author:Bill Lee [Lee, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2012-05-14T14:00:00+00:00

Communities: Helping Customers Achieve High-Value Goals

Time and again during the settlement of America, people would bond together in community to achieve what they couldn’t do alone. They had to in order to build settlements, organize an economy, build roads and bridges, provide for a common defense, and pursue economic opportunities. No monarch, guild, or other hierarchical authority could reach them or otherwise manage such tasks.

Today we see this spirit all the time as customers form their own communities—for example, to provide each other the service they can’t get from their vendors. But forming communities can fry much bigger fish than that. Hewlett-Packard’s healthcare and public-sector businesses, for example, are forming an industrywide community to help 800,000 US physicians, perhaps half of whom need to seriously upgrade their IT systems to keep up with the complex requirements of electronic healthcare record keeping. No one company could possibly meet this need, and even if it could, most physicians prefer to work with local vendors. Therefore HP is forming a community of local healthcare providers and vendors around the United States to work together to tackle this opportunity in a comprehensive way that neither the providers nor HP could achieve alone.

Companies that seek to form customer communities need to be aware of their awkward position: if they attempt to play a dominant role, they’ll destroy an important dynamic. HP, for example, must take care not to play or be seen to play an authoritarian role.

Now for the nitty-gritty. The rest of this section describes specific ways that you can build a community that will attract and serve your customers (see figure 6-2.)

Organize Around a Shared Purpose

What makes communities different from, and more powerful than, networks or tribes is the common purpose: it’s about the members, not about sacred traditions or the imperatives of organizers. (Be sure to remind your marketing department!) SFDC customer communities especially embrace that value, helping customer-members learn from each other how to succeed in their jobs, find new jobs when needed, and pursue personal and professional growth and more.

Similarly, Benjamin Franklin’s Junto, which started as a small group of young nobodies in Philadelphia, went on to make major contributions to the city. It helped to establish superb institutions such as a volunteer fire department, a militia, a city library (the first subscription library in America), the Philadelphia Academy (now the University of Pennsylvania), and the Pennsylvania Hospital. The Junto was not the creature of city leaders, but was formed by Franklin and others to advance their own small businesses while looking for opportunities to help the larger community.

This doesn’t mean that customer communities should or need be an exercise in altruism for companies. Massachusetts, for example, was settled by the Massachusetts Bay Company. The key is creating exceptional mutual value.

FIGURE 6-2

Community gravity

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