When a company has decided to move forward with an insight community to help them engage more with their customers, a critical role to fill is that of the community insights manager. The community insights manager is responsible for everything from recruiting and onboarding, designing research activities, moderating and administering activities, and completing the analysis and reporting.
Essentially, the community insights manager is the person who becomes the glue for keeping the insight community together. When working with a full-service insight community provider, you have the benefit of their experienced and savvy community insights manager, although this function can also reside with an independent researcher on your behalf, or with someone within your company if you are operating on a software as a service (SaaS) basis.
There are many different skills and traits that make up a great community insights manager. We’ve found that these 10 elements are what make our community insights managers top-notch.
A great community insights manager is passionate about insight communities as a research tool, but more importantly they are passionate about seeing their clients succeed in the marketplace through better and faster decisions enabled by the voice of the customer.
In the past, traditional research moved slower than the needs of the client. When you need to make an important internal decision, you need information to support it. With insight communities, we seek to move faster than the speed of business, and a great community insights manager is needed to make that happen. The goal is not only to be incredibly fast in responding to requests, but to actually anticipate clients’ needs in advance.
Individuals that are naturally curious and have a desire to learn bring higher quality insights to the table. This is equally important when it comes to designing and analyzing different research activities.
Having a background in marketing or market research is certainly beneficial to this role. As the uses and capabilities of insight communities expand, the community insights manager needs experience in both qualitative and quantitative research. Specific experience with community research is of vital importance, as is exposure to the newest research tools and techniques.
Clients want to move fast and need technology that makes that possible. Of equal, if not more, importance is that the mindset and actions of the community insights manager are agile, iterative, and flexible.
The community insights manager is the interface between the community supplier, the client, and the community members. That is a lot of communication! The ability to maintain engagement within the community members is particularly important.
As an ongoing enterprise, it is important to establish a good foundation through the onboarding process as well as to maintain timely execution and consistency.
Being able to use analysis tools and interpret information is absolutely critical to delivering great insights. Experience with analytic tools and critical thinking abilities also play roles in delivering compelling insights.
Like most professional positions today, writing is an essential skill to be able to accurately and powerfully express ideas and information.
At the end of the day, clients are looking for actionable insights that will propel their decision making and company results. A great community insights manager should be an individual who has a knack for finding the meaning behind the raw information, understanding the implications, and ultimately providing strong customer inspired recommendations.
At My-Take we believe our insights community platform is second to none. However for many clients, we know our insights delivery team is what matters most. For that reason, we invest a lot in recruiting the right individuals, including specialized testing, as well as continual learning.
If you want to learn more about our community insights managers, or if you have general questions about insight communities and how they can help your company deliver more value to your customers, click here to request a free consultation.