“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now.”
Usually, this saying is read as, “You can’t go back in time, so you might as well get started now.”
The saying reads differently if you’re thinking about experience management (XM). After all, the ideal state for making effective experiences happen for customers or employees is about building the right experience the first time.
Developing the right product.
Planting the right tree.
That takes time, a significant amount of effort, and there’s guesswork in figuring out what the right thing is. Are you going to need a maple, willow, or an oak? Maybe a fruit tree? That guesswork is where you stand to lose customers, visits, and sales.
But what if you could go back and know the right tree, or product, or experience for the current moment?
The single greatest source for improving XM
With traditional point-in-time XM Management, the "point" in question is usually after the moment of interaction. The question is: How did we do? (So we can improve for next time or for the next person.)
By necessity, you focus on what's "next."
At this point in the customer journey, your tree has taken root. The product or experience exists and you’re doing the necessary work of pruning—caring for what you’ve created. But ask yourself: How could you put yourself ahead by being more proactive?
Fortunately, there’s a group that’s fantastic at telling you what your customers and employees want before you even start considering how to serve them, when you’re planting the tree, so to speak.
It’s your customers and employees.
Moving beyond conventional feedback loops
How do you improve loyalty, innovate faster, and make smarter decisions by building experiences that stay in sync with these audiences?
Conventional experience management methods rely largely on structured, moment-in-time feedback and post-experience impressions to see how well experiences are meeting customer or employee expectations. This offers valuable insights at an operational level and there are additional opportunities to stay proactively in sync with an ever-changing landscape by engaging with customers.
Opportunities of active customer engagement include:
- Real-time collaboration: Innovation and responsiveness are faster when brands have a way to engage in direct, nimble feedback loops.
- Feedback on trends: Brands can get a jump on trends and evolving customer needs by asking the customers that care the most.
- Loyalty-building: Brands can build stronger, long-term relationships with customers or employees with direct, ongoing channels to involve them in shaping decisions.
The growing need for continuous engagement
Customers and employees want to be more than passive recipients of products or experiences—they want to actively participate in shaping them. Customers now expect brands to invite them into a two-way conversation, to listen to their ideas, and to value their contributions in real time. This shift has created a need for continuous engagement methods that go beyond periodic surveys and post-experience reviews, and is particularly helpful to brands in several different areas:
Development and innovation
Customers want a say in what products, features, and services get developed. Brands reduce the risk of launching products or services that miss the mark when they tap into real-time engagement from their audiences during the development process.
Marketing and brand perception
Customers increasingly value authenticity and prefer content created by people they trust, like other consumers. Brands often experience stronger advocacy by directly engaging customers for their input with a community.
Employee experience and retention
Employees, like customers, want a say in shaping their workplace. Traditional employee feedback channels may not capture ongoing needs and suggestions that could improve satisfaction and retention for the brand.
Adding communication to the listening strategy
To drive meaningful change and foster loyalty, brands need to show they’re not only listening but actively responding to the input of their communities. This involves two key shifts:
Adding collaboration to feedback
Brands are moving beyond capturing opinions to actively involving customers and employees in co-creation. This collaboration allows audiences to shape products, services, and even brand messaging, making them feel like valued partners. When these relationships bloom, community members will give you input and wisdom you never would have seen otherwise.
Growing speed and adaptability
Continuous engagement enables brands to pivot quickly in response to real-time insights. Rather than waiting for experience-activated feedback and quarterly or annual feedback cycles, leading brands are finding ways to capture insights continuously—even proactively—keeping them agile and responsive to the pulse of their communities.
Know the right tree to plant—embrace real-time customer and employee engagement
So, what if you knew the products, services, and experiences your customers and employees were going to want next month, or next quarter? What if you knew you had the right tree when you planted it, not after it grew?
Take a moment to consider: How well are you leveraging the voices of your customers and employees to drive growth, loyalty, and innovation? Are you creating opportunities for them to actively participate in your brand's evolution?
If your brand is relying solely on traditional experience management, you may be missing out on creating better experiences faster and more effectively through real-time collaborative insights and opportunities to engage your audience. Today’s consumers and employees want to feel heard and involved—and forward-thinking brands are rising to meet this expectation.
Exploring new engagement models could help your brand not only meet evolving expectations but grow a forest of stronger, lasting connections that stand the test of time.
Exploring new engagement solutions
For brands looking to bridge this gap and foster ongoing, meaningful relationships with their customers and employees, platforms like Bulbshare—a recent SMG acquisition—offer an innovative approach. Bulbshare enables brands to move beyond traditional feedback and tap directly into the insights, ideas, and creativity of their audience by creating dedicated communities for real-time collaboration. Then they provide AI-driven tools to find actionable insights in the incoming data at scale and at speed. With Bulbshare, you can stay relevant, responsive, and ready to drive lasting loyalty by cultivating your next evolution and weeding out the seeds of doubt.
Learn more about the differences between always-on feedback communities and point-in-time feedback.
Discover how real-time engagement with online stakeholder communities helps brands innovate faster, build loyalty, and create experiences that meet evolving expectations.
