Over the years, online community research has matured from novelty to necessity – an essential tool for marketing insights professionals. And it has evolved into more than just a mechanism for listening and gathering feedback from customers. The use of online/digital communities has grown steadily as a result. A significant proportion of research is now hybrid designed, a mix of both traditional and digital.

But simply having access to customers in communities is no longer enough. The differentiator is how you use these platforms to make your customers a strategic asset – what you do with the insights and how you draw inspiration from the community to align priorities, create meaningful change and, ultimately, generate new value.

Visible Stars uses a powerful online research platform for Qualitative research. The online community platform is intuitive enough for anyone to use, for projects of any scale and duration.

• Recruit the right people, invite, screen and build participants based on segment-driven quotas with integrated Inflows tool.

• Design engaging studies using a combination of activities, journals and discussion forums.
• Build activities from an integrated suite of task types including text, photo and video uploads, image markup, card sorting, fill the blanks, quick polls and grids, multimedia diaries and more. You can limit visibility to one or more segments and tailor the research experience.
• Socialize and probe on any response or topic to dive deeper and understand the ideas being tested

• Review activity streams, search word clouds, browse media galleries and then save and codify insightful excerpts.
• Drill into any activity, analyze by segment and export data tables and charts instantly
• Track participation, completion rates. Export complete, media-rich transcripts.

• The online community platform has a leading-edge responsive design. What that means is the software recognizes the device it’s opened on and will adapt itself to not only fit the screen, but to make the most of that device’s capabilities.
• Webcam for desktop, or phone cameras, the digital community platform effortlessly ensures you and your participants have a great experience on any device.

• Inspired by the platform’s community-building expertise and drawing upon familiar features from the social web to display information (e.g. in streams and photo walls), participants can comment on any of the responses and discussion threads you socialize.
• As a researcher or client, you can go further with private commenting to participants and backroom collaboration.

In today’s fast changing, dynamic environment, the business needs timely customer insights to input into their ideas, concept, advertisements, product propositions, campaigns, testing names, promotions, etc., to enable customer centric strategies. The key benefits are: