Keep distant, stay close
Forgive us for stating the obvious but the world has just changed in ways that no one fully understands yet. Necessity has forced us to change our behaviour dramatically and fundamentally. We are doing things differently. Possibly forever. How we all engage with brands, products and services is also changing. People are re-evaluating their lives, their health, their relationships, their finances, their consumption, and their values.
Now, more than ever, you need to stay close to understand your customers and their concerns. They have changed and you need to adapt to meet their new needs and be relevant in their lives. This could mean a complete re-structure of how your business delivers its offering, or demonstrating that you understand how they feel and how you can help (and we don’t just mean sticking the phrase ‘in these unprecedented times….’ at the start of your advertising).
It is a fact that the brands who continue to invest during a downturn are the ones that come out quicker and stronger during recovery. That investment includes listening to your customers.
Introducing the Mingle Speakeasy
With this in mind, and in the spirit of the many forms of ‘prohibition’ that influence our everyday behaviours at present, we are pleased to introduce the ‘Mingle Speakeasy’. As the name suggests it helps you easily speak to, listen and learn from your customers.
The Speakeasy is our online room where you can meet customers, keep distant but stay close.
Tech driven but not passive
The Speakeasy uses a variety of simple-to-use, highly secure video communication platforms that we have tried and tested with our tech partners. We suggest which platform is right depending on your objectives. As always, our 4C’s process shapes any project: clarifying an agreed knowledge objective, connecting with your customers and finally coming together to consolidate what you’ve learnt and crystallise it into insightful action.
Also, as usual, this is not a passive approach where you sit and watch an online focus group. One of the key principles that informs all our work at Mingle is that we put you, the business team, at the heart of the customer interaction. Simply put, the more you actively participate in the conversation the more you get from it.
A typical project approach
Everything varies but a typical’ project could include:
- Initial alignment with project leads on business and project objectives, project approach, recruitment spec and desired outputs. This will kick off Mingle’s recruitment process.
- A briefing session online in the Speakeasy with everyone in your business that plans to participate. We’d brief you on best practice, align on the project objectives, the ‘hot topic’ to be discussed and a discussion flow.
- Go and Mingle in the Speakeasy rooms! Typically in pairs, your team are then free to mingle with the pre-recruited respondents in our Speakeasy breakout rooms to have a guided conversation.
- Finally, after you’ve had your fun we say farewell to our respondents and gather all the business team back in The Speakeasy main room for a facilitated download of the learnings and observations. The Mingle team will help craft your observations into actionable insight for the business.
Please treat this as a flavour of what the Speakeasy could do for you. This could all be done in one session on one day or over the course of a few days to accommodate schedules. We can apply this globally, incorporating live translation and can adapt to suit a range of business needs and challenges.
Customer closeness is still relevant
So as you build your plans for future research and knowledge gathering in your business, don’t write off customer closeness as one of those things that only works in the physical world! Drop us a line to chat more, we’d love to work out how we could apply the Speakeasy to your business needs.