Getting customer insights, to improve products or margins, identify opportunities or risks, is a crucial task, usually delegated to market research companies or managed inhouse with EFM (Entreprise Feedback Management) tools.

Well, direct conversations with consumers, or end-users, is another way to gather precious verbatims. Creating virtual focus groups with customers is easily done by inviting a selected panel on a private dialog space. There, you can ask questions to the panel, and they can also initiate discussions about the conversation topic, providing a continuous, spontaneous way to express their expectations and perceptions.

We believe marketers can gather better insights by driving true two-way conversations than one-way interrogations. We also believe that these conversations interest and exclusivity should be enough of a reward for panelists. Engage with them in open conversations, and they are willing to help.

Verbatims extracted from the conversations are very rich, and the resulting corpus can be send to text-mining or business intelligence tools for analysis. Keywords used in conversations can be re-used in marketing messages. Sentiment analysis can be applied to determine the mood of the contributors. External conversations from blogs or forums can be grasped to extand panel discussions.

Customer conversations are a goldmine for customer research departments.