Acting on the Voice of the Customer: CDW's Community-Based Approach

Most companies assume they're giving customers what they want. All too frequently, those companies are kidding themselves. Since its founding in 1984, CDW, a $6 billion-plus technology reseller, has strived to put the customer at the heart of everything it does. Over the years, the company's research team invested millions of dollars collecting customer insights and determining the drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Toward that goal, CDW employed a sophisticated arsenal of customer research techniques, including frequent customer loyalty surveys and focus groups.

However, like many companies, CDW found that competitive pressure was growing, customer spending was cautious, and the Web was dramatically changing the sales process. Despite all its investment in customer research, the company was aware that there were still things it didn't know about its customers. The loyalty data helped identify "bigger customer challenges" but was not specific enough that the company could act on more granular opportunities for improvement. CDW needed to find a way to truly understand what was important to customers and to uncover what it didn't know enough to ask.

CDW Turns to Private Online Communities

As Calvin Vass, senior manager of research at CDW, explored new methods to collect customer feedback in more intimate and continuous ways, he became intrigued by the idea of building private online communities for specific segments of CDW's customer base. He looked to Boston-based Communispace to make it happen.

According to Vass, "Building online communities for our customers made sense to us for two main reasons. First, they'd enable us to get continuous customer feedback rather than semiannual or ad hoc feedback. Second, they'd allow us to really drill down on a particular topic and get insight we could act on. When we act on the feedback we receive from our customers, it shows them that we're listening to them, that we really care. The communities enable us to do that."

How CDW's Communities Work

CDW launched its first online community in March 2004. A year later, the initial community was split into three separate communities: one each for small, medium, and large business customers. Today approximately 400 customers participate in each of these three communities. The company has also launched two additional communities: one for its K-12 market and one for higher education.

Unlike public forums, private communities are facilitated to ensure that conversations stay fresh and strategically relevant. Community-building and research activities keep members highly involved. Through a combination of online chat, surveys, and online focus groups, CDW elicits feedback from its community members on anything from their top IT priorities for 2007 to the topics they would like to see covered in the next issue of CDW's Biz Tech magazine or how they would spend CDW's marketing budget if they were the company's CMO.

On average, community members spend 30 minutes a week providing feedback to CDW and other community members through diverse activities, including completing surveys, participating in brainstorming sessions, offering advice, commenting on market trends, and sharing experiences.

Figure 1. Screen Shot from a CDW Community

Results

When CDW launched its first online community, the research team had to work hard to sell the value of the tool to the rest of the organization. Today, says Vass, that's no longer an issue. "Everyone wants to use the communities! Our biggest issue now is how to stagger all the activities everyone wants to do!"

In addition to the value that the communities provide to the business, it's also clear that the customer participants are benefiting as well. According to a recent survey, 84% of community members feel that their voice matters to CDW. And many have expressed how rewarding it is to see the company act on their feedback. As one community member put it, "I like the fact that a vendor cares about our opinions. If it helps make the service we receive better, then I'm all for it."

Another benefit of conducting customer research via online communities is that the voice of the customer is heard throughout the organization at a fraction of what it would cost to conduct traditional one-off surveys and focus groups. Vass estimates that the survey feature for the communities alone has saved the company about $3 million a year. Add to that the $6,000 average cost of a focus group—without company travel and expense to get geographical representation—and the company saves another estimated $1 million per year. This is more than four times the budget for CDW's online customer communities.

"Our online communities have revolutionized the way CDW interacts with customers," said Vass. "It's clear that customers today want to be heard. They want to collaborate with the companies that can help them succeed. Thanks to our online communities, our business strategy is more in tune with our customers' wants and needs than ever before, and that's a beautiful thing."