Some of our clients and industry friends have been asking us about the Market Research Society (MRS) Awards we’re going for, so by popular demand, each week in the run up to the awards event we’re going to give a few more details about one of the nominations… starting with Sage and STRAT7 Jigsaw’s B2B nomination.
Sage wanted to improve customer centricity, so Jigsaw set up an innovative SME community that was effective at improving customer closeness and providing impactful results. B2B communities are rare beasts – and are often complex and difficult to get right.
The online community used innovative approaches (including Whycatcher, our proprietary research platform) to ensure high levels of stakeholder engagement, effective participant recruitment and effective participant engagement.
Its core focus was producing actionable insights. And this was exemplified by a community-within-the-community project which helped Sage launch Sage Earth; a service for SMEs to track and reduce their CO2 emissions. In effect we recruited a new, pop-up community from the main community so that we could build an authentic understanding of the end-to-end customer experience of using Sage Earth. Sage stakeholders themselves recognised that the only way they could research the concept (within timing and budget constraints) was using the community – and the results led to significant strategic changes in how the service was launched and its future roadmap.
Overall, this is a great example of how a primarily consumer methodology can be used for B2B research, providing a cost effective, action focused resource with direct impact on Sage’s business.
Next week, we will be looking at our nomination for the MRS Sustainability Award.
If you’re interested in getting more detail on this nomination, or any others, please get in touch!
Alex Johnston, Oct 24
English (UK) 
English (United States)