Staying ahead in a fast-moving environment: How an insight community provided a leading fintech with a direct and 24/7 line to customers  

This case study is part of a year-long, 25th anniversary series that explores where insight communities have been, where they are today, and the market and customer trends that are shaping where C Space is taking insight communities next.

For years, a leading fintech company has trusted Escalent in providing invaluable customer insights from a hard-to-reach B2B audience across a wide range of research projects. With a diverse group of internal stakeholders, each with their own unique needs, the demand for market research expertise has been consistently high. These stakeholders rely on timely, actionable insights to guide their decisions, which means the volume of projects escalates year after year. Historically, these projects have been ad hoc in nature, and our client needed a solution that would allow them to maintain the quality and depth of research in an ongoing capacity while addressing the speed and cost challenges they faced. 

When C Space, with its deep insight community expertise, joined Escalent Group, the answer became clear: build a custom, global research community. This would allow Escalent and C Space to collaborate closely, combining Escalent’s subject matter expertise with C Space’s insight community expertise to craft a tailored and scalable research solution just right for our client.

The insight community solution proved to be a game-changer. By establishing a dedicated research community, the client unlocked a range of benefits that not only enhanced the efficiency of their research efforts but also provided greater flexibility in engaging with their target audience. The insight community approach resulted in:

Faster Project Turnaround
With a pre-recruited panel of engaged participants, customer surveys, concept tests and qualitative discussions could be launched and completed rapidly, enabling our client to respond to internal stakeholder needs with unprecedented speed. This agility transformed decision-making processes, ensuring that insights kept pace with business demands.

Easier Customer Access
Our client’s most important customers were already part of the community, eliminating the time and uncertainty associated with fresh recruitment. This always-on access to engaged community members meant that critical voices were never more than a click away, fostering continuous learning, real-time insights and customer centricity.

Cost Efficiency
The research community model reduced reliance on one-off recruitment efforts and expensive ad hoc studies, delivering significant cost savings. With a dedicated group of community members available for ongoing research, our client benefited from lower per-study costs, all while maintaining the high-quality insights and expertise that had defined their research approach.

The insight community didn’t just streamline our client’s research — it fundamentally changed the way they gathered and leveraged insights, making research more agile, cost-effective and aligned with their business needs.

The insight community solution not only streamlined our client’s market research operations but also laid the foundation for sustained, long-term success. By establishing a direct line to a hard-to-reach audience, the customer research community eliminated recruitment barriers, making it faster and easier to gather insights without the need for costly, time-consuming custom studies.
 
With this always-on community solution, our client gained the flexibility to seamlessly transition between qualitative and quantitative research approaches, ensuring they could choose the right methodology for each research need. The impact was immediate — when faced with an influx of urgent requests, the community allowed them to execute multiple studies simultaneously, something that would have been near impossible without an insight community. This newfound agility has transformed how they operate, empowering them to act on insights in real-time and stay ahead in a fast-moving market. 

To mark 25 years of insight communities — and C Space’s 25th birthday!  — we’ve reimagined our most popular guide, Customer Inside, to explore where insight communities have been, where they are and where we’re taking them next.