11. Listening to customers – no, really listening

Back to contents of State of the net issue 9

Fiachra Ó Marcaigh Director, AMAS

That staple fixture of a million office-based cartoons – the suggestion box – is alive and well and living on the Web. But it is not the suggestion box as we know it.

Starbucks, Salesforce.com and Dell have all opened up public forums for customer ideas and feedback.Their aim is to tap into the creativity of their customer base and harvest the best ideas. How do they pick the best ideas? They let the customers choose them.

All the customer-submitted ideas are voted on by other members of the customer forum. Some gain a following and rise to the top. Others die off.

The key point? This process happens in public, transparently – and much more cost-effectively than other forms of customer research.

“The dead-end suggestion box and the auto-reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated,” says Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

Ideastorm.com was set up by Dell last year to build an online community “that brings all of us closer to the creative side of technology”.Since then, it has gathered almost 9,000 ideas, and these have been voted on over 600,000 times.

So far, so good. But before a company dives into an online dialogue with customers, it needs to consider some serious questions, such as:

1. Negative comments: How robust a debate do you want to foster? How much negative commentary will be allowed?
2. Censorship allegations: If the company removes negative comments will it be attacked for censorship on top of whatever the original complaint was?
3. Motivating users: What is the best way to get customers to join in and contribute? Will they do it altruistically, or will they need a more tangible incentive?
4. Legal risk: How can the company manage legal risks, such as the dangers of defamation and copyright breach?
5. Staffing and training: What resources will be needed to manage the conversation and ensure that it creates value for the company?
6. Fostering discontent: If some criticism is ill-informed, will other customers realise this, or will they take it at face value? Will giving unhappy customers a platform lead to many more complaints?

Benioff argues that in our networked age all companies and brands are being talked about by their customers constantly. Fostering that conversation at least gives the company a chance to join in.

Ultimately, the decision is whether the company really wants to join in a conversation with customers – or just wants to say it does.

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 9