Collecting product and services ideas from your customers is a great idea, right? An ideation platform will allow you to collect customer feedback, use crowd-sourcing to improve your products and services, grow your relationship with your customers through co-creation… in other words it is a technology that can enable mass collaboration with your customers.
Not so fast partner! Implementing and maintaining an ideation community takes a lot of effort, during both the planning and maintenance stages. While marketing may be ready to gather customer ideas to demonstrate that they are listening, product development and operations must be ready to act on ideas that are both popular with customers and align with the company’s business objectives.
Key steps to creating a successful ideation community:
- Get executive support for an ideation community. They can serve as a champion for the community and get the appropriate teams bought in.
- Determine where to start. Do you have a flagship product or service that customers would love to help you improve? SAP’s Idea Place is not all-inclusive, but it lets users suggest products and solutions to add to the topic list.
- Get commitment from those products or services teams that they will act on the approved ideas. Ideally, you can agree on a schedule for implementing ideas. Have a software product that only updates once a year? Strive to implement a number of ideas into that product each year. Have a product or service that can be continually improved? Get commitment to implement a certain number of ideas spread throughout the year. Dell implements about 10 ideas per month and in 2011 Intuit implemented 24 ideas from Inner Circle feedback.
- Find resources to moderate the ideation community. This includes standard community housekeeping as well as finding the correct people to respond to ideas when necessary and changing the status of the idea to indicate where it stands. Starbucks uses two Idea Partners to make their community run smoothly.
- Routinely review the ideas and decide which ones to act on. Consider setting up a process where ideas over a certain number of votes are reviewed by the teams responsible for that line of business. Other consideration factors may be the cost of implementing the idea and whether or not it supports the objectives for that business line. Threadless allows submitted designs to be scored for 7 days before determining whether to print them and P&G Connect and Develop looks for ideas that are strategically aligned with their business and provide a win-win for P&G and the idea submitter.
Once the ideation community is launched the real work begins:
- Promote the ideation community to customers through multiple touchpoints, paying specific attention to where your company previously has collected customer feedback. Send those customers to the new ideation community.
- Actively moderate and review ideas. Set customer expectations by keeping them updated about the status of their ideas. Statuses such as acknowledged, under review, coming soon, not planned and implemented are easy to understand. On the salesforce.com IdeaExchange, you can easily see which ideas are under consideration and which were delivered in the latest product release.
- Communicate reasons for not implementing popular ideas. Don’t just let them hang out in the community without a response. Customers will appreciate your transparency. Forrester says “For ideation sites, transparency is key” (membership required).
- Lastly, celebrate ideas that do make it to market. Customers want to see that you are listening to them and want to know what improvements have been made that make their lives easier. It may even convince them to buy the next upgrade. National Instruments launches their customer-driven software improvements at NIWeek, their annual user conference.
Because ideation communities are only one way to innovate with your customers, don’t miss:
10 Crowdsourcing Success Stories
5 Steps to Success in Customer Innovation Programs
A Co-creation Primer
How to Turn Social Media Assets Into Social Co-Creation Assets
Note: Some examples used in this post (SAP, Intuit, P&G, Salesforce and Dell) are current or former Ant’s Eye View clients.
An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt, Laura Feeney and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.