Part four: giving the customer a voice

By Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor

Finally, in the CRM space itself is the example of Salesforce.com’s new IdeaExchange which was set up to give the Salesforce.com customers a voice in shaping future product releases through an ongoing, live public debate. To date, more than 5,300 ideas have been posted, with 98,000 promotions, and numerous ideas have been incorporated into Salesforce.com and partner applications.

Clarence So, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce.com, explained: "The community-based innovation we've created with IdeaExchange benefits the entire salesforce.com community, not only by giving our customers the opportunity to shape the future direction of our service, but also by providing our partners and developers with qualified ideas for developing their own products."

For example, a Salesforce.com customer posted an idea for a Salesforce feature on IdeaExchange that was promoted by more than 7,000 members of the salesforce.com community. Salesforce.com partner AppExtremes responded to this tremendous interest and delivered a fully-certified solution within only six weeks of the original posting.

"IdeaExchange truly benefits the entire salesforce.com ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers," said Mark Whiteside, COO, AppExtremes. "We created Conga Courier in response to both the original posting and the many comments added by other members of the community, making this product a truly collaborative effort. The strong demand for a solution provided the business justification for a crash development effort, and the resulting solution is a win-win for everyone."

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff calls it an "entirely new way to listen to customers on how to build great enterprise software, and satisfy their needs." "We want to be as transparent as possible to all of our customers," he explained. "Customers can vote on our product roadmap, they can decide on our logos. It's all part of the wider Successforce.com initiative. That is all about making the customer more successful, getting more adoption and more capability for the customers. What other software company offers this level of feedback and lets its customers vote for features?"

If the examples of Salesforce.com, Dell and Kraft are anything to go by, then more should be offering just such facilities to their customers. The technology is there to create ever more and ever more near real-time interactions with customers. There’s no excuse for not being able to hear the voice of the customer. If you’re not giving the customer what they want but what you think they ought to have, then there’s really no excuse any more. But if that’s your attitude, you probably won’t be around very long for us to have to worry about it…

This month's stories:

Customer strategy maturity

The challenges and opportunities underpinning customer strategies

Customer strategy: the Direct approach

Innovation

Can open innovation save the West?

Plugging into co-creation's potential

Segmentation

Squeezing customers together with segmentation

The seven perils of segmentation

Customer objectives

Making the economics of customer recruitment and retention add up

Lock the customer, not the phone: stopping telco churn