Challenging question: How to innovate with customers?
The advent of social technology has created great opportunities for you to collaborate with your customers and make them active co-creators in the product and service development process.
You know the importance of establishing a co-creative strategy, but do you really know how to innovate with your customers? The task is challenging, because you need to manage multiple, internal and external, sources of input at every stage of the innovation process.
At OneDesk, we believe that given the right tools every organization can manage innovation with customers, and other stakeholders, like business partners and employees, both inside and outside the company.
Three answers to the daunting question: How to innovate effectively?
1. Have a system in place to capture valuable insights
The OneDesk customer portal is just one example of how to innovate with your customers by capturing their valuable insights. Combine the customer portal with a powerful innovation and idea management application and you can sort though, elaborate upon and manage customer insights and other important comments or questions shared by other team members. This system supports your end goal: to create a truly innovative process that efficiently incorporates ideas from all stakeholders, outside and across the organization, and promotes the creation of stellar products and services.
2. Make it easy for everyone to communicate with one another. Today many teams are virtual, which makes the ability to communicate or interact face-to-face extremely difficult. Adding to this challenge is the increase in customer communication via the web, through email or customer portals. Getting everyone communicating with each other in timely and efficient ways can be achieved with the effective use of social communication tools. OneDesk makes it so easy to innovate with your customers. The built-in suite of cutting-edge social collaboration tools keep everyone connected and on the same page. Features include a complete collaboration inbox, discussion forums, email and live chat.
3. Show your customers you care by taking action
Organizations receive thousands if not millions of ideas from customers from many various channels every year. Being able to manage these ideas is one thing, but what sets you apart from the competition is being able to take action and infuse these ideas throughout the development process. This means that customer suggestions actually get used to create new or enhance existing products and services. Requirements management and task management software in OneDesk helps to create real requirements and then assign them to tasks across the organization. Learn more about how to innovate and take actionable steps.
We want to know: Does your organization know how to innovate successfully with your customers? Does your innovation process include employees and business partners? How do you promote co-creation and other forms of innovation?