Ideas management: Involve everyone
Does your company give customers the opportunity to submit their ideas regarding product development or service improvements to key decision-makers? Does your company use customer and employee ideas to ensure the right products and services are developed in a cost-effective way? Ideas management is essential to business survival. Every business starts with an idea and continues to grow and prosper with a steady flow of ideas for product design, production, marketing, problem-solving and customer service. Organizations need an ideas management system that allows a broad involvement of employees, customers and other stakeholders to generate real innovation. Most organizations have idea management programs systems that involve employees yet few can efficiently include customers, stakeholders and employees across the organization.
Ideas management systems increase engagement
Every organization needs to recognize that customer retention, employee engagement and the delivery to market of profitable products are the result of good idea management systems. Collaboration and involvement increases the probability that customers will love the products that are launched. The most effective idea management systems offer clear and easy ways for customers to submit ideas, suggestions for improvement and concerns to key people and teams in your organization who will take immediate action.
Threadless, one of the most successful online customized t-shirt retailers in North America, is an excellent example of how fully embracing the notion of customer engagement and employee action makes good business sense. They provide their clientele an online forum to discuss product ideas and suggest new designs for their new collections. The success of this organization is directly dependent on the millions of suggestions that fuel new ideas for t-shirts that are produced and readily accepted by the customers.
Ideas management and barriers to communication
Creating a community for your customers to share and vote on ideas is a great first step. Your customers are not the only people who need an effective ideas management system. One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is the inadequate sharing of information between departments and operating units. Instead of sharing ideas across units most employees discuss issues only within their teams or units, unintentionally create or reinforce the silo effect. Barriers to communications lead to lack of innovation, and when ideas are not shared the organization is doomed for failure.
Improved ideas management systems need to be used to promote more effective internal and external communication and collaboration between, employees, partners and customers. This increases innovation which ensures delivery of better products and services.
Ideas management and OneDesk
Use OneDesk’s collaboration tools to harness the collaborative power of your customers, partners and employees to drive innovation. tools make it easy to share, discuss and manage ideas from diverse internal and external sources. The tools ensure that:
• You collect ideas from your customers, consistently and continuously, and give them a platform to vote so that the most important ideas rise to the top.
• Your customer ideas don’t fall to the wayside and action is taken by creating requirements, linking them to tasks and incorporating them into the product development process.
• The barriers to communication are eliminated by having all team members across the organization participate in discussions, create blogs related to ideas and chat with others on specific topics.
• You get quick answers to product or service-related questions
Click here to try OneDesk for free today.
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