In today's economic climate, many organizations face a crucial choice: take shelter in their core business
and try to endure the current crisis, or intensify efforts to innovate and grow. Companies that don't focus
on improving what they have and creating what they don't, face the prospect of deteriorating growth, plummeting
profits, or worse.
You already know that integrating the Voice of the Customer (VOC) into your product or service development
initiatives is critical to your success. Research has shown that 60% of new products fail because they don’t
adequately meet customer requirements. The question to ponder, therefore, is not “should I,” but “how can I”
integrate VOC into my initiatives when facing obstacles such as travel restrictions, geographically dispersed teams,
shrinking headcounts, slashed budgets, and customers stretched too thin to provide feedback? Fortunately, the
Internet and Web 2.0 technologies are opening up new and innovative ways for you to interact with and listen to
your customers:
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Google/Yahoo groups or FaceBook/MySpace. People with a shared interest can “meet,” form discussion
groups, post messages, and receive feedback and answers to questions. You can join or launch a group for free,
so it is a good way to tune in and listen to your target markets. Over the longer term, however, it is hard to
keep members engaged and is not conducive to bi-directional communications for gathering product feedback.
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LinkedIn. This business-oriented social networking site allows you to form communities around
professional interests. You can create a group for free and invite your customers to join, post information
about new product developments, and facilitate networking opportunities. LinkedIn is mainly a networking site,
however, so there is little attention given to community discussions.
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Full-fledged online communities. Web 2.0 platforms, such as Jives Software, Ramius, Leverage Software,
ONEsite, and Small World Labs, allow you to build online communities for your customers. All of these tools offer
advanced capabilities for sharing files, discussing topics of interest, posting messages, blogging, collaborating
on content via wikis, and generally building a sense of community. However, these sites can be expensive to
maintain, and can grow to become unmanageable as forum threads grow and discussion topics broaden.
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Online panels and focus groups. These tools, offered by Applied Marketing Science, Vovici, MarketTools, and others, allow
you to create and manage online panels and focus groups, providing a voice to customers, employees, and key stakeholders.
Since these groups operate on a much smaller scale than online communities, they are usually more cost-effective,
but also offer fewer capabilities.
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Online brainstorming. Tools like IDEALYST®, from Applied Marketing Science, move the ideation process to
the Web, and allow participants to brainstorm with their team and with clients in a fun and collaborative way.
IDEALYST is built on a unique reward philosophy that boosts creativity, and rewards participants based not only on
their individual contributions, but on the impact of their ideas on others. These types of tools allow you to use
the power of group problem-solving to envision new products or services, identify product improvements, and generate
ideas on virtually any topic.
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In times like these, it’s unwise to just hunker down and wait out the bad news. Instead, look for creative and
cost-effective ways to continue to listen to your customers, and then, listen harder than ever!
—Marina Gil-Santamaria
msantamaria@ams-inc.com
© Copyright 2009 Applied Marketing Science, Inc.
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