One of the challenges facing product managers is how to gather feedback and new requirements from customers so that they are representative of the customer base and not just one-off features for a given customer. This problem has exacerbated with the current economic downturn as travel and conference budgets have been slashed, making it even harder for the product managers to get in front of customers and hear their opinions. However, within the past couple of years, new 'social software' products have emerged onto the market which allow product managers to gather feedback and requirements from all of their customers. The first popular use of this 'crowd sourcing' software was Dell's Idea Storm.
Dell's Idea Storm web site allows the public (i.e. Dell's consumer customers) to make suggestions for improvements and changes to Dell's consumer product lines (usually laptops and desktop PCs). In addition to suggesting enhancements, visitors to the site can also view suggestions made by others and vote for or against these ideas. This enables the Dell product managers to get feedback and suggestions from the thousands upon thousands of customers, neatly prioritized by popularity. Now, I will say that prioritizing requirements is not a popularity contest (I tell customers that we are not running "American Idol" style voting) and the Dell product managers still have to decide which suggestions they want to implement and which they will reject. And to the credit of Dell, their product management team are active on the Idea Storm site, providing feedback on the suggestions and providing updates on which ones they will implement - and even which ones they will not implement. So Idea Storm provides a channel for customers to give feedback and suggestions (i.e. a voice in the future direction of the products) and a channel for the product management team to communicate back to those customers.
Starbucks implemented a similar capability with their My Starbucks Idea website. Interestingly, the Starbucks site is based on SalesForce.com's Force.com platform, which is the foundation platform for their cloud offerings.
There are other, standalone products that provide very similar capabilities to those offered by the Idea Storm and My Starbucks Idea website. One of these that I have used is IdeaScale. This product is a cloud-based offering that allows customers to provide feedback and suggestions (ideas in IdeaScale's terminology) and then vote on these ideas. Voting can be simple up/down votes or poker chip style voting, where every customer gets a pile of chips (i.e. votes) and they can allocate them them amongst the ideas as they see fit. The poker chip style of voting allows the customer to show a prioritization amongst the ideas rather than a simple up/down vote. The number of poker chips given to each customer can be controlled by the system administrator.
With IdeaScale, you can decide whether the site (and, therefore, the ability to submit and vote on ideas) is open to the public, to just customers or only to selected customers. This gives you, the product manager, the ability to control which customers have a voice in the product direction and features. While IdeaScale is not perfect as a "voice of the customer" tool, it certainly provide enough functionality to make the effort worthwhile. It is also licensed as a subscription product, either a monthly or annual subscription, which makes the cost of setting up a voice of the customer (VoC) program a lot more affordable - at $99 per month, it's possible to run a trial VoC program and after a few months decide if it's worth continuing.
My personal experience with using IdeaScale as a VoC tool was that customers liked the ability to easily access the site and make product suggestions. The ability to vote (using poker chip voting) and quickly see the most popular suggestions was something else that they liked. The tool gave them the sense that they had a voice and a vote in the features that would be included in our products in future releases. It also allowed the product managers to use the customer suggestions in the product roadmaps and reference the tool as a source of (i) the idea and (ii) the popularity amongst the customer base. The tool provided a simple 'idea lifecycle' whereby the status of a given idea could be updated to 'In development', 'Implemented', or 'Closed'. This allowed the product managers to provide status feedback on the ideas and allowed the customers to see which ideas had been chosen by the product managers for implementation. This last capability was valuable is the product managers could point to this as evidence that we were listening to the customer base and implementing some of their suggestions - this was always a bone of contention at the annual user conferences and it was nice to have evidence that we were implementing their suggestions.
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