Creating a community for your customers

http://empowered.forrester.com/groundswell/book.html

 

After reading the chapter 9 to 12, I have a deeper understanding of five primary objectives, listening, talking, energizing, supporting, or embracing, that can be achieved by groundswell. Nowadays, almost no companies can get rid of the groundswell—which can help you deliver and get some information to and from your customers. Besides outside of companies, groundswell also brings transformation to inside companies.

 

Actually, in chapter 9, it gives us three cases about embracing the groundswell. After finishing the reading of these cases, I, as a consumer now, begin to think that what’s it for me? It’s true that many companies regard their customers as their God. They not only provide the best products and service to them, but also involving them to be part of brain power. “People who’ve connected with customers in this way are always amazed at how much more quickly they generate ideas. It’s because they’ve just supercharged their dozens or hundreds of engineers with thousands or millions of other minds (page 183).” However, customers will ask “what’s it for me?” To be customers, they will think how do they post ideas on the website. If they do, do these ideas or suggestions really work? What they can get from them?

 

 

 

The case in the chapter 9, salesforce.com: embracing through an innovation community intrigues my interest on this website. After launching the salesforce.com Idea-Exchange (ideas. salesforce.com) and the ideas were channeled and directed by the groundswell of Salesforce. com’s own customers. In one year, over five thousand ideas arrived; now the best ones bubbled to the top. I am so interested that why the customers of salesforce.com have a lot of passionate to post their ideas. When I open salesforce.com and then click the session ideas, I can read that “Welcome to the IdeaExchange. The IdeaExchange let sales. Com customers get involved. You can suggest new enhancement, vote and comment on your favorites and interact with product managers and other customers.” According to this short introduction of IdeaExchange, we can know that it’s not just post ideas on the website, more importantly, IdeaExchange help salesforce.com create a community to its customers.

 

Besides posting their ideas on the website, customers also can add a comment on other ideas as well as vote for their favorites. As a matter of fact, they can help each other in this community. Most importantly, their ideas actually work. When I open the website salesforces.com, I find that the top idea contributor, top vote contributor and top merge request and comment contributor are listed on the website. And newest achievement of these ideas, Deliver in Winter’ 13, were released recently.

 

 

 

              

In addition, starbucks also leave me a great impression. “Are you ready to change your company’s reputation? Do you want people to think of you as a company that listens(page 193)?” Starbucks does. Starbucks create a website, also a community, My Starbucks Idea, for consumers to post their ideas, interact with other consumers and talk with featured starbucks idea partners who will be on line to listen to your ideas, ask questions, tell you what you are doing behind the scenes and make sure thinks run smoothly. Just like salesforce.com, customers also can add a comment on other ideas and vote for their favorites. Consequently, the most popular one will be bubbled to the top. More importantly, “they’d have to prove they’re ready to listen to their customers and act on those customer’s suggestions, right at the point of sale(page 193).” In My Starbucks Idea, we can find the ideas in action, which shows that starbucks are listening to their customers and the ideas from them really work. It’s true that the reaction in ideas will encourage more customers to talk to starbucks and also help starbucks a lot to improve its products and services.

 

 

              

“So work on both fronts in your company—muster up the humility to listen and tap into the skill to take what you’ve heard and make improvements(page 194).” As matter of fact, a good community is not only can help a company embrace the groundswell, but also listen to, talk with the groundswell as well as helping the grounds well support itself.