Product development with IdeaExchange

The search for the perfect solution that can incorporate marketing research, product innovation requests, product personalization and customer involvement seems to have come to an end with the launch of SalesForce.com's IdeaExchange.

Although as simple as a forum, what is extraordinary is the idea behind this tool: customers can interact with the organization and among themselves in order to establish priorities for product development. Customers can log to this forum in order to request new features or indicate improvements needed, but also to evaluate and comment on other proposal. Moreover, the means for interacting not only with SalesForce.com but also with other customers are provided.

The popular ideas (with the higher number of votes) are implemented in the following releases of the application (based also on other criteria, of course). SalesForce keeps track of the next implementations for user information under the IdeaExchange site, closing up the loop of product-request and customer communication. As ideas can come not only from customers but also from employees, two such ideas forums have been implemented, each oriented to the specific sector.

This is such a simple and effective way of building a product development process that one might ask: why haven't I thought about it?

Although already used internally in SalesForce itself, IdeaExchange was launched as part of their offer in Winter 08. Among the customers that have tested it (with a successful implementation, one should say) is Dell (see its implementation IdeaStorm: http://www.dellideastorm.com/ ). A well-known result of IdeaStorm is the PC and Laptops offer powered by open-source Ubuntu OS (http://www.ubuntu.com/).

More information about IdeaExchange can be found at: