Situation: As the medical technology company got closer to the launch date of its new platform, the Marketing Director turned her attention more fully to how the company was going to get input from its customers about product enhancements. The systems that they had used in the past were black boxes. Customers logged their ideas online and then the company downloaded them to an Excel spreadsheet. The ideas were summarized and the Marketing team reviewed them on a bi-weekly basis. Those ideas that Marketing felt were most consistent with the product development plan, got passed along to IT for consideration. Customers had little way of knowing whether their ideas were being considered until they saw a change in the product platform which could be months, if not years, later.
Approach: We worked closely with the Marketing team to help them see that the collaborative approach that they had taken to developing the new platform, working with medical research labs around the world, should not stop at its launch. They could continue to co-innovate with customers throughout the platform’s entire lifecycle. Using an idea management application, customers could submit ideas in an open environment. Similar ideas could be clustered together and Marketing as well as IT could interact with customers in real-time. Customers could vote on ideas that were most important to them, helping Marketing understand what customers valued and why. The company could even use the idea management application to engage its customers in discussions about specific issues with which it was grappling.
Result: Once they decided to use an idea management application as the foundation for their customer enhancement system, the Marketing team was thrilled to find out that customers were much more willing to provide input when they got immediate feedback. Many customers were eager to collaborate on ways to solve some of the thorniest challenges that got in the way of using the new platform. Marketing discovered that the biggest challenges were not technical – instead many involved changes that had to take place in the medical research labs to effectively use the new platform. As a result, Marketing initiated several customer support groups that focused on sharing ideas about successfully changing lab processes.
