Blog 9 - My StarBucks Idea - Harnessing Customer Innovation

What is a successful organization? In three words, it is one which ‘embraces customer suggestions.’ Li and Bernoff refer to this as embracing the groundswell. Simply put, organizations should listen to customer conversations on online forums and integrate these suggestions into their products/services. The key for organizations is not just to listen, but also to create avenues for customers to talk, such as through private communities, and ratings and reviews sections on websites.

For organizations, harnessing customer innovation in product development processes is as easy as ABC:
A: Always encourage customers to talk on forums, and to rate and review your products and services.
B: Be sure to listen carefully to this conversation
C: Channel these ideas, compliments and complaints into enhancing your product/service and corporate brand.

Organizations and consumers should build a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship. After all, an organization needs feedback on improving its products and services and on developing new ones, and the consumer is eager to tell the organization exactly what they need or desire. Such collaboration is ideal.

Starbucks is an excellent example of an organization that has tapped into community ideas through social media and made customers an integral part of their innovation. Starbucks received over 17,000 coffee ideas in the first year of the launch of its online forum, "My StarBucks Idea." To date, the company has received 20,627 ideas just about coffee and expresso drinks. The site is overflowing with ideas - in fact, just 6 minutes ago, a customer posted this: “Please offer ‘truvia’, a natural calorie-free sweetner.”

To effectively tap onto customer suggestions, Starbucks has organized its site into ‘Product ideas,’ ‘Experience ideas’ and ‘Involvement ideas’ with the last category referring to corporate social responsibility and community involvement. Importantly, the coffee giant tells customers what has been done with their ideas by placing a tick next to “Under Review”, “Reviewed”, “Coming Soon,” and “Launched.”

Do check out their site and share your thoughts on what they did well and what they could do better to engage their customers. http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/