Suggestions, Please
Jeff Jarvis has an interesting piece in Business Week on the latest iteration of corporate suggestion boxes. Starbucks and Dell, among others, created websites that solicit customers' ideas... One wants ice cubes made of coffee so the iced coffees don't get watered down; another wants shelves in the bathrooms to hold their drinks when they can't hold their water any longer. Suggestion boxes are infamous for being completely ignored, but Jarvis talked with the head tech guy behind the Starbucks site, who promises to make the connection between customer and company a meaningful one:
"To close that loop in an authentic way," he argues, the company must make a commitment to "building those ideas together with customers.... We're truly going to adopt it into our business process, into product development, experience development, and store design."
The full article is online here. And I'll throw open our suggestion box for the day... If you could pick any company to create a suggestion site, which would it be? And what suggestion would you make?
Tags: Dell | Jeff Jarvis | Starbucks | Suggestion box
10:15 AM ET | 04-24-2008 | permalink
