John Ragsdale of SSPA recently did an interesting post entitled, “Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers”. In his post, John talks about the importance of getting input from customers and how it isn’t easy these days…

With many companies launching ‘voice of the customer’ initiatives, input from customers is becoming more sought after than ever before. As support organization push towards Value-Added Support, direct input from customers is critical to delivering service offerings and products that not only fit customer needs, but help deliver more business value and better enable customer success. But capturing customer feedback isn’t always easy, and relying on surveys as the only mechanism to gather input will soon exhaust the patience of some customers. Finding new ways to collaborate with customers, and encourage peer-to-peer customer collaboration, is a good strategy to collect the necessary input, as well as build stronger relationships with customers overall.

He has also talks about ways in which Web 2.0 capabilities can help…

The key, then, is to take your existing processes for customer collaboration and migrate them to the Web, incorporating community capabilities such as forums and Wikis to replace existing email distribution lists, conference calls, maybe even some local user group meetings. Once this online beachhead is established, you can begin to expand the community to incorporate additional processes and additional customers. When other customers see lively discussions going on around topics they are interested in, they will be much more likely to join in and participate.

As my previous post on SaaS 2.0 implies, we completely agree with John. We are currently working on innovative ways to take familiar collaborative capabilities and combine them with time-proven customer support practices to deliver benefits to both customers and vendors. Stay tuned.