Suggestion box for the community era
Traditional suggestion box approaches often prove ineffective for most businesses. The standard approach is a one-to-one communication channel with no visibility into previous suggestions or topics that are already being considered. And, due usually to a lack of resources by the company, many suggesters never receive feedback on their suggestion. This typically results in fewer and fewer suggestions being made.
Idea Magnet empowers a web 2.0-friendly community-driven suggestion box. Our approach uses the "wisdom of crowds" to collect, refine, and rank suggestions, and can highlight natural hot-spots of activity. With Idea Magnet's enterprise-friendly workflow engine, business owners do not have to wait for the "monthly updates" but can instantly connect and engage with the user community. Idea Magnet spurs a conversation about the specific topics of interest, allowing everyone involved to share not only their interest in the suggestion but also providing a way to get the message out about what is being done about a particular request.
Shortcomings of a traditional suggestion box
'One to None' communication. When the user inserts a piece of paper into a physical box or hits the send button on an email to the suggestion box, any meaningful communication between the user and the enterprise ends. This tends to discourage users from contributing and diminishes the traditional suggestion box as a channel for good quality information.
Impersonal for contributors. People like talking to people, not machines, robots, or automated voice attendants. In large part, this is because a live person gives instantaneous feedback. In the traditional suggestion box scenario, the contributor has taken their own time to provide a suggestion, yet they rarely receive feedback, and often do not even receive acknowledgement of their suggestion (outside of perhaps an automated email.)
Onerous for the task owner. The lack of feedback is often not by design but by force. There are often poor souls at the other end of the suggestion box, whose task is to read and review the input, forward the important items to the respective business owners, and acknowledge the contribution. Unless you have significant investments to process the incoming data with linguistic parsing, categorization, and ranking, it is impossible for a few to reasonably deal with even a nominal amount of incoming open-ended comments.
Our 3P approach Suggestions and ideas need to be reviewed on the basis of popularity, personality, and priority. Our patent pending engine lets you see the popularity and then filter, slice, and cross-tabulate the data in the context of personality -- the attributes of the people behind the votes. And for a top-down analysis, ideas can be reviewed in the context of priorities set by senior management.
Questionable quality It is not uncommon to have 900 suggestions all suggesting the same or similar ideas, since users have no way to know what has already been suggested, what is under consideration, and what kind of feedback is actively solicited.
What's different in our approach?
Open dialog. Instead of a one-on-one communication, suggestions are posted in an open forum. Other users can see what is already posted, comment on the suggestions, and vote on what they like and support.
Avoid duplicates. The most common problem with closed suggestion boxes is the natural phenomenon of duplicates. If something is glaringly obvious, it will be noticed by the majority of the community, resulting in several duplicate suggestions that point out the same issue. Thus, lack of visibility to other activity creates an additional burden on folks tasked with sifting through the rubble.
Community ranking. The "crowdsourcing" is best on display if you let your community know that you are actively looking for their input, and that their votes matter. People vote on ideas that appeal to them and will vote down ideas that they are not particularly excited about. Often times, the discussions around the voting helps to bring out the attitudinal and behavioral preferences of the users.
Dialogue, ability to refine and improve. If you consider a sample size of one, the experience is, by definition, individualistic. If you let that size grow to a wider audience, incremental changes in the suggestion can result in addressing a much larger aspect of a particular product or service element. Giving users the ability to comment, refine, and extend the ideas makes it easier for product managers to distill this feedback into a plan of action.
Recognize and reward. In the community world, it is important to recognize and reward "desirable" behavior. Idea Magnet has several built in capabilities to define, administer, monitor, and acknowledge what you think is worth putting on a pedestal. For certain subsets of user groups, an element of competitive pursuit can often spur contributions and Idea Magnet has built in capabilities for leader boards, top 10 lists, and other activity-based rankings.
Let us know how we can help with your suggestion box. We would love to hear from you!