Salesforce Ideas
A Closed Loop Process for Innovation
Here's an overview of the process behind managing an online community, from launch through implementation of top ideas.
Typically we'll find an executive sponsor who decides the organization needs an application like this to help them become a more responsive, innovative company. The implementation process can be very fast, because it is often a greenfield. You need to think about what you want to accomplish, and who you need to involve. You need to customize the application to match your website and create a back end process for managing ideas.
When you launch your community, you might open it up to employees or customers and partners. You can start simple, but we also support the ability to create lots of communities for different topics, departments, or customer segments.
The basic premise is that a customer or employee submits an idea, creating a virtual meeting place to discuss the idea. Picture every idea within your organization having a unique identifier. Once it's out there in the public domain, the community can discuss the idea, add comments, and can vote it to the top.
Salesforce has very robust tools for managing the community, and reporting on the top ideas. Since everyone logs in to submit ideas and can be tied back to their identity, you can run reports on who your top contributors are, and what type of customers voted for a given idea.
You will also want to create a review process, so that the top ideas from the community are reviewed. The best ideas will be assigned to project teams who will see them through to fruition, and report on their status.
When an idea is under consideration or delivered, you'll want to communicate that back to the community to let them know you are listening. You can do this through a status field on the idea, or through a blog which highlights success stories and recognizes key contributors.
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