It is today's news that Intranets.com, a company that provides online web-based team collaboration services, has decided to open ears and a forum to listen to what their customers really want.
Photo credit: Nara Vieira Da Silva
Regardless of how much of the Intranets.com decision is part of a marketing tactic or of an effective change of attitude from this company, this is a great, very positive sign: it is end users meeting the industry and starting a long-awaited open conversation.
Kudos to Intranets.com for being a leader on this front, and here is their official message about it:
Intranets.com Announces Formation of Customer Advisory Council
More Than 80 Intranets.com Customers Help Test and Evaluate New product Enhancements
Burlington, MA - February 23, 2005 Intranets.com, the leading provider of on-demand collaboration services, today announced it has formed a Customer Advisory Council to support product development initiatives. Since Intranets.com was founded in 1996, it has leveraged customer feedback in a variety of formats including monthly surveys and focus groups to make its product a success. Today, Intranets.com is the worlds largest online collaboration service with 250,000 users across 9,000 customers.
The new council, comprising more than 80 customers who volunteered to be part of the program, will provide a new interactive forum for Intranets.com to meet the growing business demands of its customer base.
In order to best serve our customers, we formed a special task force to test new product features and provide feedback throughout the development cycle, said Christine Bataille, Brand Director at Intranets.com. The input we receive helps us prioritize new applications and determine what enhancements to release next. The response to the program has been overwhelmingly positive and we look forward to growing it further over the next year.
Customer feedback has always played a critical role in shaping Intranets.coms collaboration suite. The company makes product decisions based on the information it compiles from online surveys, e-mails, and live support. Because of this, about 20% of Intranets.com customers now say a feature they requested has been rolled out and added to the product.
The Customer Advisory Council is a new venue for Intranets.com to interact directly with customers in order to expand and enhance its collaboration suite.
Currently, council members are participating in testing several product features including a new user interface and database enhancements.
In 2004, Intranets.com introduced web and phone conferencing facilities to its asynchronous collaboration facilities and launched a new online calendar with group scheduling features based on direct customer input. Intranets.com will leverage the new Customer Advisory Council to continue to deliver the powerful collaboration applications its customers rely on to run their businesses more efficiently.
For a FREE 30-day test drive, go to http://www.intranets.com/
Too bad they didn't invite me!
I have lots of advice and suggestions for Intranets.com, but haven't heard from them, since the first time I shared a good deal of advice with them last year.
From my point of view, more attention to what customers wanted was really something they needed to address, and I am happy to see they have started to take the first serious steps in this direction.
Who's next?
