The Value of Real Customer Involvement
This fine article concludes with the need to create some tools to get in touch with customers in a more efficient way. I'm pretty sure the companies that will be successful in the future will coproduce their products or services with their clients. At first I thought PlanetFeedback was poised to be a place where companies and customers would meet and exchange. Apparently I was wrong since the feedback I sent them has been left unanswered for a month. Here's the nice letter that they helped me write:

"September 13, 2000
TO:
Pete Blackshaw , CEO
PlanetFeedback
1128 Main Street
Cincinnati, OH 45210

FROM:
Olivier Travers

RE: PlanetFeedback incident number 205646

Mr. Blackshaw,

I am writing with a suggestion concerning PlanetFeedback.

Specifically, I would like to suggest that you allow people to discuss suggestions they would like to do to a company, such as new features they'd like in a specific piece of software.

Venting against lousy service is useful. But what I'd really like is us consumers being able to collaborate between us and with vendors, so that we have a more active role in defining their future products. That would beat any market study.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Sincerely,

Olivier Travers"

Apparently he's not interested. It's sad because I don't really care about complaining to lousy companies. I'll stop buying from them and tell as many people as possible to avoid them. On the other hand, when I'm able to establish a dialog with a vendor that actually listens to my suggestions, I suddenly feel like an über-consumer. Notice the terminology used by PlanetFeedback in its template letter: if a customer writes to a company it's an incident.

Of course you can't follow up on everything some guy might ask. But please start conversations with us, we know how a business is run and will accept any priority management that makes sense. Any company that fails to recognize this will be rejected à la Microsoft. And it won't be limited to software, because we've come to expect a respectful attitude you know.

11/29/01 update: one of their programmers let me know about Reality Click.