Innovating is actually quite easy. Producing innovations that your customers will actually want - and buy from you is the difficult part. How do successful companies go about it? They start by listening very closely to what their customers and employees have to say.
Keep your customers engaged, and get them to provide continuous feedback: from a private, select group in the early stages of a product or service to general customer feedback and ideas for on-the-market products.
Innovation and great ideas comes not only form a limited set of employees working on a particular problem. Sometimes other employees bring a fresh perspective and creative ideas to old problems - or even dream up completely unrelated products.
Zoho Discussions allows you to create special forums and topics for collecting customer and employee feedback, and where they can vote (anonymously and only once!) for the ideas that they like the most. What is working? What can be improved? What products or features should you prioritize over others?
To make the voting process intuitive, each topic type has its own type of voting.
Once a topic is posted, users can express their opinions through commenting, voting and changing topic status. After flowing through these status, an actionable conclusion is drawn. After this, the topic can be frozen (locked) for participation and retained for archival purposes. Some topics could add value by reinforcing another more detailed participation. These, we call related topics.
Zoho Discussions comes with an inbuilt spam engine and also lets the user community flag content as inappropriate. Thus helping drive down spam and irrelevant content.
Accessing your community using your own URLs is an important aspect of branding. In addition, Zoho Discussions also offers customizable friendly URLs for most filters and activites, so you can embed relevant links where you want.
SEO options are available in Zoho Discussions to help your content be more visible to search engines (if you so desire) and help your customers find the content they are looking for faster.
You can provide a seperate email id to receive feedback from your discussions deployment. We are coming up with an embeddable feedback form shortly too.
Comprehensive and flexible user management allows you to add individual users, user groups and the entire company. Once accepted by the user / group each user can be individually administered, assigned labels and permissions.