Asking your customers for suggestions seems like a great way to improve your services or products. Two recent items I came across suggest it’s not something you should do without clearly thinking through what you are trying to achieve.

Report 103 is an excellent newsletter from Jeffrey Baumgartner on applied creativity and ideas in business and this week’s edition follows on nicely from my previous post about feedback. If you buy the idea that customer feedback is a rich source of service improvement ideas then proactively soliciting ideas from your customers (and non-customers) seems like an even better idea. (more…)

To round off last week’s series on feedback here’s a story from my recent experience with the BBC. Prompted by a discussion on Ecademy about the new series of Dragon’s Den I realised I had been really annoyed by the trailer.

I’m a fan of most business programmes, particularly the ones we can watch as a family - my 11-year old son has been addicted to both Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice - but I get more than a bit irritated when the “showbiz” aspects of the programmes overshadow the business content. (more…)

A recent post on the Wikinomics blog raises the question of how much time the use of Facebook and other social networking wastes at work. A recent study suggests 233 million working hours are lost each month due to Facebook. Rather than using shock statistics to impose a knee-jerk ban, companies should recognise the potential benefits of social networking to deliver superior service. (more…)