Dell IdeaStorm Harnesses the Power of Customer Feedback to Drive Product Innovation

“With Salesforce Ideas, the best ideas bubble to the top. We’re able to gather all our customer feedback in one place and use the robust management tools to track and implement the ideas.”


Challenge
  • Dell—a leading global systems and services company—needed a scalable way to collect feedback from its community, helping the company capture feedback and drive innovation.
  • Dell interacts with more than three million customers every day.
  • The company also wanted to create a secure employee community to capture candid feedback from 80,000 employees from across the globe.

Solution
  • Dell CEO Michael Dell was so impressed with Salesforce IdeaExchange and the way it drives product development at salesforce.com that he immediately wanted it rolled out at his company.
  • Within three weeks, the company had launched Dell IdeaStorm—built on the Salesforce Ideas platform—to give customers and enthusiasts a chance to “walk the halls of Dell” and share ideas that influence product development, services, and operations.
  • Posted ideas compete on equal footing; comments and voting ensure the most popular ideas bubble up to the top. 
  • Within the first week, Dell IdeaStorm had collected more than 500 ideas; by the first month it had collected 2,500 ideas. 
  • EmployeeStorm is a secure community that allows employees to post ideas regardless of where they sit within the company; in the first two weeks of launching it had gathered more than 700 ideas.

Results
  • Ideas bubble up through IdeaStorm, allowing the company to identify pain-points and hone in on areas that need improvement and enhancement.
  • Customer feedback on IdeaStorm led the company to build select consumer notebooks and desktops pre-installed with the Linux platform. Dell also decided to continue offering Windows XP as a pre-installed operating system option in response to customer requests.
  • Dell leverages the wisdom of crowds to evaluate and prioritize customer feedback.
  • Dell customers and enthusiasts have a chance to be a part of the product development process—to tell the company what they want to see in future releases.
  • Executive-level confidence drives home the message that IdeaStorm is an important way to engage customers and broaden innovation.
  • EmployeeStorm breaks down the silos natural in corporate life and increases collaboration—allowing, for example, tech support employees in Asia to communicate and share ideas with sales reps in Round Rock, Texas. 
  • EmployeeStorm also engages employees at every level to comment on their area of expertise and to participate in the discussion.
 
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