Retail April 15, 2008, 4:55PM EST

'Hey, Starbucks, How About Coffee Cubes?'

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Customer input led to a “splash stick” that prevents annoying spills Andrew Popper

The Gift Economy

What's most striking about the conversation at MyStarbucksIdea is how constructive it is. One idea that has gained traction is to embed a customer's regular order on her Starbucks card so when she enters the store she could swipe the card, her order would be put in and paid for, and she'd avoid (and shorten) the line. Other suggestions call for the ability to send in orders by phone or Web. These customers are telling Starbucks that long lines irritate them. But note well that they didn't come online to complain. Instead they offered solutions. This is the gift economy of online.

The company is still finding its way on the road to true transparency. In the discussion about those ideas for the Starbucks card, one of the idea partners wrote that he or she was working on some "secrets" in that area but couldn't talk about it yet. Well, if customers are truly going to have seats at the conference table, shouldn't those deliberations be collaborative and in the open? "I think it is changing and evolving our views of confidentiality and competitiveness," Bruzzo concedes. "There are advantages to having that kind of transparency because it creates more engagement, and we actually get to iterate on our solutions while we're building them."

You could say this is nothing but a fancy suggestion box. Benioff argues no. "The dead-end suggestion box and the auto reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated," he says. In this age of nonstop, immediate communication in blogs, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube, he says, "your customers are having a conversation about your products and practices. The question every company has to ask is: 'Do I want to be part of this conversation? Do I want to learn from it? Am I willing to innovate on the basis of it?' "

Dell, Salesforce, and Starbucks each have parallel implementations of Ideas behind their corporate firewalls that are reserved for employees. There, too, they are batting around suggestions. On Starbucks' internal site, Bruzzo says, there's a "heated debate" going on now about "dress code and what does it mean to allow people to express themselves?"

Bruzzo advises other companies to follow Starbucks' example in using Ideas. "Don't underinvest in adopting it into your business process," he implores. "See it as an important part of how you run your business." He also says it's O.K. to make mistakes. "Your community is incredibly forgiving, actually, if you show a real interest in listening and responding."

Customers, it seems, can be great bosses.

Jeff Jarvis is an outspoken commentator on technology and media. Jarvis, who heads the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, will post a longer version of this commentary on his blog, Buzzmachine.com.

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