Driving Innovation With Ideas From Your Online Community

Innovation is the key to business growth.

In order to come up with a successful product, you need to make the most of ideas and suggestions from your customers.

In fact, putting customers at the center of innovation will help drive value to your community and brand.

In this blog post, we look at how you can drive innovation from online communities, and the limitations of idea management on Salesforce communities.

So, let’s begin!

Challenges With Idea Management on Online Communities

A challenge that commonly hinders organizational innovation is ambiguity in requirements.

You need to listen keenly to customers in order to effectively address their needs with your product, better than a competitor.

Now, for on-the-fly ideas, you can scroll through tweets or use Instagram’s poll sticker to get insights into customer needs, wants, and expectations.

However, in order to go deeper and study your market without going for extensive research, you need a better way to pick your customers’ brains.

With online communities, you can engage customers and build products on the basis of their feedback.

Since communities are a hub for idea generation, you can use them to not only understand customer needs but also give them a platform to share ideas.

But with the amount of information flooding into your community, how do you separate great ideas from others?

Managing Ideas in Salesforce Communities

The Ideas component in Salesforce enables you to build a customer-centric community and manage ideas and suggestions better.

However, it has limitations.

Limitations With Salesforce Ideas

Salesforce Ideas is currently unavailable in Lightning Experience.

Therefore, LEX users need to switch to Classic every time they want to access Ideas on their online community. In addition to this:

• Filters, as well as the search option are unavailable, making it difficult for users to search for relevant ideas
• Enabling ‘Email-to-Idea’ conversion is also not possible

Inconvenient, right?

But for every problem, there is a solution.

Overcoming the Limitations of Idea Management on Salesforce Communities

There are two ways in which you can overcome these limitations:

Customization

You can access Ideas in your Lightning Org with customization. However, you’ll need heavy coding to tailor the component according to your requirements.

Moreover, it can take a few weeks to get the job done. Therefore, customization may not be the ideal solution.

Salesforce-Native App

You can also access Ideas in your Lightning Org via a Salesforce-native application. This is a relatively secure and easy option that does not affect system performance.

Apps are equipped with multiple out-of-the-box features that simplify idea management in your online community.

Over To You

While customization enables you to develop features that fit business needs, it’s a time-consuming process.

On the other hand, a Salesforce-native application offers high-end flexibility.

Manage Ideas in Your Salesforce Community With IdeasPro