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Customer Feedback Drives Product Offerings

Tags:  government  security  new products  windows  intel  intermedia.net  microsoft 

By William Toll on March 19, 2008

New product ideas come from everywhere-customers, vendors, sales teams, competitive pressures, government regulations…you get the idea. Your product dreams are often bigger than your ability to productize and bring them to market. There is a proven way to see through the clutter and prioritize the winners: Listen to your customers.

At Intermedia, we help Web hosts, MSPs and other IT service providers bring their customers’ demands for better email, Web mail, wireless email and lightweight business applications to market. We prioritize new features and products based on real customer problems articulated to us. It sounds obvious, but too many companies launch new products and features that are not solving even a single problem for their customers. The product, and in some cases the company, are doomed to slow growth and failure since the market messaging never strikes a tone with a customer.

What drives Intermedia? Customer feedback about their business challenges. Two business problems we are asked to repeatedly assist with are productivity and security—primary issues that all businesses struggle with today. Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo and AIM are great tools for communicating with others. We all use them, but using them at the office is becoming an issue for many businesses. From productivity problems to security problems to intellectual property leaks, public IM access at work is a problem.

After listening to our customers’ frequent requests, we recently launched a secure instant messaging solution based on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This product idea was driven directly from our customers and is driving rapid adoption of this new service. In the end, this product will be successful because we are solving fundamental business problems with secure, business centric, instant messaging.

RSS William Toll has held product management positions in the Web hosting and financial industry since the late 1990s. Now at the leading hosting services provider, NaviSite, William is responsible for developing the company's small business hosted product lines, including one of the industry's biggest ... (Read full bio)

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Comment by Anonymous on Monday, September 08, 2008

i have read your article and found it very Interes

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