Developing company culture by involving the customer

In a recent study, Booz Allen Hamilton found out that companies which directly engaged their customer base around new products had twice the return on assets and triple the operating income of their peers.

There are more ways to involve customers and thereby change the role of customers from being passive consumers to being active participants. One way, which can lead to both higher efficiency and more innovation, is using interactive and collaborative technologies such as blogs, LiveChats, polls, as well as document, photo and video-sharing. These and similar internet tools are continuously increasing in numbers and also constantly getting better.

Can you give some examples of the way the company/companies, you work for, is/are using or planning to use interactive and collaborative technologies such as the ones mentioned above, or others, to get more and faster feedback faster from customers – and thereby become more innovative as well as efficient?