Last Friday was a great day for me because a major piece of development was released on ParkLogic. It was such a great relief to see it go live that I felt like cracking open a bottle of champagne! Amongst a lot of behind the scene fixes there were two critical parts of the platform that empowered a much greater level of interaction with our customers.

The first item was what we call "Answers". It is a database of questions and answers to help our clients utilise the various features of ParkLogic a lot better. One of the biggest complaints that we've had is that ParkLogic is so extensive that it's often quite hard to come to grips with its power.

In "Answers" clients can literally ask questions and instantly view answers or if there isn't an answer then the ParkLogic team can answer the question. This then grows the database of answers to all sorts of questions. The nice thing about the system is that customers can also provide answers or question answers and these are also all searchable and categorised.

The second feature that was released was "Ideas". ParkLogic customers can submit ideas and other customers can contribute to the online discussion around the idea or even vote for it so that all the good ideas percolate to the top of the idea pool.

In only a few days we've had a stack of great ideas being submitted and it's been really good to see customers directly being able to influence the direction of future development. For example, one idea was to have an online "chat help" for those customers needing some direct and immediate assistance. This was a great idea so we implemented a solution 24 hours later.

I had a lot of people tell me that it's very dangerous asking customers for their direct opinions. What happens if they say some crazy things or only suggest stupid ideas? I prefer to believe that customers are a lot smarter than many companies give them credit. The result is that there have been some incredible ideas that we would have never thought of and the result will be a better platform for customers. How good is that!

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