Does the clients’ opinion matter?

During our course, we have talked continuously about the innovation process. One of the main motivators is related to the identification of a need that has not been (completely) fulfilled. So what happens when a client decides that he will not only point out what he needs to a company but also he decides to be proactive and provides an improvement to that organization’s offer? Will that initiative be appreciated by the organization rather than disregarded? Is the phrase “the client is always right” not important when we talk about innovations?

I found an interesting article called Why American Airlines doesn’t fly online, and what they should do about it (November 2009). Dustin Curtis felt tired of trying to deal with the AA.com booking a flight. In his condition of a user interface designer, he wrote to AA to offer an alternative user friendly website. After that, he received an anonymous mail from a member of their design team making reference to “the culture and processes employed”. Then, branding seems no longer paying attention to clients’ voices, especially in a big corporation. As this anonymous person expressed, “AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means”. Then size matters... it can take to inertia (Customer's Site Redesign Exposes the Sad Truth about Corporate Inertia, November 2009). It is time to innovate not only in customer service but the whole customer experience, as Curtis expressed in his article (The response, May 2009). Will, then, corporations start developing meaningful innovations for their clients?