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A business academic has said that organising creative meetings with your top customers can benefit your company and strengthen your working relationships.

Dr Edward Glassman, through is article ‘Team Creatvity At Work II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best’, also claimed that these meetings solved any problems which interfered with the ‘special customer’-supplier relationships and even helped businesses to innovate new ideas for products that customers need.

To host one of these meetings, which should run for a series of sessions, you need to invite top representatives from your best three customers – they will appreciate that you are inviting them to give their input and that you are trying to streamline your ‘Special Customer’ services to benefit them. You should also include an equal number of members from departments in your own company.

For the first session you should meet with the new creativity team and invite each person to talk about who they are, what they want to get from this meeting and what resources they are bringing to the meeting. This gives you a good idea of what customers want. Dr Glassman suggested doing this over dinner.

In the second session mix your business’s innovation team with the customers in different teams and try to identify problems by creatively examining the current state of the ‘Special Customer’ relationships. For example analyze whether phone hotlines between company and customer are affective or look at how long it takes for products to be delivered.

For the third session use your knowledge of the problems and discuss with customers about how these problems can best be solved. Not every solution will work but ideas will continually be generated.

Finally ask every member to present their opinions on how to improve the ‘Special Customer’ program. Discuss these ideas and decide on how to implement these ideas.

Dr Glassman said that in some cases this can result in the business, which organised the meetings, being the sole supplier to their special customers.

He also claimed that these meetings are a fun, effective and focused way of provoking change and solving problems within companies.