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You probably won't want to replace all your call center PCs with iPads, and doing "real" support work likely requires a full keyboard. But we're betting at least a few of your customer support staff have to either take work home with them or monitor issues outside of the office. Accessing the customer service help desk from the road probably isn't a good justification for buying an iPad, unless you have a lot of reps in the field using help desk software. But help desk access is a good use for iPads that your company or your employees already won.

The help desk for the iPad market seems to be just getting started. Here's a look at what's available so far.

Companies such as Dell and Starbucks have created public facing websites for gathering ideas from customers. These two examples are powered by Salesforce.com's idea management module, but there are many other options. Facebook is an increasingly popular place for people to interact with companies, so it's a great place collaborate with your customers on their ideas. Spigit just launched its idea management app for Facebook today, but there are others.

Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company's topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

Fear of failure rarely keeps serial entrepreneurs down. In fact, said Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga at today's FailCon event, "As entrepreneurs and programmers we're used to failing aren't we? If you look at it as A/B testing until you get the perfect product, then it's not an issue. It's important to learn from it...Otherwise, honestly, why change a f@#king thing if you're not going to measure the impact?"

Finding new ways to reach, engage with, and learn from customers is a cornerstone of Enterprise 2.0. The idea and suggestion management space is one slice of that effort, and in this series we'll review the major players in this space and look at what options your company has for participating in it. The idea and suggestion management space has essentially three types of vendor offerings (with some bleeding across categories).

MeasuredUp is a review service that allows customers to share their positive and negative experiences about local or online businesses, but until now, these businesses did not really have a chance to reach out to these customers through the service and rectify potential customer service issues. Now, MeasuredUp has introduced a new featured, Direct Connect, which allows companies to claim their identity on the service and reach out to their customers.