A New Record Type for Improved Idea Management

View ideas by company in Aha! Ideas Advanced.

April 6, 2021

A New Record Type for Improved Idea Management

by Claire George

214 votes. This is how many of you wanted to be able to group submitted ideas by customer. It was our third most popular idea, but our product team could not evaluate the true need by votes alone. How many different companies contributed to that vote count? Did they have an active subscription? And what have we delivered for them lately? We knew that if our own team wanted more details about ideas data, you would too.

You can now use organization records to see a detailed view of ideas by company and analyze requests by customer segments.

An organization is simply a way to represent the company or account that individuals belong to. You could already capture basic information about an organization in Aha! Ideas, including the company name and associated contacts. And you could then add proxy votes for existing ideas on their behalf.

But you told us you wanted the same thing that we did — a way to group all user-submitted ideas, votes, and proxy votes in one view to gain a full understanding of each customer's needs. This update makes it possible to do exactly that and benefit from the full power of our data model.

The ability to manage ideas by organization is available for customers in the Ideas Advanced plan. This plan is ideal for organizations that want to expand the way they collect feedback. It includes features like dynamic forms, portal translation, empathy sessions, and in-app feedback widgets.

The examples below show an Aha! Ideas Advanced account. Aha! Roadmaps includes essential idea management capabilities and customers can always upgrade to Ideas Advanced. If you would like to trial this advanced functionality, just email us at support@aha.io so we can help you get started.

Here's how to start incorporating organization records into your idea review process:

Create your custom layout

Organizations are now a record type. This means you can create a custom layout for organizations and add as many custom fields as you like. This flexibility is ideal for capturing CRM-like information about your customers, such as their size, location, industry, revenue, and which plan they are on. In the example below, we are tracking company location and subscription type.

You can create a custom URL field to link to the corresponding organization record in your CRM system.

You can create a custom URL field to link to the corresponding organization record in your CRM system.

Add organizations to your account

Now you are ready to populate your organization data. There are three ways to add organizations — individually, CSV import, or you can let our software automatically create organizations for you based on the email domains of your portal users. You must specify at least one email domain for each organization to connect related portal users.

You can also import organization details that match your custom fields via CSV to keep the data fresh.

You can also import organization details that match your custom fields via CSV to keep the data fresh.

Understand each customer's needs and track what you have done for them lately — in a single view. Find the organization you want and open the record to view the details about their feedback. You have a beautiful overview of an organization's ideas data, with charts to visualize status and overall portal engagement. Explore popular ideas, recently submitted ideas, and recently shipped ideas in the feedback tab.

When you add a domain, the organization analytics will automatically populate based on related portal user ideas.

Analyze customer feedback

Remember those custom fields you created? Now you can use them to report on feedback trends across different groups of customers. In the example below, we created a pivot report to analyze the needs of customers on premium and partner subscription plans. This gives us a better sense of what these users are most interested in so we can make better prioritization decisions.

Use the record hierarchy to adjust the record types shown in your pivot.

Use the record hierarchy to adjust the record types shown in your pivot.

With a more holistic understanding of which customers are asking for what, you can build more lovable products.

Take the next step with these newfound insights and engage your customers. Set up a live empathy session and invite key members of an organization who voted on an idea you want additional feedback on. Gather feedback on early designs and poll your participants. You will have a focused group that is already invested in the idea.

We have more updates planned to support detailed views of individual people and segments, as well as an integration for syncing customer details. Tell us what other functionality you would like to see in our ideas portal. You will be notified when the status of your idea changes — so you are always informed on what we are building next.

Start a free trial today — be happy

Sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 400,000 users trust our cloud-based software to build lovable products.

Aha! Ideas is the best way to crowdsource feedback, engage a community, and develop customer empathy. The Ideas Advanced plan offers sophisticated capabilities like what is described above to expand the ways you collect feedback and engage with your customers in real time.

If you are looking for a complete product management suite, choose Aha! Roadmaps. It includes essential idea management for crowdsourcing feedback. If you are interested in features like the organization record, you can upgrade to Ideas Advanced at any time.

Claire George

Claire George

Claire is passionate about helping product development teams learn how to bring their strategy to life. She is the director of product marketing at Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software. Claire has 20 years of marketing and software experience. Previously, she led product marketing at an agile-based work management platform.

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