Feedback Manager's Guide to UserVoice

Triaging Suggestions

To encourage user participation, it’s important to keep your feedback forums organized and easy to use. This may include merging duplicate ideas, removing spam items, or moving ideas to the appropriate location. Below are some resources which will help you accomplish this goal.

When you’re getting started managing ideas, we have a great Getting Started Video that will walk you through the basics. VIDEO: Getting Started with Managing Ideas

Don’t have time for a video? Check out these articles:

• Saved views: Use filters to set up personalized views and notifications for the ideas you care about. This makes it easy to find ideas that meet your criteria (forum, category, label, status, customer activity level) and stay on top of the feedback you’re interested in. Learn more here. 
• Merge ideas: Combine redundant ideas while retaining supporters and comments. Learn more here. 
• Bulk actions for ideas: Save time by selecting multiple ideas to move, delete, or mark as spam. Learn more here. 
• Organize ideas with internal labels: You can use labels to group ideas about a certain topic or product area. One way you might use this is to search for all ideas that contain a keyword, then apply a label to those ideas. Learn more here.
• Editing ideas: When viewing an idea in the admin console, click “Options” then select “Edit” and you’ll be able to change the idea’s title, description, forum, and category. If you are changing the title or description, be sure to maintain the user’s original intention and be careful not to put words in their mouth. 

*PRO TIP: Optimize your forum organization so that suggestions come in efficiently and require less grooming. Check out this article to learn more about forum organization.

Customer Communication

It’s important to close the feedback loop and let your users know their feedback is being seen. By keeping your forums up to date, you can build trust in the feedback process, improve your customer experience through transparency, and increase usage of new functionality.

• Public Status updates (pro and premium plans): Status updates are an important part of the feedback forums because they close the loop with customers and let them know where their feedback stands. You can post a status like “Under Review” or “Completed” to let your users know where the idea stands. Even if you don’t plan to build what they want, it’s crucial to make them feel heard. Learn more here. 
• Email subscribers of an idea (pro and premium plans): To send a private message to the users who have subscribed to updates on an idea, click on the idea in your admin console and you’ll see the option to “email subscribers”. This can be useful if you need to ask the subscribers for more details or invite them to be beta testers.

*PRO TIP: Create a threshold for the number of votes on an idea, after which you will commit to posting a status update. A good starting number for this is 10 but it will depend on the size of your user base.

Identifying Trends

When you’re receiving lots of feedback from your customers, you need a way to detect patterns and know what customers are focusing on. The functionality listed below will help you “filter signal from the noise” on your forums so your Product team can be confident about what customers want and make informed decisions.

• Activity Report (pro and premium plans): This report will help you measure engagement and feedback channel adoption. It displays trends for how much feedback is coming in and where it's coming from. Use this report to makes sure you’re meeting your goals for feedback volume and that all channels are being used effectively. Learn more here. 
• Build custom reports with the Analysis Export (pro and premium plans): The Analysis Export lets you download ideas along with the data we have about their supporters. You can manipulate this data in a spreadsheet to determine which ideas are relevant now, see how many accounts want an idea, and rank ideas by market segment. Learn more here. 

Managing Users

Part of maintaining a feedback forum is keeping your user information up to date. We’ll walk through a few common user management tasks and how to complete them in UserVoice.

• Delete user profiles: If a user requests that their profile be deleted, you can do that for them from the admin console or they can do it themselves from their web portal settings. Learn more here. 
• Block a user: If you have a user who is posting inappropriate content, you can prevent them from posting from that user profile. Learn more here. 
• User information: If a user needs to change their email address, name, password, or subscription settings, they will need to make these changes from their web portal settings. To do this, they can sign into the web portal, then click “settings” in the upper right-hand corner.