One of the greatest features you can offer your customer or partner base as a product-driven company is an idea engine. It allows those who use your product regularly to offer suggestions on how to improve it, features to add, or what new products to create. Giving the power to your customers to help make the decision on what gets added to the next release helps drive value to your community and your brand.
To that point, Salesforce has a built-in, aptly-named solution called Ideas, a place for users to post, vote and comment on ideas. You can segment areas, called Zones, by product or type of customer, and further group through categories within the zones. Each idea posted can have a status – customizable to your company and process – along with any custom fields you’d like to offer your customers. You can provide reputation based on activities, as well as have “expert” users, those who have the authority to speak knowledgeably about your company and product (MVPs, if you will).
Getting Ideas to Your Customers
Salesforce Ideas is quite vanilla out-of-the-box, and while a highly custom Ideas implementation is possible and offers the greatest flexibility, it’s often a bit out of scope for most. Lucky for Salesforce users, standing up a Lightning Community is quick, easy and you may already have one. Why not add in the ability for your customers to provide feedback on your products?
Salesforce Ideas is not actually Lightning-compliant yet, and therefore you can’t surface it in a Lightning Community as-is. Enter the Idea Zone app. This Perficient-built AppExchange offering is a set of drag-drop-and-configure Lightning Components designed to leverage Ideas from within a community. Installing it takes minutes; configuring and launching, just a few hours!
Originally posted on Perficient’s Salesforce blog, I encourage you to read the rest of the article by clicking here.