Rolling Out UserVoice to Sales, Success, and Support

Buying UserVoice gives your product team a home for customer feedback. Filling it depends on the people who talk to customers every day. This guide covers what to set up first, who to invite, the tools your teams capture with, what a good capture holds, who triages it, how your teams hear back, and how to tell whether it is working.

What a good rollout looks like

A rollout works when capturing feedback becomes part of how your customer-facing teams already work, and when they can see what happens to what they capture.

• Every customer conversation can end in UserVoice. Your teams capture from where they already are: an email, a CRM record, a support ticket, or a message in Slack.
• Requests collect on existing ideas. Your teams add customers to ideas that already exist instead of creating new ones. Demand for the same thing builds up in one place, where the product team can see it.
• Every request names a customer. Each piece of feedback is tied to the person who asked, and through them to their account. The product team sees who is asking, not just what is asked.
• Your teams hear what happened. When an idea's status changes, the people who captured feedback on it get an email. Teams that see results keep capturing.

Who owns the rollout

Set up the basics before launch

Your teams form their view of UserVoice in their first week. Finish the setup before anyone is invited, so their first captures land somewhere that makes sense.

Invite your teams

Anyone with a contributor, view-only admin, or admin role can capture feedback. Customer-facing teams usually join as contributors or view-only admins.

• Contributor is its own seat type. Your plan includes a set number of contributor seats. Give one to anyone who talks to customers every week, and ask your UserVoice rep to help size each team.
• You decide whether these roles see revenue. Read-Only Revenue Access, in your settings, shows or hides revenue for view-only admins and contributors. It is on by default, and only the account owner can change it.

Create teams first

1. In Settings, open Extension, go to Create teams, and select Add team… for each group, such as Sales, Customer Success, Support, and Product.
2. For people already in UserVoice, open them in User roles and access and use the Teams tab. A person can belong to more than one team.

Teams show each group's captures in the Activity Report and in an idea's activity feed. Anyone not on a team appears under No Team.

Send the invitations

1. In User roles and access, select Add team member.
2. Enter each person's email address, separated by commas. Use the address they use in Slack.
3. Choose the Contributor license type, or an admin with View-only permission on ideas.
4. Under Teams, select the team they belong to.
5. Choose a reply-to address, so replies reach the rollout owner, and select Send invitation(s).

Each person gets an email inviting them to accept and create a profile. It also points them to the extension on the Chrome Web Store.

Where your teams capture

Every capture tool does the same job: it ties a customer's words to an idea and to the customer who said them. Give each team the one closest to its conversations.

Feedback connectors, which pull feedback from calls and tickets automatically, are coming soon.

What a good capture holds

A capture is useful when the product team can act on it without asking the person who logged it. That takes four things. Share them in your launch and pin them in your team channels.

Search first, then link or create

Before you submit

• Capture one request at a time. If a customer asks for three things, capture three times, each on its own idea.
• Write a public description for a new idea. Left blank, the customer's feedback becomes the description, and a public forum shows it.
• Leave Subscribe user to updates on. It's on by default, so the customer hears when the status changes.
• Answer the internal questions. Deal stage or renewal context helps the product team weigh the request.
• Don't capture your own opinion as customer feedback. Flag the idea as important and add a reason, which only admins see.
• Route bugs, outages, pricing, and contract questions elsewhere. Capture feature requests, product gaps, and workarounds.

Launch week

Launch with a short announcement, a live demo, and a few people who capture visibly from the first day.

1. Post an announcement in each team's main channel. Say what to capture, the tool to use, and who to ask.
2. Run a short demo in a meeting your teams already attend. Capture one real request from an email and one from Slack, and add one of them to an existing idea.
3. Introduce your champions by name, so people know who to ask.
4. Answer every question in one shared channel, so the answers help the next person.

A sample announcement

Adapt this to your own channel and names.

Triage and close the loop

Captured feedback always lands on an idea, so triage means checking new ideas and new feedback, not clearing an inbox. Give it an owner and a schedule.

How your teams hear back

Measuring adoption

The Activity Report, under Insights in the admin console, shows who is capturing and from where. Check it every week in the first month.

The first 30 days

A schedule that works for many teams. Adjust the timing to your own launch.

After the first month

• Review the Activity Report with each team lead every month.
• Invite new hires as part of onboarding, with the four parts of a good capture.
• When an idea your teams captured on ships, say so in their channel and name the people who captured it.