Your First 30 Days with UserVoice
A week-by-week plan for admins, from first setup to your first leadership update.
On this page
UserVoice works best when the structure, data, people, and habits come together in the right order. This guide is your plan for the first month: what to set up each week, who owns it, and which guide to open for the details. Follow it as written, or move steps around to fit your team.
How this plan works
Each week builds on the one before. Structure first, so feedback has somewhere to go. Account data next, so every idea shows who's asking. Then people, then customers, then the habits that keep it going.
Set up forums, categories, labels, and statuses, and connect your CRM.
Invite the teams who hear from customers, and give them capture tools.
Open your portal and widget to customers, and announce it.
Start a weekly triage, close the loop, and send your first update.
| Who | Owns |
|---|---|
| Your UserVoice owner | Settings, structure, invitations, and the plan itself |
| Product managers | Their forums or categories: triage, statuses, and linking ideas to the roadmap |
| Customer-facing teams | Capturing feedback from calls, tickets, and emails |
Week 1: Set your foundation
Decide where feedback lives and how you'll describe its progress before anyone starts adding it.
| Set up | Decide | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Forums | Split by audience or product line, and keep the number small | Strategies for Forums, Categories, and Labels |
| Instances | Whether separate brands or teams need their own instance | When to Add Another UserVoice Instance |
| Categories and labels | Categories customers recognize, and labels your team filters by | Strategies for Forums, Categories, and Labels |
| Statuses | A short public set customers understand, and internal statuses for your workflow | Closing the Loop with Statuses |
| Submission questions | The context you need when an idea is posted | Custom Questions That Make Ideas Actionable |
Start smaller than you think. A few forums, five to ten categories each, and a handful of statuses. Adding later is easy; untangling is not.
Week 1: Connect your account data
Connect your CRM in the first week. From then on, every idea shows the accounts and revenue behind it, including ideas captured on day one.
- Connect Salesforce or HubSpot in Settings, Integrations, and choose the account fields to sync, such as revenue, plan, and renewal date.
- If you don't use a CRM, import accounts and users from a file instead.
- Set up single sign-on for your portal, so customers arrive as the users you already know.
- Decide who can see revenue, using Read-Only Revenue Access for view-only admins and contributors.
Week 2: Bring in your teams
Most feedback reaches your sales, success, and support teams first. This week, give them a fast way to capture it.
| Do | How |
|---|---|
| Invite people | Contributors, or admins with view-only permission, depending on what each team needs |
| Group them into teams | So reports show which team captured what |
| Install capture tools | The browser extension for email, CRM, and support tools, and the Slack app for messages |
| Run a short launch | A 20-minute session: what to capture, how to search first, and how customers hear back |
Seats, roles, invitations, and launch week, step by step.
Running UserVoice on your teams' capture alone, and adding a portal later.
Week 3: Open your portal
With ideas seeded by your teams, the portal has something to show on day one. Now invite customers in.
- Brand the portal, write a welcome message, and post a few status updates.
- Turn on single sign-on and put the widget in your product.
- Add the portal link to your help center, release notes, and support replies.
- Send the launch email and in-app message.
Setup, sign-in, the widget, private portals, and announcement templates.
If you run betas, set up a private forum for testers now.
No public portal? Skip ahead. Teams running an internal-only program can spend this week on capture habits instead.
Week 4: Start the rhythm
The habits you start now decide whether UserVoice stays useful. Put them on the calendar.
| How often | What | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | Triage new ideas: merge duplicates, label, assign owners, and set a status | Turn a Messy Backlog into a Clear Signal |
| Weekly | Post status updates on ideas that moved, with a message | Closing the Loop with Statuses |
| Monthly | Review the roadmap, link new ideas to features, and update linked ideas | From Feedback to Roadmap |
| Monthly | Send a one-page update to leadership | Reporting on Feedback to Leadership |
Set your Insights email to weekly. Under My Notifications, a weekly summary of trending ideas and status updates keeps the rhythm visible.
Put AI to work
Once feedback is flowing, AI takes on the counting, sorting, and drafting.
| Tool | Use it for | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| The UserVoice agent | Questions about your ideas and accounts, answered as tables you can act on, inside the admin console | The UserVoice Agent – Ask in Plain Language |
| The UserVoice MCP | Working with your feedback in Claude, ChatGPT, or Codex, alongside Jira, Slack, and your CRM | The UserVoice MCP Playbook |
| Label recommendations | Suggested labels on new ideas, based on how you've labeled before | Strategies for Forums, Categories, and Labels |
| Importance ratings | Asking customers how much an idea matters to them | Prioritize by Revenue, Not Just Votes |
Try the agent in week 4. Ask it “Which open ideas have the most revenue behind them?” and use the answer in your first leadership update.
Try it with your AI assistant
1 of 4 prompts in the PDFAttach the PDF to Claude, ChatGPT, or another assistant, then paste:
Using the UserVoice guide I attached, turn the 30-day plan into a project plan for [company], with owners and dates. Ask me about our team and goals first.
Three more prompts and the checklist are in the full guide. Get it by email →
Read next
Get the full guide
We'll email you the 11-page PDF. It adds three things that aren't on this page:
- The 30-day plan on one page, to copy into your project plan
- A six-step checklist to put the guide into practice
- Four AI prompts for Claude, ChatGPT, or your assistant of choice, including one that uses the UserVoice MCP to work with your own feedback data
