Just Launched! — Sales and Support Teams Can Vote for Ideas on Behalf of Customers

Idea management powers innovation. This is why ideas portals in Aha! are a critical part of your product team’s workflow. You can capture requests in a central location and then review, analyze value, and promote the best ones directly to your roadmap. But there can be gaps — customers and prospects often share feedback with other teams they interact with, such as sales and support. Those colleagues deserve to participate in idea management in a more seamless way.

You can now enable proxy voting in your private ideas portals.

It may be helpful to revisit how idea management in Aha! works. An idea is a type of data record in a workspace (just like a feature or release is a record). The way that users submit and view ideas is based on the portal type. Public portals are visible to anyone with the URL. Private portals are visible only to users who meet your chosen criteria, such as a specific email domain, a list of invited users, or via single sign-on. You can customize idea visibility even further via settings.

Thousands of companies use Aha! ideas portals. Some also use our integrations with Zendesk and Salesforce to make sure ideas that are collected in other systems are not lost. But many of you told us you wanted another way for cross-functional sales and support teammates to share ideas from customers and add critical business details. You wanted those users to be able to represent what customers are asking for directly in Aha!

Now you can let colleagues capture feedback and add proxy votes on behalf of your customers. Thinking about adding hundreds or thousands of colleagues to your portal? Portal users are free and unlimited — so go ahead and invite as many sales and support colleagues as you want. They will appreciate participating in the ideation process.

And if you already have a customer-facing portal, do not worry about people adding duplicate ideas. When a user begins typing in a new idea, the auto-lookup capability helps prevent duplicate requests. If you do not have a portal yet, administrators in Aha! can create new ones.

Here is how you can enrich your idea management with proxy voting:

Enable proxy voting Enable proxy voting and customize the proxy vote form. Standard fields include organization, contact, and description — and you can add your own too. Selecting what information is required to submit will help bring consistency to how internal teams share feedback.

Understand who is requesting the new functionality Sales and support team members can quickly share who the customer is and what they want in the proxy vote form. If it is a new idea, team members can capture the request then add a proxy vote that includes the customer’s details and any additional helpful information.

Analyze and promote ideas As you review recent submissions in your ideas dashboard, you will see a new section for proxy votes in the idea details. Having all the votes in one place gives you a clear understanding of the demand for a specific idea and its business value. Then you can promote the best ones to your roadmap with confidence.

Keep everyone informed of status changes As an idea is prioritized and the status changes, portal users who submitted proxy votes automatically receive an email notification. This helps sales and support teams manage customer expectations — so they can provide an outstanding experience and win more business.

Proxy voting gives internal teams a place to advocate for customers.

Start by making idea management a priority. The next time a sales or support teammate tells you about a customer request? Have them add the new idea or vote for an existing one on the customer’s behalf.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Ideas portals are available to all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 300,000 users trust Aha! to build lovable products.