October 20, 2020 Announcing Aha! Ideas, with advanced functionality for developing customer empathy

Every product builder is told that they need to develop customer empathy. You need it in order to innovate and improve. But most companies struggle to engage with a broad community of users to gain actionable insights about what they need and what they want. Today, we are excited to announce a new product designed specifically to help teams expand the number of ideas that they capture and better understand customers.

Aha! Ideas is the best way to crowdsource feedback, engage a community, and develop customer empathy.

As part of this launch, we changed the name of our flagship product from Aha! to Aha! Roadmaps. More than 5,000 enterprise companies and 400,000 users trust our roadmap software to build lovable products and be happy doing it. And if you have used it, you know it includes essential idea management capabilities as well. But do not worry, all Roadmaps plans will continue to include the existing essential idea management features so you can continue to seamlessly incorporate customer insights into your strategic planning process.

But there are many companies that just want to collect feedback and do not need robust product management and roadmapping capabilities. Our new product is ideal for them. It is perfect for teams working to engage employees or jumpstart an innovation program, for example. It comes with two plan options — Ideas Essential and Ideas Advanced.

You can also now upgrade your Roadmaps account to add Ideas Advanced capabilities. This gives you broader options for collecting ideas and new tools for engaging and empathizing with your community. It can be added to any annual plan for $20/user/month or to any monthly plan for $25/user/month. Please contact us at support@aha.io if you would like a demo of the new capabilities or would like to try using them in your account.

The advanced idea management capabilities enable you to expand how you collect feedback and develop empathy with portal translations, empathy sessions, and in-app community feedback.

Let's take a closer look at what you can do if you choose to upgrade and use the new functionality in Ideas Advanced:

Crowdsource ideas in five languages

Make your ideas portal available in English, Spanish, German, French, and Dutch. This encourages customers and employees to engage with the portal and share ideas in their language of choice. Once enabled, the portal is displayed in the language chosen in each user's browser settings. Standard portal text and email notifications are automatically translated.

Customize the terminology and email templates for each language.

Conduct live empathy sessions

Bring groups of customers together for an online conversation via chat that you moderate. Focus the discussion around a specific topic. You can automatically include customers who voted or commented on a related idea and manually add others. Creating a discussion guide helps you prepare exactly what questions you want to ask and the order. Launch polls during the live session to quantify your research, then review the transcript from each session to summarize important learnings.

Star insightful messages and convert each one into an idea.

Gather in-app community feedback

Embed a feedback widget in specific pages of your web application. This makes it easy for users to share their thoughts while they are actively using your product. But what makes this totally unique is that your users can see all of the feedback and interact with one another. You can add a widget to as many pages as you want. Update the text prompt to reflect the page the user is on to keep the conversation focused. Then convert insightful messages into Aha! ideas so you can prioritize future improvements.

Customize your feedback widget to match your brand.

Discover exactly what your customers want and develop the empathy needed to truly understand why.

We also just delivered a fresh design that you can use for all new ideas portals regardless of the plan you are on. In addition to the more modern look and feel, portal users can easily sort ideas by recent, trending, or popular — as well as filter by status. For existing portals, an administrator will need to enable the new design in the branding section of your portal settings.

Contact the product experts on our Customer Success team at support@aha.io for a live demo or to try advanced idea management functionality in your Roadmaps account free for 14 days. We will be happy to show you a better way to develop customer empathy.