Aha! Roadmaps | Track special customer information

There are many reasons why you might want to track how the work your team completes affects a subset of your customers. For example:

• You might want to track releases that will require you to enhance your support documentation.

• You might have a professional services team that focuses on your top client's needs.

• You might be updating your messaging in response to changes in the competitive landscape, and you want to track how your target audience reacts.

Let's take the first example and build it out through the rest of this article. Note that in this example, we assume that you use Aha! Roadmaps to manage a product workspace, but of course you may use Aha! Roadmaps for a variety of teams, and may have selected your workspace type accordingly.

Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

• Custom tables for customer training

• Create your customer training table

• Link customer training to your releases

• Communicating and reporting on the training plan

• Tailor it for your company

Custom tables for customer training

We want to show how upcoming releases affect our key customers. A custom table would enable exactly this type of detailed tracking. Here, we provide one example of customer information you may track to demonstrate the flexibility of custom tables.

Custom tables, available to Enterprise+ customers, further extend our custom field capability so that you can truly design the way you manage important information. With custom tables, you enhance full records with as much supporting detail as you wish. This associates the whole record to your Aha! Roadmaps roadmaps with a single link.

Often when shipping a new release, customer training is necessary to educate your users. Launching a new release of features is an example of when a custom table would be a viable solution to manage details related to that training.

For those in the organization responsible for training, there are multiple details that would need to be maintained to facilitate that training:

• Main customer contact details

• Scope of new functionality to be taught

• Date of the training

• Number of students and class size

• Trainer assigned

When a new customer experience is delivered in a release, the associated details for training would be readily available, so that it would be easily managed. The team could also share the training plan with the stakeholders through the roadmap and track its progression through reporting.

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Create your customer training table

Let's build a customer training custom table together.

The first step is to create the custom table at the account level. Select Settings ⚙️ Account Custom Tables and click Create custom table. You will need to be an administrator with customization permissions to do this.

You can create a custom table from scratch yourself, but in this case we can take advantage of the Aha! Roadmaps example custom tables. Click Create customers table to create a pre-built custom table, which we can modify to include training elements.

By default, your new table will be named "Customers." Click on it to give it a custom name, such as Customer training.

Next, let's walk through the custom fields in your new custom table. You can always add or remove fields to your specific needs:

• Name of the customer, as a Text field. This could be the company name.

• Primary customer contact as a Text field. This could be a person's name at the company.

• Phone number of the primary contact, as a Text field.

• Email address of the primary contact, as a URL/Email field.

• Number of employees at the company, as a Number field.

• Account manager of the overall relationship, as a Users field.

• Notes for any comments you want to add to the customer, as a Notes field.

• Status of the customer as a Predefined choice list.

Each of these fields become a column in your table. To turn this table into one that tracks customer training initiatives, add the following fields by clicking Add custom field:

• Scope of the training, perhaps broken into modules or packages, as a Predefined choice list.

• Training date as a Date field.

• Trainer as a Users field.

• Students as a Number field.

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Link customer training to your releases

To detail training for a particular release, create a custom field to specify which customers need training under Settings ⚙️ Account Custom fields. Select the Releases tab, then create a Many to many relationship field and select your newly created Customer Training table as your custom table.

The new custom field, Training, is now available in each release when opening up the detail drawer for a release. Simply click in the Training area and select all customers that require training.

By clicking on the customer name tag, you can open up the drawer view of the custom table record, which allows you to instantly drill down to view all the key training information associated with that customer.

Communicating and reporting on the training plan

Monitor and review the status of training with all involved stakeholders through a custom roadmap under Roadmaps Custom. Click the Views dropdown, select Related views, then Custom roadmap: Releases by workspace to get started.

To review the specific training details, click Customize view Edit data and then add the data column for Customer Training.

You can visualize releases by the trainer name with custom color codes. Use the collapsible right sidebar to configure this, and any other aesthetic options. You can also view dependencies for any record on your roadmap by hovering over a record and clicking the View linked records icon. Analyze critical dependencies — including fields on dependent records — by creating custom reports and charts.

Note: This record icon only appears in your Aha! Roadmaps account view, not in presentations or shared webpages.

You can now save your timeline and share it with others by adding it to an Aha! Roadmaps presentation.

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Tailor it for your company

This custom table example is a simple one to demonstrate the flexibility of custom tables. How you track customers at your company may require additional data and different styles of reports. Custom tables can be used to track any data you choose. If you would like to discuss how to tailor this use case for your company's needs, contact the Aha! Roadmaps Customer Success team for guidance.

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