Scoring customer feedback

[Massimo Arrigoni]

We collect customer feedback on our products in a variety of ways / channels (sales tickets, support tickets, customer development interviews, etc.). We store it and work on it, but we're missing a great way to score it.

What's your recommendation for scoring it internally? Let's call an instance of feedback an "item". Multiple instances of feedback on the same thing go under the same "item". Now... to score it:

• We could use one issue in JIRA per item and have team members vote, but this way (a) we would create a huge number of issues in JIRA and (b) you can't vote down (you can only vote i.e. vote up)
• We could create a page in Confluence for each item and have team members like the page, but this way also you end up with a gazillion pages in Confluence and also you can't dislike". You can only "like".
• Also, in both cases, the same person can't vote again. Let's say the same sales person hears of a feature request again: how can they signal that to the team?

How are you handling this? What are you recommendations / best practices? I'm sure it's come up before. I just coulnd't find a discussion on this here on Answers.

Thanks much for any advice: I really appreciate it!

[Frank Stiller · Accepted solution]

Usually you would have something like CRM software for it, i guess. But just for me to understand the question better:

• Whats the granularity of the feedback? Gazillion pages or you can wait and collect and compress for quite a while. Do you want to track the concrete customer or shall it be just a checklist (you dont need to downvote on that i guess)
• how much information shall the team get. Can the team ask questions or is it quite final and the number of requests really matters. For me as a developer usually i have always a question for a feature request as its almost impossible to be in line with a client, e.g. this request sounds exactly like this other one..
• How often are these feature requests and do you need to read up historic data/resolved tasks? e.g. a simple tasklist where you just enter the number of votes and when its done check it. And after 25 improvements create a new page/excel sheet e.g. not really good to track historic data.

As i have experienced these things usually a custom field has been created in jira to tackle this, something like customer impact or some other "text/number" field to tackle the number. The perfect thing would be to have a public issuetracker where all customers can see all improvements and then either upvote or create a new one, a good sample would be github or the atlassian trackers.

I am a developer not a sales person. My preference would be (as a product owner without contacting the customer):

1. An Issuetracker (JIRA project) with links to all customer requests where i can see what they "really" wanted (more or less). Then i could decide on that what makes the most sense for the product
2. A simple table (wiki page) where each customer gets in a comma separated column so the sum is the number of requests for that feature (still more information than a simple number) but less then linked tickets
3. A task list with feature and number

Thats what i currently could think of with JIRA/Confluence default mechanics. In the end it's about a feedback translated into improvement requests and the later one is ultimately an issuetracker thing imho.

[Massimo Arrigoni]

Thanks so much Frank!

I'm still unsure on how to collect the "votes". We have around 30 people between sales and support staff. The key for me is to give them an easy way:

• To find out whether the feature that a customer just asked for has already been reported
• Add their vote

If it's a page in Confluence (which would make sense since at that point we're still in the phase in which we're discussing the feature: it's not a task or issue yet), there is still the problem of letting the sales/support staff "vote" more than one.

Would you just have them add the customer name / ID / Ticket ID / etc. as a way to vote, and then count those?

Thanks again!

[Frank Stiller]

This is quite informative: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/110373/how-does-the-jira-team-use-jira-atlassian-com

There is some feedback page (tracker), like a wiki page with a table and a column with customer id (which gives the unique number of external votes). And another system / project where the actual improvement can be worked on. Like in the given article. When you already mention that you have some customer feedback portal (CRM) then you already have such translation / transition system. It is now about a comprehensible way to track it, right? I think the wiki page is a good start.

Anyway, if you dont have the need for permission stuff and showing some fields only for some audience you usually dont have to verify no one votes more than once i suppose. And usually the product team can find out also quite easy whether a feature already has been created in the todo's.

Quite often there is not the right or wrong tool, just the tool where everyone accepts to work with ;)

[Massimo Arrigoni]

Thanks Frank, very much appreciated. For now we have decided to go forward with a table in Confluence as you mentioned above (with ticket or customer IDs of those that submitted certain feedback/feature requests), linked to feature-specific pages still in Confluence (for discussion / specifications), which will then be linked to an issue in JIRA when the new feature / enhancement has been spec'd out. Thanks again for taking the time to help!

Massimo

[Pavel Zubov]

Hi, Massimo!

You can take a quick look at Customer Case add-on for JIRA Cloud.
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/customer-case-for-jira/cloud/overview
It allows you to have the customer portal which allows you to unify all feedback channels and process them in one place - in JIRA Cloud.

As of now, you cannot vote against ideas, but you can contact their team and ask for this feature. They are quite open and react quite quickly to such feature requests.

Regards.

[Attila Bordás _Everit_]

Hello there,

If you interested in a lightweight score solution for JIRA server, then check out our Feature Score add-on. This plugin adds a simple custom field type that allows you to immediately see your item's value on the Issue screen. You can customize your metrics, value range, and weights easily and the score will be calculated based on the configured equation. 

Also, you can check out our best practices here about customer feedback management.