Salesforce Ideas
MyStarbucksIdea Receives 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award
MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks. Among many excellent embracing applications, this one stands out. It includes thousands and thousands of particpants. They have suggested 75,000 ideas suggested. Some of the suggestions have changed the way the Starbucks company does business – including new products and service ideas already implemented by Starbucks. -Forrester Groundswell
Customer Blog: Six Steps to a Successful Ideas Implementation
I thought this post from a customer blog was worth pointing out. JP is the administrator for 120 user Salesforce implementation and they've been using Ideas since the product went into limited release last November. He does a great job of highlighting a set of actionable tactics that have made their implementation successful.
Step 1: Customize the App
Step 2: Prime the Pump
Step 3: Inform and Train Your Users
Step 4: Lead the Horse to Water
Step 5: Make Him Drink
Step 6: Preach from the Soapbox
Reporting Back To Your Community
An important part of your communication strategy is to show that you are listening and acting upon the best ideas from the community.There are a couple ways you can do this.
With the new expert icons your moderators will stand out and provide an official voice. They can join the conversation by validating ideas, asking follow-up questions, or providing updates. - You can use the new status tags to flag ideas as under consideration, coming soon, or delivered. This provides the community an easy way to sort ideas and see all the things that are being acted upon.
- Some companies choose to run a blog along side the ideas application. With a blog you can create a date ordered narrative about things taking place within the community.
- To draw users back to the site, it's also a good idea to create a quarterly email newsletter to community progress and highlight interesting ideas.
Starbucks is the model example having implement each of these feedback channels. By sending out emails like the one below and starting a dialog with their customers, they create new evangelists who in turn promote the site and the Starbucks brand. It's a virtuous cycle which leads to a vibrant, successful community.
Also See... Salesforce Ideas Process Map
Salesforce Ideas Winter '09 Release
The Winter '09 release is now live for all 47,700 Salesforce Customers! As many of you may have seen Salesforce announced a bunch of exciting new features across all the product lines. For the Ideas product it is a particularly big release with over a dozen new feature. Below you'll find detailed descriptions of each feature as well as a screenshot tour of the Ideas App.
Visualforce for Ideas (Ideas Spring '09)
With the Spring '09 release customers have the option of using Visualforce to achieve pixel-level control over the ideas application so that you can match the exact look and feel of your website, whether that be an intranet site or a public customer facing website.
The way it works is that you'll
download a default set of Visualforce pages and corresponding Apex
Classes which make up the Ideas App. In total there are 20+ Visualforce
pages and associated Apex Classes:
Popular Ideas, Recent Ideas, Top All-Time, Recent Comments, Ideas Detail Page, My Activity, My Ideas, My Votes, Recent Replies, Search, Login Pages, Registration Pages, Error Pages...
These are pages that you could build from scratch using Visualforce and Apex but we wanted to help make it easier to get started.
Once you've installed these pages you can then go in and edit the mark-up and CSS to configure the site just the way you like it. Because you have control of the mark-up and CSS, you can move elements around on the page, remove elements all-together, or insert entirely new elements. For example you might want to extend the profile page with fields from the user object or you might want to add a button for report abuse. You might even decide to create entirely new Visualforce page, such as top contributors or about this site.
Continue reading "Visualforce for Ideas (Ideas Spring '09)" »
Customer Portal Customization (Ideas Winter '09)
With the Winter '09 release customers also have the option of using the Customer Portal to manage UI customization. While there are limits to what you are able to customize, the big benefit is that much of the customization can be done with clicks, not code. You can pick fonts, colors, tabs, and side bar elements. You can also add custom fields and change page layouts on the idea detail page.
Even with the customer portal there are some places where you'll need a web developer.
- 1. You might want to create a HTML header and footer which is pretty easy to do.
- 2. You might want to create an HTML homepage to introduce your community.
- 3. You'll will want to come with a design and customize the login, registration, and error pages.
- 4. You might want to override pieces of the portal UI with CSS. For example, you might want to use tabs with rounded corners. There is risk of things breaking with this approach and it's important that you first read through these guidelines.
The last point to note is that with the Customer Portal upgrades are seamless (assuming minimal to no CSS overrides) with new functionality automatically added to your community with each release.
Merge Ideas (Ideas Winter '09)
To help you improve data quality, we came up with a very elegant way to merge duplicate ideas. If you drill into an idea and find it's similar to another idea within the community, you can click on the find duplicate button. It is important to note that this button will only appear for individuals with the Edit/Delete permission.
The first step in the find duplicate process is to search for similar ideas. It will automatically do a fuzzy match but you can also refine your search by entering in other key words.
Suggested Duplicates (Ideas Winter '09)
Merging ideas on the back end is part of the solution, but there is also a lot of interest on how to catch duplicate ideas on the front end. There is a feature called suggested duplicates that is not available in the standard UI but is available with Visualforce pages in the Winter '09 release. The example you see below is an example from the MyStarbucksIdea site.
Suggested duplicates does a fuzzy match of the words you typed into the title box and recommends similar ideas, which the user might vote for or comment on instead.
This is a top feature request so we'll work on getting it into the standard UI in the next release, but once again for now it's just in Visualforce.
How is Salesforce Ideas Priced?
Depending on how you are planning on using Salesforce Ideas, your community might be a mixture of several different types of users. Here are three examples.
Example 1: Share Sales Advice and Best Practices
If your sales team is already using Salesforce CRM (Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited), Salesforce Ideas is included. All you have to do is add the Ideas tab to their view and you're off and running.
Example 2: Company Wide Community to Drive Innovation
Many companies want to create communities which are accessible to all their employees, across all departments. It might be that you already have some CRM users who have access to Ideas. For all your other employees you can add Ideas Only Users which are $5 per month. This license includes the home tab, the ideas tab, 3 custom tabs for things like Ideas in Action, reports, and dashboards.
Example 3: Customer Communities to Capture Feedback and Manage Discussions
Lots of companies want to use Salesforce Ideas to create customer communities similar to Dell Ideastorm or MyStarbucks Idea. The community might be used to capture feedback, or it might be a place for customers to post questions and form discussions.
With these types of communities a named user model isn't always appropriate, so we offer a login based licensing model which is similar to a cell phone plan. There are a number of different plans to choose from ranging from 250 logins a month, all the way up to 5 million logins, which for all intensive purposes is unlimited.
