Aha! Ideas | Getting started

Are you ready to crowdsource feedback, engage your community, and develop customer empathy? This video is a great place to start. It gives you an overview of the entire Aha! Ideas application — from capturing ideas to scheduling empathy sessions and reporting on what your customers are most interested in!

Click below to watch the video, or scroll down to follow along with a transcript!

Transcript

Hi, this is Claire from Aha! Today I'm going to introduce you to Aha! Ideas. Aha! Ideas is perfect for teams of all types, whether you're focused on jump-starting innovation programs or crowdsourcing feedback. It includes everything you need to empower customers, employees, and partners to share their ideas. Engage in an open conversation with your community so you can gain clarity about what people want. And empathize with their needs so you can truly understand what they think and feel.

Aha! Ideas comes with two plan options, Ideas Essentials, and Ideas Advanced. Let's take a look at what you can do.

Workspaces

To get started, you will first create a workspace. Workspaces give each team a dedicated space to manage feedback about specific products, programs, or projects. You can create as many workspaces as you need to reflect your organizational structure.

Ideas Essentials

Now you are ready to empower and engage your community. Ideas portals are designed for crowdsourcing feedback and requests. You can create as many portals as you need and invite unlimited users, giving everyone a voice. Creating a portal is super easy and included in Ideas Essentials.

• First, give your portal a unique name.

• Second, select a theme color to match your branding.

• And third, choose the access level. You have two options: Private requires users to log into your portal, while Public allows anyone to submit and view ideas.

Once you have set up the basics, you can add further branding, upload a logo, and give your portal a custom URL that aligns with your company's domain. This ensures a consistent brand experience. Then customize everything from Idea submission forms to email communications and terminology.

Ideas Advanced

With Ideas Advanced, you can expand how you collect feedback. For example, you can make the standard text in your portal available in English, Spanish, German, French, or Dutch. So your community can engage with the portal in their language of choice.

You can also enable proxy voting in private ideas portals. This empowers sales and support teams to capture feedback and add votes on behalf of customers.

Ideas Overview page

Collecting ideas is just the start — you then need to engage your community in the feedback process. Use the Ideas Overview page to manage recently submitted requests. Categorize ideas by theme, add tags, and capture key details such as financial projections.

Commenting on ideas is a great way to start a conversation so you can get more context about what people actually want. Then, score each idea based on value and effort. This will help you evaluate which ones will have the biggest impact.

Close the feedback loop, even when you have to say no to an idea. Automatic notifications keep anyone who created, voted for, or commented on an idea, informed of status updates. This creates transparency and encourages people to keep submitting other ideas in the future.

Empathy

Now it is time to dig deeper and find out what your customers really think and feel. Ideas Advanced provides breakthrough functionality to help you empathize with customers, so you can deliver solutions that people love.

You can bring groups of people together for an online chat-based conversation. It's like a virtual focus group, giving you the valuable insights you need.

• Choose a specific topic you want to discuss and schedule an empathy session. You can invite people who voted or commented on related ideas and manually add others.

• Then create a discussion guide to plan exactly what to ask, so you can keep the conversation on track.

• Insert questions in the live chat to get the conversation flowing.

• You can also launch polls to validate your research with quantitative feedback.

• Use the transcript of the session to review important messages and summarize learnings.

Feedback widgets

You can also empathize by asking what customers think when they are actually using your product, embed the feedback widget in specific pages of your web application, and ask questions to find out what delights and frustrates your users.

The community-based approach gives users a way to interact directly with your team, as well as with each other. To get started, your engineering team will need to add a one-time code snippet to your application. This gives you the flexibility to add widgets to any page of your application from within Aha! Ideas, with no additional work from your engineering team.

As with empathy sessions, all of the feedback is stored in a transcript. Quickly turn insights into actionable requests so you can prioritize future improvements.

Reports

Now that you have all of these incredible insights, it's time to bring your data together. Aha! Ideas comes with a powerful reporting engine, so you can analyze feedback trends and highlight team progress. Build your own report from scratch or choose an example report to get started quickly. Advanced reporting options include customizable pivot tables and charts, so you can visualize your data in a way that makes the most sense.

Here, we created a bar chart to view trending ideas by category. You can clearly see what your customers are most interested in.

Aha! Roadmaps

If you need a way to incorporate community insights directly into your strategic planning process, choose Aha! Roadmaps. Our complete product management suite has everything you need to set strategy, prioritize work, and build visual plans, including Ideas Essentials.

Need help? Use the question mark in your account to get help from an expert. It's time to change the way you innovate. Get started today with a free 30-day trial of Aha! Ideas or request to join a live demo. Our customer success team has deep product expertise and response incredibly fast.

We want to help you capture every bright idea and achieve breakthrough innovation. So what are you waiting for?