How to Effectively Manage Ideas on Salesforce Experience Cloud

The idea-creation process is a journey with many twists and turns. Ideas can be born in a flash, and then bounce around for days or weeks before finally developing into something concrete.

For an idea to reach its full potential and contribute value, more than one mind must add its input before the idea becomes a reality.

And the most important thing here is to manage those ideas. This can be done through idea management software, helping you drive value to your brand and community.

Research shows that the idea management software market will potentially grow to $1.99 billion by the year 2027, and rightly so.

In this blog post, we look at the importance of effective idea management, how to manage ideas in Salesforce, and how to access ideas in Lightning Experience.

So, let’s begin.

Decoding Idea Management

Idea management is a structured approach to generating and evaluating ideas that could help improve an organization’s bottom line.

However, the difficulty stems from the fact that ideas are everywhere, and it’s hard to systematically manage and organize a lot of them.

This is where idea management software comes into play.

Before delving into the advantages of utilizing idea management software and determining which one to employ, let’s first examine the significance of managing ideas.

Importance of Idea Management for Your Business

1. Enhancing Engagement

Ideas can help you enhance engagement with your current customers and prospects.
Getting customers involved in developing new ideas will help them feel more involved, which increases the likelihood of them engaging with your products and services over time.

2. Understanding Customer Intent

Ideas help you gain insight into your customer’s behavior. Incorporating ideas to understand customer intent, deliberating, analyzing, and working towards executing those ideas allows businesses to address customer needs efficiently.

3. Fostering Ideation and Innovation

Ideas are an effective way to promote and foster the idea generation process. Since ideas are coming in from end-users, you can innovate around your product or service in a way that customers want.

4. Building Transparency

Ideas provide you with a better understanding of your customers. As such, they can help you improve customer service while building transparency between your company and its customers.

Ideation in Salesforce

The Ideas component in Salesforce enables users to share and post ideas on the online community directly.

When enabled, the Ideas component allows users to:

a. Post Ideas
b. Subscribe to Favorite Ideas
c. Filter Ideas by Category and/or Status
d. Vote and Comment on Ideas

These valuable insights and suggestions directly contribute to shaping the future development of products and services, ensuring their alignment with evolving needs and expectations.

Salesforce Limitations With Ideas

1. The Ideas Object is Available Only in Salesforce Classic

The Ideas Object is only available in Salesforce Classic and users are unable to access it in Lightning Experience (LEX). So, whenever Lightning users access the Ideas component, they have to switch back to the Classic version, which is time-consuming.

2. Filters and the Search Option Are Unavailable

In the Ideas component, users cannot apply filters or search for relevant ideas. Users neither have access to the information about an idea’s creation in a certain time frame nor can they filter through ideas.

Ways to Implement Idea Management in Salesforce

Although Salesforce doesn’t provide access to Ideas in Lightning, there are two ways that users can access ideas in LEX:

1. Via Customization

Customization necessitates a lot of coding in your Org, which increases the chances of your system slowing down. This procedure could take from weeks to months, making it less feasible.

2. Via Installing an Idea Management Software

The idea management software provides a centralized platform to collect and store ideas in one accessible location. This prevents the loss of valuable customer ideas and ensures easy retrieval when needed. This way organizations can ensure that promising ideas are quickly identified, developed, and brought to fruition.

Why Do You Need a Dedicated Idea Management Software?

Luckily, there are a lot of great software solutions out there when it comes to the idea management process.

With dedicated idea management software, you can:

a. Capture customer ideas with the necessary detail, no matter where they come from.
b. Test and develop these ideas against the core requirements and problem definition.
c. Progress the best ideas through to concept, pilot, and eventually product development.

Introducing IdeasPro- A Potential Solution

Users can install a Salesforce-native application, like Grazitti’s IdeasPro, to access Ideas in the Lightning Experience without affecting the system’s performance.

The app enables secure access and offers longevity as well as scalability.

Key Facets of IdeasPro:

1. Powered With 20+Out-Of-The-Box Functionalities
2. Greater Gamification Support
3. No User-Defined Limit
4. Highly Customizable for Personalization

Conclusion

In present times, smart brands have created online communities to interact with their customers and gather their unique ideas. Ideas on Salesforce can be a powerful tool for companies that use it to increase productivity and efficiency.

However, customizing the Ideas component for your community built on Salesforce can be a time-consuming process. So, it’s crucial to move to a Salesforce-native application that provides high-end flexibility.

Given the limitations of the ideas component on Salesforce, Grazitti has built IdeasPro, a Salesforce native and scalable application to help businesses drive value to their brand.