Top 6 Features To Consider While Choosing an Idea Management Software

“Everything begins with an idea.” – Earl Nightingale

Sticky notes or the good ol’ suggestion box are great to quickly capture ideas. These methods, however, do not guarantee that great ideas will be developed and applied in a systematic way. To ensure that your ideas see the light of day, you need robust technology to capture, process, and diffuse ideas within your business.

That’s why, in your Salesforce Community, you must enable the Ideas Component to leverage creative ideas and drive innovation. But managing ideas, keeping the community clean, identifying the best ideas, and some inherent limitations related to ‘Ideas’ in Salesforce can become tricky to deal with.

That’s where an Idea Management Software can bring structure to your ideation processes, store them in a centralized database, prioritize them, and develop them faster.

Let’s unravel all the top features to look into when deciding on an idea management software.

3 Reasons Why You Must Enable the Ideas Component in Your Salesforce Org

Key decision-makers, across the world, are currently investing in innovation and idea management technologies to boost innovation on a global scale and become customer-centric. Why should the ones using Salesforce be any different?

Let’s take a look at some key reasons for enabling the ideas component in your Salesforce Org:

1. Innovative Approach to Get Ideas: Do you ever wonder what’s better than capturing customer requests straight from your sales and support teams? The answer is getting ideas from customers. You can create zones to organize ideas or idea themes to invite your community members to post ideas about specific topics. This enables members to resolve problems or suggest innovations for your product/service. This helps you to gain insights into your customers’ expectations and work on delivering those while boosting your revenue goals.

2. Identification and Prioritization of High-Value Ideas: You must identify ideas that can be utilized to carve an impact and increase your ROI. A clear understanding of your goals and the feasibility of the idea or requested feature suggested by a customer could bring value to the table. You can prioritize your ideas and make informed decisions on the basis of this understanding.

3. Clarity on Ideas Status: Assign a status to ideas so that you can keep a track of all your ideas. This helps your support and sales reps to gain a full view of the planning and progress of an idea, thus, helping create transparency and better decision making.

By enabling the Ideas component in your Salesforce Org, you can:

• Create a culture of innovation
• Proceed with your best ideas efficiently
• Increase customer engagement
• Improve customer experience
• Implement better decision-making

6 Key Features That Your Idea Management Software Should Support

There are six vital characteristics that should be marked on the checklist of every idea management software. They are:

1. Easy-to-use

When it comes to a tool that is meant for everyone, it is essential that it is easy to use and understand. This makes the learning curve smoother and the software more approachable.

2. Gamification

Gamification enables you to engage participants who are excited to innovate and contribute to business success. It helps to improve user-adoption rates by assigning ideation points, badges, achievement levels, dashboards with progress bars, and other metrics which can recognize and reward their contributions.

3. Idea Deflection

Most of your users or customers may have one or more ideas and there’s a high possibility that some ideas may have already been shared. So, for instance, if a community user tries to post an idea that already exists in the system, they would be shown the existing idea and articles so that they don’t end up creating similar ideas.

4. Spam/Abuse Prevention

Sometimes, notorious elements could disturb the atmosphere of the community in the disguise of sharing ideas. That’s why an idea management software should support blocking/filtering of certain abusive or offensive words or phrases so as to maintain a clean and safe space to share ideas.

5. Idea Mapping

An idea management software should ensure that whenever your community members create/like an idea or comment on an idea, their accounts are getting mapped with it. This way, you can communicate the progress of ideas to keep customers, teams, or partners updated on the status of ideas. Also, it should provide the ability to send automatic notifications when the status of an idea changes.

6. Flexibility

An ideal idea management software gives you the flexibility to define your idea management process in a way that aligns with your organization’s objectives. For instance, you might want to open the ideation process to public opinion or you might want to limit it to a few users with a specific submission form. Your idea management software must give you the ability to control access and visibility.

The Challenge of Ideas Limitation in Salesforce

The capabilities that Salesforce offers are immense, especially, when you enable the Ideas component, it lets your customers, partners, and employees to share and post their ideas in your community.

Accessing Ideas in Salesforce is a piece of cake. However, while Ideas in Salesforce helps your service team in fetching and analyzing your customer’s views and requirements, there are certain limitations. Particularly, the fact that the Ideas object is currently available only in Classic, thus, making it difficult for Lightning users to access Ideas.

And because of this, your teams have to go through the hassle of switching back and forth between Classic and LEX to access ideas.

To combat this challenge, Grazitti’s Salesforce experts built a solution that offers advanced ideas management features – IdeasPro for Salesforce.

Supported in both Classic and Lightning Experience, IdeasPro is an advanced version of the standard ideas component in Salesforce. This customizable solution is powered with 20+ out-of-the-box functionalities and offers a unique ideation solution to break down silos and foster a global culture of innovation.

Also, it has features like:

• Idea Account Mapping
• Profanity Prevention
• Idea Merger Scheduler
• Multiple Attachment on Ideas
• Email-to-Ideas

And a lot more.

The right idea management software is key to bringing all great ideas to life and, ultimately, delivering a superlative customer experience. So, if you’re on the hunt for a powerful idea management software for Salesforce, IdeasPro can be your best bet.

Wish to manage your ideas more efficiently with IdeasPro? Talk to us!