🕑 Share product ideas with Qualtrics | 2-Minute Tips | August 27th 2024

@AlonsoC.  Thanks for posting this video up however,  the evolve platform needs improvement and I am sure there are many community users out there which have voiced this already, below are the key points.  It would be great if we could be told what the road map (with timings) is to improve it and make it easier for your customer to feedback and tell you what ideas are of most interest.

Thanks

Rod Pestell

1. There is no date created or last modified visible (date submitted is in the form hidden away so we just need that being made visible in the table).  You can’t tell how old it is also you can’t tell how much traction there is for the idea as a result.
2. You can’t sort by the columns.
3. You can’t submit photos and it is difficult sometimes to explain your idea and gain traction.
4. You can’t search by new ideas.
5. The search facility is confusing and you can’t do complex searches which might help to narrow down the ideas list in case it’s already been created.
6. You can’t search in a more granular form such as for specific widgets in the CX dashboards.
7. There is little house keeping in terms of duplicate ideas - eg. search by retention and there are a number of repeat ideas.  The titles need to be made more consistent so that it’s easier to tell what the idea is about.  This means the votes are diluted and you can’t see which is the most frequent request.
8. When you state ‘capability exists’, very few provide sufficient information as to the work around or a link to a support page - you just state it’s possible.
9. There is no ability to be alerted of other people adding ideas in specific categories you may be interested in.

eg this one

The reason there is no customer demand is that no one is informed of these new ideas and so it’s really hard to up vote things you don’t know about.

10. You don’t get a notification of when your idea are made visible
11. There is no easy way of searching for your own ideas you have submitted and seeing how many votes they have had.

I agree with what Rod mentioned above. The old ideas platform was a little better for searching, but it still seemed like it wasn’t reviewed/cleaned up frequently enough, and “dead” ideas (or already implemented ideas) were never purged, and not always updated that it was actually implemented.

@Rod_Pestell and @Eric_A -- Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback on your experience with Evolve. We dedicate time each quarter to improve the experience for our customers and product managers. Our Product feedback and Insights Team will review your suggestions and we'll post an update on which enhancements we can make in Q4!

We have submitted ideas this way and love it. There is way more transparency here in this process compared to many other companies we contract with. We like the PM feedback and my team always comes to upvote their favorite ideas!

I did not know about this until I saw a post about it on LinkedIn! As someone who consults with many firms in the CX space, it is good to know the door to feedback is always open. There are a few items that have been on my “wish list” for a while now. Will submit them. 

Hi @Rod_Pestell! Just wanted to add to @Michael_Cooksey's comment and address some of your points. When submitting your idea, you can 'Attach Files,' including photos, to help explain your idea. Also, feel free to contact your Customer rep (Account Executive, Customer Success Manager, or Technical Account Manager) for a report on your ideas, including status and IDs.

@JeffDavis 

Hi Jeff,

How do you find the ideas you’ve submitted?  What do you mean by PM feedback?  Do you get alerts when ideas change status?

Thanks

Rod Pestell

I use the sort and search functionality to find what I am looking for in the Ideas table:

The PM comments I myself am referring to are the notes Qualtrics leaves for example when a capability exists: 

You have to scroll to the right in the table to see the PM Comment for Customers column.

@JeffDavis How do you sort?  Clicking on the headers of the table do nothing.  I would assume the idea ID would be sequential and so that would be a way of finding new ideas but only if you can sort by it.

Let me know

Thanks

I was hoping I could search by EV ID, for example lets search for EV-246 as per below screenshot

I’ve set the filters to all but when you type in EV-246 into the search window, it doesn’t show up. So this scuppers the thought that I could search for the newest (highest ID).

How do you get round this?

Another point… I thought that I would use the google chrome find function but because it’s in own sub window (iframe?) the search facility will only search part of the content, ie only what is on view.

@Rod_Pestell I meant filter, not a true sort. 

Search workarounds: Use the secondary search above the PM Comment for customer column:

Or click “Open in Coda” in the upper right hand part of the iframe table:

Then use the search in the left column:

Thanks for the reply @JeffDavis .  Appreciate the work around but it’s still very difficult to find things.  At least with the secondary search window you can search the EV ids (but that itself doesn’t seem full proof).  I should be able to find the ideas I created and / or contributed to if they were merged into another one.  To a point, It’s my right to be able to see my data and so I should be able to see it and find it.   Just FYI i’ve linked in this thread 

• 💡 Product Ideation Overview | Evolve

As the same ideas, points or issues about the system were discussed over a year ago and we have still not seen any improvements.  It would be great to know what the road map of evolve is.  This whole experience has put me off contributing to ideas and suggesting workarounds to people who have added ideas based on my knowledge.

This shouldn’t be difficult and the problem here is that no one is managing our expectations.

Qualtrics - if you are listening - ‘sorry’ won’t cut it - we need action and then you’ll find this system so much more informative as your clients will be able to guide you so much more.

Hello @Rod_Pestell -- We are indeed listening! Hopefully you saw my reply on this thread to you last week. I let the Evolve team know about your feedback here, and they said would review your suggestions, and post an update on which enhancements can be made in Q4.

I also let them know again today about your latest post. 

As I have more information to share, I will absolutely post it here for everyone. 

My team and I have submitted ideas and we like the transparency and simplicity of the process. I wish more companies would have something like this! We previously used a different CX software platform and they did not offer this level of visibility. We love the XM Community 😀

Thanks @Michael_Cooksey  - Looking forward to Q4 and the Evolve team making some improvements and giving us some idea of their road map of changes as I appreciate not everything can be done at once.

Thanks again 

Hello @Rod_Pestell -- Thank you for your latest comment! I will definitely emphasize the need for a road map of changes, and of course will keep you posted on anything I hear. Thank you again for the feedback thus far; I want you to know I placed it directly in the hands of the folks responsible for potential changes!

Hello, everyone! 

For those who gave feedback about wanting to see changes to the Evolve program, I received the following update from the team:

“The Product Feedback and Insights Team has completed their prioritization planning for Q4 and provided their list of initiatives they plan to tackle:

• Simplify the Upvote form
• Add a date filter for finding ideas
• Improve the idea search functionality
• Ensure PM messaging is included on all ideas with a status of "Capability Exists"
• Email status updates when the PM team changes the status on one of your ideas

Thank you so much for all the input on the Evolve product ideas program! Please continue to provide your feedback to help us keep improving.”

@Rod_Pestell and @Eric_A  -- @ mentioning you here to make sure you see the above ☝️

Great news - thanks for the update and will await further news

@Rod_Pestell We will definitely keep you updated as we hear more!

​@Rod_Pestell ​@Eric_A for visibility:

We have some updates to share on Evolve improvements! From my colleague on the Evolve team...

• We've made some minor updates to the idea forms to reduce the fields needed submit ideas and clarify how fields are used for processing ideas.
• We've updated the idea table to sort by priority score, idea submitted date, and then idea status to surface the most relevant ideas at the top
• To allow users to find trending and recent submissions, we've also included a date filter
• Update: Product Tag filter now live!

In the coming weeks we'll be looking into how the search functionality could be improved and adding a Product Tag filter.

Hope this helps! Please feel free to DM me or otherwise let me know if you have questions. 

​@Michael_Cooksey , when I open the Ideas page, there is now a default filter on the tags “Dashboards” and “Dashboard Reports or Widgets”. Did someone activate a default filter by accident? I can’t get rid of them. When I remove the filters, after I refresh or go away and come back, the default filters are back.

​@JoycaV, thanks for calling this out! It should be fixed now 😀

HI ​@Michael_Cooksey , I was wondering if you have a thread elsewhere gathering feedback about the Evolve system.  I’ve gone in today to take another look.  As I don’t use it too often, the first thing I wanted to do was to see how my own ideas posted have progressed.  This is still impossible to do.  I then also wanted to sort the table by date as I could then refer to the basic evolve confirm email I got to find some of them but this isn’t possible still.  The email by the way doesn’t include the idea ID and so other than the date and trying to remember what the idea was I don’t really have much hope of finding my ideas.

Also, with regards to the filters drop down for first submission, please can you explain why in the list we have future dates?  Are some of us time travellers?! ;)

Thanks

Rod Pestell

I gave that feedback long ago through the feedback form mentioned in the Evolve confirmation mail… indeed at least an idea ID in that mail would be helpful. Or indeed being able to filter on “ideas submitted by me” . 

As this wasn’t implemented meanwhile… what I do is when I submit an idea, is to copy-paste my idea description into a spreadsheet… then after a week or so when the idea is normally actually published in the portal, I try to look for it. But as they often change the description slightly it’s also not easy to find it back… 

Hello, ​@Rod_Pestell and ​@JoycaV -- Thank you for the latest round of feedback, and thank you for your patience on a reply here. I was able to set up some time internally to discuss your input with the team, and can give you the following info:

First, we are looking for a new platform vendor to manage the ideas process, so please know that the current solution/Evolve ideas table *may* be going away in the near future. 

For the current moment, however, many of the points you raised are largely due to Coda functionality limitations 

1. see how my own ideas posted have progressed: this is still a limitation with the platform since the evolve portal is an iFrame of our own internal tool, and providing an email search could provide security concerns by allowing users to search for others' posts. For now, I recommend continuing to use the solution Alonso mentioned (here) requesting your customer rep to send you a report of your ideas.
2. sort the table by date: dynamic sorting isn't supported within Coda, unfortunately. We've looked into this and this is unfortunately beyond our current technical capabilities, which is why we've included the date filter as an option for more dynamic date filtering. We've also prioritized date as a sort option by default along with the priority score and status.
3. can you explain why in the list we have future dates: this is a default Coda functionality of the date filtering selector we cannot remove. My colleagues tell me they can work with our Coda team to see if there's an alternative date selector option.

Expanded search results are also coming -- soon, you should see many more results while searching the Coda table, making it more likely that you will find your ideas.