The UserVoice Blog

One Million Tickets

2012-02-08T16:30+00:00

Last week we hit a very exciting milestone.

After less than a year since we released UserVoice Helpdesk, there have officially been one million tickets received by Helpdesk accounts.

We've sent the account that received the millionth ticket this very special certificate to thank them for being part of this. Keep your eyes peeled...it could be arriving in your mailbox!

This is the work of an extremely talented, dedicated, and growing team. But it’s also a sign that an increasing number of companies are demanding a better experience, both for their team and for their customers. These are people who want to have a conversation with their customers...and they want their tools to make this easy.

A hearty congrats to our team and thank you to our customers. We’re going to keep making this thing better for you.

-Richard White
CEO, UserVoice

You can now make your Helpdesk private

2012-02-07T00:20+00:00

We’ve had a lot of requests for private helpdesks that aren’t accessible by the public. Maybe it’s an internal company helpdesk, maybe it’s a helpdesk for a beta, maybe you only want your actual, paying customers sending you issues. Either way, you don’t want to let just anyone access your UserVoice Helpdesk.

Thanks to our fantastic developers, this is now possible! You can now restrict access by Single Sign-On (available on our Premium plan and above) or by IP range (available on our Ultimate plan).

Learn about setting up a private site in our knowledge base.

Enjoy, and please let us know what you think of this feature!

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Please welcome our new developer and designer hires

2012-01-27T16:00+00:00

Our team continues to grow and I’m very excited to introduce you to three new members!

Austin Taylor will be joining our Raleigh office and working on our iOS SDK (in fact, he just launched our v1 of the iOS SDK). Austin plays the piano and enjoys programming in Haskell and Clojure. The reason his photo is different from the others is because we haven’t had a chance to photograph him...because he and his wife just had a baby girl!

Chad Bercea is a graphic designer who is joining UserVoice to provide much-needed help with marketing collateral (he created our recent Community Manager Appreciation Day cards). Chad will be joining our San Francisco office, assuming his love of Batman does not translate to wearing underwear on the outside of his pants. Chad says: “if I had to choose a side in the great battle of Pirates vs. Ninjas, I choose pirates. That should tell you all you need to know about my personal life.”

Raimo Tuisku is a software developer who arrived in the USA from Finland only a few weeks ago. His name is pronounced with a rolling R, which 75% of our San Francisco office fails at. Raimo will be primarily doing Rails development, but he’s excited about HTML5, Ruby, JavaScript, Software Architectures, and new technology in general.

We’re very pleased to have these talented gentlemen on the team, and thrilled that they’re already producing awesome new things for you.

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

I can haz feedback? How Cheezburger found their customer voice

2012-01-24T16:12+00:00

One might imagine that if your business was to publish pictures of cats with captions, customer service wouldn't be a big focus.

But for Cheezburger -- home of I Can Has Cheezburger, Know Your Meme, FAIL Blog and other humor sites -- the end-goal is a sustainable, passionate, and happy community. And customer service is a key part of that.

“Cheezburger's mission is to make the world happy for 5 minutes a day and we rely on our community to help us achieve this," says John Clayton, developer at Cheezburger. "Providing customer engagement tools such as UserVoice on our sites allows the community to stay engaged and in control of their experience.”

In 2011, Cheezburger decided to try a new tactic for gathering feedback. They created a UserVoice Feedback Forum for one of their products -- their photo builder -- and asked their customers to prioritize what they wanted. They seeded the forum with what they thought would be some popular ideas, and installed the UserVoice widget on their builder pages.

Then everything blew up.

The gap between what they thought users wanted and what users actually wanted was huge. Ideas they expected to see support for, like picture searching, sank while unexpected, customer-generated ideas, like font options, quickly climbed to the top of the forums.

John says it was “eye-opening.”

Furthermore, although they only put the widget on their “builder” pages, they quickly started getting loads of non-builder feedback. “It opened the floodgates”, says John. “And we couldn’t be happier to know what they want.” Cheezburger quickly made collecting customer feedback a company-wide initiative, and today they have more than 500 ideas and over 150,000 visits to their UserVoice account a month.

The tool made it happen, but the important lesson was to give customers a voice. “Our customers are wonderfully fanatical,” beams John. “All it took was a venue for their feedback, and they were more than happy to help us build a better product.”

Introducing: auto-save for UserVoice tickets

2012-01-23T20:26+00:00

There's nothing worse than writing a response to a customer and then losing it. Maybe you got signed out, maybe you clicked somewhere else...it doesn't matter. That was hard work, and you shouldn't have to do it again!

Today we're proud to announce auto-save for UserVoice. Now we'll automatically save every character you type in the Message or Note field, no matter what you do after typing it. This is available now on all plans. Check out the video, and enjoy!

New Feature: Custom Statuses (and 5 ways to use them)

2012-01-11T10:00+00:00

One of the key features in UserVoice Feedback is the ability to set statuses for ideas. These allow you to keep your customers in the loop about the progress of their ideas and to return their votes to them when you close an idea.

Today we’re giving you even more control with the ability to create custom statuses.

For most companies, the standard Under Review, Planned, Started, Completed, and Declined statuses are just fine. But for many, these are restrictive. Now - thanks to your feedback on the subject - you can create any status in your Feedback Settings:

If you want this status to close the idea and return votes to the voters, simply check the “Close idea” box.

This feature is available for those on the Ultimate plan (or, if you’re on our legacy plans, the Gold plan).

So, how might I use this feature?

Here's 5 suggestions:

Think an idea is good but know you won’t get to it this year? Create a “Backburner” status!
Want to make it clear that you’ve read an idea, but you’re looking for more feedback? Create an “Open for voting” status!
Don’t ever mark anything as “Under Review”? Delete that status option!
Have a feature in beta? Create an “In Beta” status!
Want to add a little attitude? Change “Planned” to “Hell, yeah!”.

This feature is available now. Dig in, and let us know how you are using custom statuses!

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Seesmic Desktop now supports UserVoice

2012-01-11T01:12+00:00

Do you live in Seesmic’s social media desktop app? Do you wish you could manage your UserVoice account in the same slick interface?

Seesmic has a present for you.

Today, longtime UserVoice customers Seesmic announced the launch of a UserVoice plugin for their desktop app. The plugin allows you to view, manage, and respond to ideas and tickets for your UserVoice account...all within Seesmic Desktop.

Here are my UserVoice tickets and ideas sitting alongside my Twitter feed:

Here’s how you can respond to tickets or ideas:

Dig it? Hop into the marketplace (from right within Seesmic Desktop) and add the UserVoice app...you’ll be helping your customers from Seesmic in no time.

The Knowledge Base Challenge has a winner

2012-01-05T17:00+00:00

In November we challenged you to spend 10 minutes a day writing documentation. Why? Because UserVoice’s Instant Answers feature could automatically answer up to 40% of customer issues...it just needs content to work.

Our winner is...Memolane, with a whopping 50% improvement, landing them at a 33% Instant Answers rate! Congrats Meghan and Memolane - you get a free month of UserVoice service!

Claro gets a shout-out for the best Instant Answer rate: 36%!

A kudos to everyone who participated. Finding time to write documentation is damn hard, and frequently gets deprecated in order to answer tickets...the same tickets that the documentation might have answered!

Here are our tips to keep up and improve your Instant Answers rate in 2012:

1. Give out your support email address less. Sure, sometimes you have to. But if you can, try to send people through your UserVoice widget or portal page. 100% of emailed tickets make it through to your queue...with no chance of being Instantly Answered.

2. Look at your article report. Which articles are getting viewed, but still not Instantly Answering people? Make sure you’re improving these articles before writing any new ones.

3. Keep up the 10 minutes of writing per day (or increase it!). Eventually it adds up, and you’ll see that Instant Answers rate increase.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and one more congrats to Memolane!

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

Get 40% off UserVoice and help us fight SOPA

2011-12-29T22:28+00:00

We love the web. It’s not just a technological invention: it connects, entertains, empowers, and inspires.

#SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is poised to potentially kill the internet. While it’s supposed to protect intellectual property online, it gives the government the ability to make US-based service providers (like web hosters, search engines, and payment gateways) stop providing services and links to any pages or sites that may contain pirated material. We’re not just talking about pirate sites. We’re talking about any site with user-generated content: from big ones like YouTube, Facebook, and Wordpress to smaller sites like Tumblr, Reddit, and, yes, UserVoice. Dead in the water.

There are a lot of companies fighting SOPA (you may have heard of Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Facebook...). But Godaddy is not, and we think that’s plain wrong. So does NameCheap CEO, Richard Kirkendall:

”While we at Namecheap firmly believe in intellectual rights, SOPA is like detonating a nuclear bomb on the internet when only a surgical strike is necessary.”

We want to fight this thing. We’re joining our friends at Zopim as part of #moveyourdomainday and moving all of our Godaddy domains (we're moving to Dyn). We encourage you to join us. We’re also offering new customers 40% off the first 6 months of ANY UserVoice Full Service plan and donating 10% of all such proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as is Zopim. Sign up for UserVoice and use the code no2sopa to get the discount. This deal will be active until January 12th.

Already have a UserVoice account? Tell your friends that they can get a service you recommend for cheap, all while saving the internet!

Some other handy ways to protest, courtesy of Zopim:

Scheduling a call with your house representative (via Tumblr)
Email your Representatives & Senators via EFF’s anti-blacklist action alert
Donating directly to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Writing an open letter to oppose SOPA

New features: idea attachments, idea-to-ticket, & front-end idea organization

2011-12-21T22:48+00:00

It may be the holidays, but our team is still hard at work improving UserVoice for you. Here's a few highly-requested enhancements we've launched for you this month.

Idea-to-Ticket

You may have noticed that occasionally a customer posts a support issue in your feedback forum. This isn’t ideal; as we’ve said before actual issues are best dealt with in a ticket system. Now, it's easy for Full Service accounts to turn ideas into tickets.

Open an idea in the Admin Console
Click the gear icon in the upper right corner.
Select “Convert to ticket”

You can find all the details about what happens to the idea (and how to undo what you've done) in our knowledge base.

Idea Attachments

A picture's worth a thousand words, right? Well, you can now allow your end-users to attach files to ideas they post. This feature is off by default. To activate it:

Sign in to your Admin Console
From the sidebar, click Settings
Below Settings, click Feedback
In the “Content Filters” section, you should see the option for “Idea Attachments”
Click ‘Enable’

There's a filesize limit of 50mb.

Front-End Idea Organization Improvements

Rather than “Accepted” and “Closed” sorting options in your Feedback Forum, we now provide a dropdown so you can view ideas with any status you’d like. Bonus: if you’ve never used a status then it doesn’t even show up.

Looking at content you’ve interacted with is also a lot easier. On both your profile and via the “My feedback” dropdown, you can now filter by ideas you’ve voted on, ideas you’ve commented on, and whether they are open or closed.

We hope you enjoy these new features and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can keep making them better.

Happy holidays!

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice