Roadmap

Roadmap update 23: Control overviews, Reporting, Customization, and more

Roadmap update 23: Control overviews, Reporting, Customization, and more

First of all, we’re super excited to be part of Gainsight now, you can read all about it in the blog post of our CEO Robin if you haven’t already. The acquisition means an acceleration of our R&D efforts to improve our current product and execute on our existing vision. Our vision is to become a Customer Hub to scale digital engagement, to help you create customer journeys that are more integrated and effective than ever before:
 

  • Make your community your central Customer Hub and use all customer data to deliver a personalized experience.

  • Deliver content and engagement proactively, by combining notifications, gamification and community content with journey orchestration capabilities.

  • Modernize the community experience with a more conversational, rich and real time experience.

  • Truly understand how your community engages and drives business outcomes as a key input to customer health scores.

 

Our focus for this year remains to work closely with you, our community, and improve the existing product. Just like we’ve done in previous quarters, we’ll continue to use your input to build a better product. Last quarter, we delivered on some of your top-voted ideas related to the moderation experience, groups, and integrations. For the next quarter, we’ll continue our efforts to improve the moderator experience by upgrading the content and user overview pages. 

 

We’re also excited to start working on more customization options in the front end of our product. By using our no-code page builder, we’re already seeing more and more customers using the homepage as a customer hub, unifying all content and engagement your customers need to drive business outcomes. To help achieve this, we’ll add more widgets to the homepage, upgrade the UI and create an additional landing page optimized for browsing the community categories.

 

Coming up

 

Community overview page:

A couple of months ago we released a new overview page for the Knowledge Base. We aim to do the same for the community module. Our objective is to provide a page for end-users to explore all the community content. With that you can free space on the homepage so it can then be used as a "Customer Hub" landing page, making it easier for your end-users to explore all the content relevant to them. 

 

New and Improved widgets:

To support that "Customer Hub" vision for the homepage, we want to take the experience the page offers to the next level. The goal is to improve current widgets both in terms of UX and UI and well as create new widgets. We will focus on providing easier navigation and guiding users through their different use cases. 

 

Upgrade the User overview in Control:

With this project, we want to give some love to our Control environment. The User overview needs a proper upgrade. The goal is to update the UI and add more filtering options. Ultimately we wish to add bulk actions and take steps towards offering segmentation. For example, give you the option to perform actions like sending an email to all users who have not logged in the past 30 days, giving a badge to all users in a given group, etc.


Moderation overview:

Community teams are moderating content on a regular basis. That’s why we’ll be working on improving the moderation experience by bringing old functionalities back and adding some cool new ones. Plus, we’ll strengthen the underlying technical layers to ensure consistency and reliability. The goal is to make your content moderation work as easy and pleasant as a walk in the park while saying “goodbye” to our old moderation overview. 

 

Customizable Attend button on Events

We are looking into a way for you to customize the RSVP button by inserting an external link to the registration page. The goal is to enable the usage of your community together with an external event management tool and to create a better user experience when the event registration lives outside of our platform. The user will be able to navigate easily and finalize the registration there, ensuring that you’re capturing all the information you need from attendees. 

 

Release the Product Feedback Dashboard

Our Product Feedback Dashboard has been in Beta for a while. It’s now time to remove that status. After releasing this dashboard, we’ll use it to bring in Salesforce data and enable filtering on product ideas (submitted and delivered) on a customer level. This will be only for customers that enabled the Salesforce integration.  

 

Improve reporting

Data needs to be turned into insights. As communities grow and traffic increases, it’s fundamental to ensure our customers easily understand the trends in their communities. We’ll focus on an easier way to export raw data, and improve the counting of unique visitors. 

We’ll also enable filtering on a company level for all available dashboards. This way superusers can quickly assess the engagement of individual customers in their communities. 

 

Patterns and images blocker for posts and titles

Even with the best efforts from community teams to prevent and educate their members, private information and inappropriate images can find their way into communities. To further fortify the defense against these, we’ll be adding pre-moderation automatic rules that would catch such posts and create a “Pending” state for a moderator to review them. 

 

 

Newly-released since the previous roadmap update

 

For example, give you the option to perform actions like sending an email to all users who have not logged in the past 30 days,

 

Nice! Can you tell us a little bit more about how that email will look like? Will it be customizable?
Always happy to try it out if you need testers.

 

Best,
Daniele

Looking forward to some of these changes. A couple items to call out:

  1. I do hope you strongly reconsider the approach on community overview page as the KB overview has resulted in lower traffic to our KB content than the previous iterations.
  2. I also hope to see events get more attention in terms of being able to merchandise the page and add additional content to that page beyond just the listing and additional ways to filter and find upcoming and past events. We can already easily connect to our events platforms.

For example, give you the option to perform actions like sending an email to all users who have not logged in the past 30 days,

 

Nice! Can you tell us a little bit more about how that email will look like? Will it be customizable?
Always happy to try it out if you need testers.

 

Best,
Daniele

Thanks @Daniele Cmty! We are currently laying the groundwork to make these examples possible, so sending emails is not planned or scoped for this quarter yet. However, I’d love to hear some of your use cases for customized emails so we can keep those into account. 

However, I’d love to hear some of your use cases for customized emails so we can keep those into account. 

 

Sure, just here as a comment? @Sebastian 

 

Improve reporting

Data needs to be turned into insights. As communities grow and traffic increases, it’s fundamental to ensure our customers easily understand the trends in their communities. We’ll focus on an easier way to export raw data, and improve the counting of unique visitors. 

We’ll also enable filtering on a company level for all available dashboards. This way superusers can quickly assess the engagement of individual customers in their communities. 

 

Any hopes on improving the reporting on emails/notifications? :nerd:

 

I’m very excited for these coming updates. And I have to say that the vision is exactly in line with our use case and what we hope to build for customers on our end. 

While it’s low hanging fruit (and I agree with hoping to see some of the things Scott mentions for events), I am especially excited about this one: 

Customizable Attend button on Events

We are looking into a way for you to customize the RSVP button by inserting an external link to the registration page. The goal is to enable the usage of your community together with an external event management tool and to create a better user experience when the event registration lives outside of our platform. The user will be able to navigate easily and finalize the registration there, ensuring that you’re capturing all the information you need from attendees. 

Question: Is this (from road map update #22) still in the queue of upcoming improvements, or has it been moved back into the backlog? 

Product update subscriptions for multi-product companies

We plan to take a first step towards delivering this idea from @Moller Toma. Right now, subscribing to product updates is all or nothing. That’s not logical if your customer only owns one product out of your offering, or if they only use a certain set of modules on your platform. We’ll enable your community members to subscribe only to relevant product releases that interest them, based on product areas.

It would good to understand this a little better. Sounds quite abstract at the moment but also kind of a big deal 

 

Community overview page:

A couple of months ago we released a new overview page for the Knowledge Base. We aim to do the same for the community module. Our objective is to provide a page for end-users to explore all the community content. With that you can free space on the homepage so it can then be used as a "Customer Hub" landing page, making it easier for your end-users to explore all the content relevant to them. 

@DannyPancratz 
Still in the queue and now much closer to the top.
We are exploring the potential solutions for this pain point and will be pulling it for development shortly.

@Suvi Lehtovaara 
We are working hard in improving our reporting and next in our notifications.
The idea 

Requires improvements to notifications.
As soon as we give a bit of love to our notifications I would appreciate a deeper discussion on this idea and the insights you want to infer from such reporting.

Looking forward to some of these changes. A couple items to call out:

  1. I do hope you strongly reconsider the approach on community overview page as the KB overview has resulted in lower traffic to our KB content than the previous iterations.

Hello @Scott Baldwin thanks a lot for sharing your concerns. 

First a few questions: do you mean that your KB overview is not having much views or that the KB categories and topics are having a lower amount of views?

I also see you are not linking to the KB overview or KB categories from your homepage, is that something that you changed recently?

A few thoughts from my side:

  • We are planning to make some improvement to the Mega Menu to improve the discoverability overview of the KB overview page and in the future the Community overview.  When looking at different communities, there is quite some variation, the page sometimes get a lot of views, sometimes not so much. Our goal is to improve the Mega Menu while balancing discoverability and accessibility best practices. We are working on it :)
  • I see you use the KB module more as a "Get started" guide for your community than an actual KB. In that sense I can understand that another community overview page might not make the most sense for your use case.

However, I’d love to hear some of your use cases for customized emails so we can keep those into account. 

 

Sure, just here as a comment? @Sebastian 

Yes, feel free to share your use cases in a comment :)

 I also hope to see events get more attention in terms of being able to merchandise the page and add additional content to that page beyond just the listing and additional ways to filter and find upcoming and past events. We can already easily connect to our events platforms.

 

Hi @Scott Baldwin! We are currently working on the strategic vision for the Events module and we hope to communicate soon a roadmap with more specific plans for this module. Appreciate the interest and feedback on this! :raised_hands:

@Cristina to answer your questions:

  • our KB overview page gets few visits AND overall views of KB content have declined.
  • we’ve only ever linked to them from the mega menu.

This KB contains our community knowledge (e.g. how to use the community, our T&Cs and information on our team). Given the community growth, we’d expect that traffic to be at least the same, but since launching this new overview it’s actually dropped. Agree the mega menu interaction and discoverability may be part of the reason for this. 

We can easily re-title what we have there as “Community overview” should this concept get introduced in the community menu. My main concern here is adding something that isn’t working that well in the KB to Community before looking at the underlying issues. And I’d like to avoid a solution being pushed on us without an opportunity to share more on the problem and influence the solution design more.

 

@Marion Frecaut that above comment was for you, sorry.

On the Community Overview, this page could be especially useful for me if we can:

  1. Manually curate the content on this page
  2. Make this page, exclusively, indexed and followed where the rest of the community is not
  3. Put it in front of the login gate

Our community is private due to the nature of some of the conversations we have there, so being able to have a single page in front of the login gate that serves up a taste of what’s behind the login gate would do wonders for our SEO and conversion rates. ​​

We could build a page like this on our website, but the manual curation part is challenging there.

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