How can you collect feedback in a way that centers your product strategy, gives you control over the customer experience (CX), and makes each of your customers feel heard?

Updating and moderating requests on traditional, community-centric portals requires a lot of maintenance, which is why we take a different approach at Pendo. The new Idea Portal in Pendo Listen supports continuous discovery, validation, and research by giving your customers a place to share feedback, while delivering You control what they see.

To ensure we were providing our customers (and internal Pendo users) a scalable and intuitive way to manage feedback, we validated our assumptions using ideation tests. Here’s how we do it.

Letting customer feedback inform how we direct our portal

When setting up our own idea portal in Pendo Listen, we tried several ways to organize content, tabs, and sections. We had a hunch about which one made the most sense, but we wanted to dig deeper and validate a few different options with our customers first with Listen.

To do this, we built three test portals with the following three layout options:

1. Work to be done (JTBD)

This will include tabs like “Drive product adoption” and “Activate and train users”. This puts ffocus on our customers and their goals, not our software. This also encourages youthey want to talk about what they want to achieve, not just how to fix it.

However, there are several drawbacks to this approach. That’s mis more subjective than the other two options, which may cause confusion or additional setup time. That’s also mit’s likely that the ideas overlap between tabs, making it difficult for users to search for what’s relevant to them.

2. Stages of product discovery

This will include tabs such as “Gather feedback,” “Considering,” “Building,” and “Beta,” and aadding another layer of transparency for our customers to our roadmap. However, maintaining this will take longer, as our team needs to check all categories and ideas for words that could mislead customers. Plus, it’s harder to find the ideas you’re looking for.

3. Modules in Pendo

This groups tabs by product area, such as Guides and Analytics. This is in line with how we talk about our products, setup is easy, and anything that doesn’t fall into one product area can fall under the ‘global’ tab option. It’s also easier for users to navigate, offers more flexibility and ownership for Pendo’s internal teams, and band by using sections as high-level phases, we can still offer transparency regarding what’s on our roadmap. The downside? The focus is on the product, not the customer tasks to be completed or use cases.

To identify the best onboarding for our team and you, we added screenshots of each portal to three different ideas in Listen. Then, we added this to the idea test and launched it with our customers:

The result: Customer-selected product modules

In just a few days, customers chose it Module most portal orientation, with JTBD portal orientation follows closely.

However, in-app feedback that customers shared in testing this idea led us to Module orientation.

• Many customers tell us that Product Module is how they think about features in Pendo, and how they see ideas in the list. This is definitely the easiest option for most customers.
• JTBD is praised for encouraging customers to articulate what they want to achieve (i.e. “what” and “why”) rather than “how,” which may not truly address JTBD.
• JTBD worry some customers because they are more subjective than Product Module and they may think about this differently, leading to confusion.

We can solve it all these needs with our final choice Module as tabs at the top, and high level Status as part. The way we organize ideas in the portal can help connect the “why” behind each comment. Use this template to see how we structured the text of each idea to do this.

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Using idea testing is an easy and fast way to get to know your customers and make data-backed development decisions. To find out more you can do with Listen, take a self-guided tour or talk to an expert.