Growing up, I spent many afternoons in my grandma’s living room, as she lived across from my school. Grandma was very involved in her community and would often have friends over for what she called "drink alongs." They discussed and debated a variety of topics, usually about how to improve their community. Listening in on how they solicited community feedback and strategized ways to take action, was fascinating. Now, I get to spend my days listening and strategizing at scale as part of my job at Salesforce.
Customer Success and Trust are core values at Salesforce. We believe our customers’ success is our success, and, when we build our business hand-in-hand with our customers, we’re able to drive continuous innovation and growth. That’s why we give our customers a seat at the table; we want to know what’s working, what’s not, and what they’d like to see in the future. Of the many channels that make up Salesforce’s Voice of the Customer program, my favorite is the IdeaExchange because it’s where any customer can go to shape Salesforce products.
Meet the IdeaExchange
The IdeaExchange is an always-on customer feedback platform, connecting the Trailblazer Community to Salesforce product managers. It empowers customers to share opinions and post ideas for product improvements or new features so that our teams can continue to create valuable solutions. Once customers have a Trailblazer Community profile, they can start posting and upvoting ideas.
Learn about our journey together
If you’ve been following along with us over the past year as we reimagine the experience on the IdeaExchange, you know we are closing the loop on customer feedback with updated technology, better communication, and improved internal processes. The best part is we have been on this journey with our customers, co-creating, and co-innovating together. We’ve already started to deliver new features from winning ideas through a few rounds of pilot cycles, and are excited about seeing a number of those features available in the Spring ’20 Release.
Start to prioritize top ideas
During the True to the Core keynote with Parker Harris and Bret Taylor at Dreamforce ‘19, we unveiled the latest functionality on the IdeaExchange: Prioritization. Here’s a brief overview of how to work with our product teams to shape Salesforce products via the IdeaExchange:
- Share your ideas for product improvements with the Trailblazer Community.
- Browse ideas and upvote the ones that you like.
- Three times a year, product managers create a prioritization list from the most-upvoted ideas.
- When the prioritization cycle opens, spend 100 coins we give you on the ideas that you want to see on the product roadmaps.
- Product managers refresh the roadmap to include the ideas that earn the most coins.
- Salesforce starts working on the winning ideas selected by the community.
Winning ideas become new features that make their way through the release planning and development process. Ideas that don’t win may be considered in a future cycle. Why? As much as our teams would like to implement as many ideas as possible, they can’t all be done at once. IdeaExchange prioritization introduces tradeoffs and forces customers to tell us what they care most about. Our product teams also ensure new ideas don’t compromise our number one value: trust.
Influence the Salesforce product roadmap now
Here are four ways to shape Salesforce products on the IdeaExchange today:
- Explore how the IdeaExchange works so you can start posting and upvoting ideas for future releases.
- Learn how to work with our product teams via the IdeaExchange by earning a shiny new IdeaExchange Basics badge on Trailhead.
- Connect with our team and stay up-to-date on big announcements in the IdeaExchange Reimagined Trailblazer Community Chatter group.
Mark your calendars!
Prioritize top ideas three times a year to shape Salesforce products. You can start prioritizing in the upcoming cycle from January 20, 2020, to February 3, 2020.
