Get brand new ideas with Advanced Communities’ “Ideas Management”

This guest post has been written by Stas Dunayev, a Managing Director and Valentina Naumenko, a Head of Marketing at Advanced Communities (London based consultancy), a highly innovative team devoted to Salesforce Community Cloud evangelisation.

I decided to give AC a spot on my Nerd At Work because I used their great product on a personal project regarding the Salesforce Ohana Italia, and what a better way to promote a product that is available for free for our Salesforce Ohana! (ed)

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We are Advanced Communities and we specialise in Salesforce Community Cloud. We have lots of Community Cloud components on AppExchange and we would like to introduce our most popular component – AC Ideas. 

The main point of our Community Ideas Component is to facilitate the Ideation process. In plain English, this means your customer or partner or even your own employee can create an Idea and other members of your customer/partner/employee community can then view, comment and, most importantly, vote for that Idea. After voting, you can see which Ideas are the most popular ones and decide whether to implement them or not.

The Ideation process can be employed by companies and organisations of all sizes and across all industries as an important part of product design. 

To stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need first and foremost to listen to your users as this allows you to succeed in both growing your business and retaining your existing customers. You might be familiar with the Ideation process already as Salesforce as a company uses Ideas extensively for its own products. On the well-known IdeaExchange site (https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaSearch), Salesforce users have created thousands of ideas suggesting improvements and missing features and collectively contributing to the success of new Salesforce releases. If Salesforce uses it, why can’t your company do the same? 

Ideas Management used for Salesforce Community Cloud platform can provide fantastic benefits for any business: it allows firms to interact with clients as well as partners and to engage with their personnel within a community thus providing an opportunity to generate fresh ideas.

The Ideation process includes the following steps:

• Generating and Gathering a great number of ideas from all your stakeholders that then can be filtered and selected into the brightest, most appropriate or most ingenious ones.
• Reviewing. The status board enables you to easily review all submitted ideas and to reward your best contributors
• Evaluating and Communicating keeps your community audience informed about the ideas status updates.

AC Ideas, an Idea Management created by Advanced Communities, provides you with a complete set of tools at each stage of the Ideation process. AC Ideas can help you leverage the power of Community Cloud and crowdsource new ideas as well as collect employee feedback and provide valuable insights to help you grow your business.

By employing AC Ideas, you will be able to:

• Understand your customer or partner needs.
• Stay in touch with your employees.
• Step beyond straightforward solutions and generate innovative ones.
• Explore new directions which you may not have encountered before.
• Ask the right questions to your stakeholders and listen to their answers.
• Measure and quantify customers’ demand.

AC Ideas is a lightning solution developed for Salesforce Community Cloud which allows you to get invaluable feedback from your customers and to identify their pain points or missing features in your products and services. The ideation process can and should help you with planning and creating a roadmap for your products.

So let’s take a look at how AC Ideas works.

1. After installing the component and setup of its settings, your users can start generating new Ideas. To do this, they can login to community, go to the Ideas page and click ‘Post an Idea’ and fill in details – the key information about an idea: its title, categories and description. 

2. Now a new idea is posted! For more efficient management of published ideas there is a list of useful features:

• Comments and Votes give your community a voice and provide clarity on what matters most.

• Votes Threshold: set up the vote threshold, e.g. after exceeding the set threshold, the Idea will automatically change its status from ‘New’ to ‘Accepted’ and the product manager will get notified of this via email.

3. And finally, you get a clear structure of your ideas, obtained by using a Categories Hierarchy, as well as Filters and Advanced Search, that allows you to organise your Ideas page in the most efficient way. 

Since the component was launched on AppExchange it has been installed multiple times and is in use by thousands of companies and organisations.
The main version is free and does not have any restrictions. 

A paid Enterprise version is also available with lots of extra features and is in use by companies such as Australia Post, Mulesoft and Financial Force from this link.