How to Effectively Manage Ideas on Salesforce Experience Cloud

The idea-creation process is a journey with many twists and turns. Ideas can be born in a flash, then bounce around for days or weeks before finally developing into something concrete.

In order for an idea to reach its full potential and contribute as much value as possible, more than one mind must add their input before the idea can become a reality.

And the most important thing here is to manage those ideas. Managing ideas and suggestions from your customers helps drive value to your brand and community.

In this blog post, we look at the importance of effective ideas management, how to manage ideas in Salesforce, limitations with Ideas on Salesforce Experience Cloud, and how to access Ideas in Lightning Experience.

So, let’s begin.

The Importance of Effective Ideas Management

Enhancing Engagement

Ideas can help you enhance engagement with your current customers and prospects.
Getting customers involved in developing new ideas will help them feel more involved, which increases the likelihood of them engaging with your products and services over time.

Understanding Customer Intent

Ideas help you gain insight into your customer behaviour. Incorporating ideas to understand customer intent, deliberating, analyzing, and working towards executing those ideas allows businesses to address customer needs efficiently.

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Fostering Ideation and Innovation

Ideas are an effective way to promote and foster the idea generation process. Since ideas are coming in from end-users, you can innovate around your product or service in a way that customers want.

Building Transparency

Ideas provide you with a better understanding of your customers. As such, they can help you improve customer service while building transparency between your company and its customers.

Managing Ideas in Salesforce

The Ideas component in Salesforce Experience Cloud enables users to directly share and post ideas on the online community.

When enabled, the Ideas component allows users to:

• Post Ideas
• Subscribe to Favorite Ideas
• Filter Ideas by Category and/or Status
• Vote and Comment on Ideas

Limitations With Ideas on Salesforce

• The Ideas Object is Available Only in Salesforce Classic

The Ideas Object is only available in Salesforce Classic and users are unable to access it in Lightning Experience. So, whenever Lightning users have to access the Ideas component, they have to switch back to the Classic version, which is time-consuming.

• Filters and The Search Option Are Unavailable

In the Ideas component, users cannot apply filters or search for relevant ideas. Users neither have access to the information about an idea’s creation in a certain time frame nor can they filter through ideas.

Accessing Ideas In Salesforce

While accessing Ideas in Salesforce Classic is an easy task, the challenge arises when you want to access Ideas in Lightning Experience (LEX). For this reason, Lightning users switch to Classic to access ideas on their online community, which is an inconvenient process.

Although Salesforce doesn’t provide access to Ideas in Lightning, there are two ways that users can access the Ideas in LEX:

• Via Customization

Customization necessitates a lot of coding in your Org, which increases the chances of your system slowing down. This procedure could take from weeks to months, making it less feasible.

• Via an App

Users can install a Salesforce-native application, like Grazitti’s IdeasPro, to access Ideas in the Lightning Experience without affecting the system performance. The app enables secure access and offers longevity as well as scalability. Moreover, most of the apps come with features that allow users to streamline idea management.

Check out another amazing blog by Sukhwinder here: How Achieving Innovation Goals Help Shaping the Future of an Organization | Salesforce Guide

Conclusion

In present times, smart brands have created online communities to interact with their customers and gather their unique ideas. Ideas on Salesforce Experience Cloud can be a powerful tool for companies that use it to increase productivity and efficiency.

However, customizing the Ideas component for your community built on Salesforce can be a time-consuming process. So, it’s right to move to a Salesforce-native application that provides high-end flexibility.

Want To Learn How You Can Manage Ideas on Salesforce Experience Cloud? Watch Our On-demand Webinar.