Setting up a Feedback Portal

Learn how to set up and configure your Feedback Portal.

Maayan Ayalon avatar
Written by Maayan Ayalon
Updated over a week ago

Craft.io Feedback Portal is a great way to collect feedback, ideas, or demand either directly from your end customers or via internal teams like Customer Success or Sales. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through the Feedback Portal setup process and how to configure it to your needs.

1.   Create a New Feedback Portal:

From the Top Navigation bar, click on the ‘Feedback' button to launch a new Feedback Portal. 

Note: only the owner of your workspace can create the Feedback Portal.

Then, you'll be prompted to set your company name, your Feedback Portal’s name, and the sub-domain for the URL. This will be the destination where your customers will go to submit new ideas and feature requests.

You'll also have the option to add a logo and to specify which Workspaces will be connected to the Portal. This step allows you to connect customer feedback to Epics and Features within Craft.io, so it’s important to select the correct Workspace which will eventually house the items that will deliver on your Customer needs. 

2.  Setup Feedback Portal Categories

Next, create some categories to help to organize your customer feedback (for example Feature requests, Ideas, Bugs). These categories are like folders and don’t necessarily need to reflect the structure of your Product hierarchy within the Craft.io Workspace. Adding a description for each category can be useful in helping those submitting to correctly categorize their feedback.


3.  Configure your Portal’s settings

The next step would be to define the portal's settings by clicking the ‘Settings’ button in the top right corner of the screen. The first tab, 'General Settings', will allow you to edit the Name, URL, and Logo of the Portal. It also allows you to set the Portal's Privacy.

You can choose from two types of access to the portal:

Public access:

  1. Anyone with the URL can submit feedback to the Portal. They will be required to sign-up but do not need to be specifically added to your Portal as an invited user.

  2. Users will be able to see other people’s feedback submissions.

  3. This option is typically used to collect feedback from a large group of end customers who would receive an email from you inviting them to submit feedback via your Portal URL.

Restricted access:

  1. Only pre-defined users will be able to submit feedback. Each invited user will need to sign-up and create an account to access your Portal.

  2. This option allows you to group users into specific companies inside the 'Company List', and to control whether they can see submissions from other users when visiting the Feedback Portal. 

  3. The restricted access option is typically used when you want your internal teams to log feedback on specific pain points or sales opportunities on behalf of partners or customers. The restricted access option also allows you to control who can access the portal and limit what customers from different companies can see while submitting feedback.


4.  Manage Teams

You can invite individuals from your organization to both submit feedback and help you maintain the Feedback Portal. From the Settings screen, navigate to Team Manager, enter the email address of the user and select which permission type you would like to allocate them to. 

We recommend using the Team manager only to invite users from your core team who will assist you with managing feedback and administrating the portal.

5.  Set up Companies

If your organization wants to collect feedback from multiple companies or groups, use the Company List feature to create organized groups in the portal. These groups often represent actual companies that use your products, your customers; but they can also be used for internal feedback collection by representing internal groups within your organization. In addition to being more organized, creating Companies will also help you control who has access to the portal and certain categories and whether users within different companies can see each others’ feedback. 

Note: this option is only available when you’ve selected the ‘Restricted Access’ option in the General Settings section. 

To set up Companies, from the left-hand menu select Company List, then click "Add Company". Next, type in the Company’s name, then select the workspace the customer’s feedback will connect to, set the size of the Company as well as the Company’s value (this can be used to represent values like revenue, customer lifetime value etc.), and click on "Create Company".

Now you're ready to invite the Company’s users to this portal. You have the option to manually type in the emails of all the users you'd like to invite under "People". This will send them a personal invite email that they can accept and sign up to the portal. Alternatively - you can invite the users via a company-unique invite link.

With the company invite link, you can easily and quickly invite a massive amount of users by sending the unique link to a group email or publishing it on a webpage (instead of typing the emails in one-by-one).

To guarantee that only users from the same company can join their group, each company is defined by a set of email domains; only users with emails that match the specified domain will be allowed to sign up to the Feedback Portal.

For example, if one of the companies you defined is Wallmart and their domain is wallmart.com, then type in that domain in the window under Invite link, and click on "Add domain".

After you added the relevant domains, you can copy the invite link and send it to the relevant users within that company.

6.  Define questions

The feedback form that users will fill in to submit their feedback can be configured with a set of predefined questions. The purpose of these questions is to empower product managers to direct their feedback providers to relevant questions about a feature or product so that they receive more contextual and structured feedback.

To set up the form, from the Settings left-hand menu select Feedback fields, then click Add Field.

To define the type of answer format you’d like to receive for each question, you can select the type of field you'd like to add to the form from the drop-down menu. For example, to define a closed set of possible answers, select Single-Selection or Multi-Selection, or define that the answer format is either Text, Date, or Number. This way, you can create highly structured and accurate feedback questions and forms.

If you are puzzled about what you could ask, you can use the "Guru Questions" which includes a large bank of preset questions you could add with a click, that represents some of the best practices for feedback collection in the industry.

You can add as many questions as needed, and any field you add can be defined as “Required” to ensure receiving answers to the important questions.

You can also add a description line for each of the questions so that the form and questions are clearer and easier to understand for its users.

7. Manage your workflow

When a customer submits a new piece of feedback, the Portal manager can update both the customer and his team members with the status of this feedback submission (e.g., New, In Progress, etc.). You can manage the statuses as well as their default order in the Workflow & Statuses section inside the portal settings.

The 'Feedback Status' is visible both to the team managing the portal and to the users submitting the feedback. Add new statuses, delete existing ones, change their corresponding color or reorder the statuses using drag and drop.

In addition to the 'Feedback status', you can also use the 'Internal status' to manage the progress of a feedback submission, which you may wish to communicate only internally. This status is only visible to specific users you’ve invited on the Team Manager page and who have been granted the right permissions (Editor or above). For the 'Internal status', you can also add new statuses, delete existing ones and reorder the workflow (in a similar fashion to the user-facing 'Feedback status'). 

Finally, there’s an option to manage the Feedback importance value available to the user submitting the Feedback, such as ‘Must have’ and ‘Nice to have’. Add new importance levels, delete existing ones and reorder as needed. 

8. Define and manage Labels

There's also a dedicated label management area inside the settings. Admins and process owners can create, delete, and see how various labels are used for each of the connected workspaces.

To define a new label, click on the 'Add Label' button, and to edit/delete an existing label, just hover over the name of the label and click on the pencil icon to edit or on the trash bin icon to delete the label.

You can also see the items that are connected to each label by clicking on the number of connected items next to the label name.

Next up: Check out this article where we walk you through the full journey of a feedback item.

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