Use guide community for feature requests and bug reports?

Hey Mathieu! I see that this is your first post, so welcome to the Zendesk Community! 

We use the Community both to get product feedback and provide support, and would be happy to answer any questions you have. I've also asked our social media team to tweet this post out, so hopefully we can get some other Zendesk users in to answer questions as well. 

Hey Nicole!

I am looking for guidelines and best practices to get this setup for my community. Basically, how to engage users into posting their feature request and post bugs in the most efficient way.

Any markers would be very welcome!

Thank you!

Mathieu.

Hey Mathieu - 

One recommendation I get frequently for a feedback forum - i.e. where people can suggest features - is to set it up so that you or your product managers lead those discussions, rather than users just suggesting things at random. When you leave it open, you'll tend to get a lot of people asking for a certain button or function without explaining what problem they're actually trying to solve, and that's not the most helpful information for Product Devs. 

I'd recommend starting threads asking specific questions, or about specific aspects of the product. 

Break bugs out into a separate area; those will likely require more 1:1 troubleshooting. 

Also I'm interested to hear if you'v e gotten it up and running and what you've figured out so far!

We use this functionality at the moment. It works fairly well, but we have a couple of problems with it:

1) Our primary issue is that there's no easy way to export all of the suggestions and the associated voting for our product management team to review. Sure, you can do this via the API but it's a real problem for us as our product management teams make use of Aha! and Jira for managing product features and we don't have resource available for writing API calls to extract this kind of information. Insights reporting is only capable of extracting statistical information rather than lists, so we end up in a bit of a bind having to manually run through all of the tickets.

2) We get a LOT of duplicates and there's no way to merge discussion posts together. 

I'm hoping that, one day, Guide will introduce Apps the way in which Support does, which might let us more easily pull these feature requests in to our other systems, and/or it becomes easier to extract this information out of guide. 

Thanks for sharing, Paul! 

Would love to see some sort of integration between community section of guide and jira.

Could you explain that more in depth Ray?

Sounds very interesting.

If it's simillar situation to us I suspect Ray wants to see requests end up in JIRA as issues then have the ability to keep them in sync.

We send out customers to the forums when when they have feature requests, but we track all development activity in Jira. Ideally we could link a feature request in Zendesk to a Ticket (we have a feature request type of ticket) and it could copy over things like vote count / comment count so we can use that when planning releases to make sure we are taking our customers ideas into account.

Some really nice to haves would be a way to change the status of a zendesk feature request in Jira. For instance to mark the feature as planned or done.

But mostly I want a way to easly link back to Zendesk from Jira when looking at a feature request and see the vote counts so I can order my backlog accordingly.

-ray

We are using Guide for feature requests as well with the same plan to add links to another application for feature additions underway. Can we add something as simple as links which are only visible to agents and light agents?

Features are added as sprints to our project management application and connecting the article links to those sprints would be great. It's worth it if we have to use the API. We're looking for any advice which might help us get there faster.

Hey Ray and Wes,

I think both of these use cases are very valid but not necessarily something we are looking to support natively in the near future. 

I would encourage you too look at our API(https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/help_center/introduction) and see if it is useful to help you close the product gap. I am keen to help you use the API along with make sure we cover any gaps in the API.

Thanks! 

We are also a heavy Jira user, and thrilled that we can link ZD support tickets to related Jira stories. We would also find it incredibly useful to link community "feature request" posts to the same Jira elements!

I ran across this thread as I am looking to see if we can modify the "Status" options (Completed, Planned, etc). Anyone know if this is possible?

Hello @Jim,

In the base product, this isn't possible and would require custom code to implement. I've reached out to our moderator team to see if they can offer their expertise in helping you accomplish this. 

Best regards. 

Hi Jim,

The honest answer is no, technically you can't change that.

But with a little imagination we can go a long end.
Imagine the following;

Simply create the sections that align with your Agile stages.
So you have these sections for example

• Ideas
• Working on
• Planned
• Finished
• Not planned

Then whenever you do a feature request, simply move the topic to that particular section.
Other than this, it's nearly impossible unfortunately.

- Kay

Thanks for the clarification, Kay!

Sorry for the mixup @Jim but it seems this change isn't currently possible as the product stands. I would recommend posting this request in our product feedback forums so our devs can consider it for future updates. 

Best regards.