JIRA & Customer Case vs HunchBuzz

The modern marketing and retail has encountered a serious problem – how to sell some generic and unknown product to customers. Nowadays in the era of the Internet, each customer can find the required product online, read its reviews and order it with the shipping to the required location. These all facts have transformed a modern customer into a very picky and full-of-product-requirements person, who definitely knows what he wants. Today’s companies and manufacturers have already realized the necessity of communication with end users for tailoring products to their actual needs. For these objectives customer community building platforms have been created that provides you with tools for gathering customer feedback, its further analysis and measuring user satisfaction and customer loyalty to your brand.

In our recent blog posts we have already compared the combination of JIRA Cloud and Customer Case against IdeaScale, UseResponse and UserEcho. In the current blog post, we want to match them against a new customer community platform – HunchBuzz. These community build tools will be compared against each other by multiple functionality and usability parameters.

HunchBuzz is a customer satisfaction platform running in the Cloud. It supplies you with the means for customer feedback management through collection of customers’ ideas, their further moderation and indication of the current progress on them. You can start a trial account or request a demo.

Customer Case is the the add-on developed by StiltSoft team for JIRA Cloud ecosystem. It allows you to smoothly transform your issue tracking system into the featured customer community platform for collecting user feedback and migrating it to production without additional manipulations.

This blog post we will compare both rivals by the following options:

• Login Capabilities
• System Structure
• Management of Ideas
• Idea Moderation and Management of Idea Statuses
• Voting System
• Notifications and Subscriptions
• Reporting and Analytics
• Customization and Enhancements
• Widgets & Social Media
• Pricing

Login Capabilities

HunchBuzz provides visitors of your user community portal with a capability to sign in with a social account (Facebook or Google+) or create a new HunchBuzz user account. Creation of a new account requires entry of the email address, password and first name of the user.

Your customers can sign up to Customer Case with their social accounts on Facebook or Google+, or create a new account for the whole community forum. Company employees can also use their JIRA accounts for signing in to feedback forums, in this case the Employee marker will be shown next to the employee name. Users without social accounts can create a new account by entering email and password, so your customers can get quick access to Customer Case.

System Structure

HunchBuzz provides you with a community feedback portal that is hosted in the vendor’s Cloud infrastructure.Your community gets a default HunchBuzz sub-domain, domain aliasing is available only in the Enterprise pricing plan.

Your community is comprised of multiple challenges (projects) that you open for collecting feedback from your users and visitors of your products. While creating a challenge you can define a lot of settings, as follows:

• set the challenge name and its description
• enable prize rewards for active feedback users and the number of available prizes per challenge
• set the close date for the challenge when all feedback items will be rejected
• add up to 2 generic multi-choice questions
• specify tags
• enable/disable review feedback for evaluation of customer satisfaction (up to 4 metrics)
• limit access to the challenge (submission, viewing, commenting and review)

Once your visitors open your community, they will see the list of available challenges. After opening a particular challenge, your visitors will see the list of submitted ideas, as follows:

The administrator of the community cannot manage feedback items or create new ones. Internal management of challenge categories is not also available, so all the submitted ideas will be stored as is without any categorization.

Installation of Customer Case add-on transforms your JIRA Cloud into the client feedback portal with the alias like company.customercase.com. The ‘company’ name is automatically retrieved from the JIRA Cloud compny account, which looks like company.atlassian.net. Customer Case supports the domain aliasing so you can always map your online community portal to a custom domain of yours. Details on this procedure are available here.

Once creation of the customer feedback portal is complete, you can start adding feedback forums and no subscription limitations or fees will be imposed to your user feedback portal. Feedback forums work on the basis of native JIRA projects that will be used for storing ideas submitted by visitors and users of your products.

Creation of a new feedback forum is quite a simple procedure that requires nothing more than entry of the forum name and its description, and selection of the appropriate JIRA project for storing ideas. Even newbies in JIRA will not experience any problems with this. Upon creation of the feedback forum, you will get a unique URL path with the mapping to the corresponding feedback forum. You can further share this URL with your customers on your websites or online resources. It is not a problem to add corrections or update the feedback forum, or remove it if no longer needed. All the submitted will be saved and kept in your JIRA as separate tasks with visitors’ comments.

Management of Ideas

HunchBuzz provides visitors with a capability to add ideas on the home page of the community. Once the user has entered the initial title of the idea, the system will try to find duplicates or ideas having the same keywords.

The user can instantly proceed to creation of the idea by clicking the Post New Idea button. In addition to the idea title, the user should enter the description in the visual text editor. Optionally, one file of the specified formats can be attached to the issue.

Management of ideas is available in the individual way without any bulk operations. The following operations are available to the generic user:

• adding a new comment or deleting the already left one
• posting the metrics review
• subscribing to the idea updates
• printing the current idea

In addition to the above mentioned actions, the administrator can perform the following ones:

• updating the idea status
• viewing statistics for the current idea
• editing the idea title and description
• deleting the idea from the challenge

Customer Case displays the paginated listing of all ideas left by users on the current feedback forum. Several filters allow you to narrow the list of ideas by the appropriate status and category. Additionally, you can sort the submitted ideas by the recent activity, number of votes or creation date.

Creation of a new idea requires entry of only idea summary and idea description. The visual text editor allows you to apply the required formatting, embed links and images into your ideas.

All customers and visitors of your feedback forums can post their comments with idea updates, vote for interesting ideas or watch the featured ideas.

Idea Moderation and Management of Idea Statuses

HunchBuzz is equipped with a simple idea moderation engine, which can be activated in the settings of the user community portal. Once it is activated, all the submitted ideas will be published as is, but you will get a notification about suspicious feedback items. There is also an additional section where the administrator can view all the newly submitted and not approved ideas.

The administrator can either delete the idea if assumes it to be spam or delete the report, so the idea will be no longer marked as suspicious.

Customer Case is also supplied with the simple moderation section where the support agent can view all the submitted ideas on each specific feedback forum and view details of each feedback item.

Here the moderator can filter ideas by category or status or sort them depending on the recent activity, creation date or number of votes.

Moderation of ideas can be performed either in a bulk or an individual way. On the list with ideas, you need to select the appropriate feedback item and perform the appropriate action on it, as follows:

• add internal or external comment visible on the feedback forum
• edit the idea summary or description
• delete or move the idea
• add links to some external web sources
• add internal labels
• clone the idea
• attach files or screenshots
• start progress on the idea or reject it

The following bulk operations are available to administrators:

• edit values of ideas
• move ideas to another feedback forum
• transition ideas to another status
• delete ideas from the feedback forum
• synchronize ideas with some external system
• export ideas to Excel, XML or Word
• share the list of ideas with some user

Managing Idea Statuses

Management of idea statuses (stage labels) in HunchBuzz is quite simple. You can add new labels, edit the existing ones and delete the no longer needed statuses. While adding or editing the idea status, the administrator can enable/disable voting for ideas being the current status.

Customer Case uses the built-in features and capabilities of JIRA Coud for management of idea statuses through modifications in the project workflow. You can always customize and adapt the idea management workflow and add custom transitions for the associated idea statuses.

Voting System

HunchBuzz supplies users of the online community portal with the progressive voting system, that allocates the variable number of votes depending on your choice. So the range of available voting options varies from ‘-2’ for the Really dislike option and up to ‘+2’ for the Really like option. Voting for comments is not available. The moderator’s comments left when updating the idea status are shown at the top of the comment thread.

Customer Case also has a voting engine that allows your customers and visitors leave their votes for ideas. The user can leave his or her vote for any idea on the feedback forum, as the number of votes is not limited so your visitors are free to vote for the required ideas. Voting for or against comments, as well as marking comments as featured are not available in Customer Case.

Notifications and Subscriptions

HunchBuzz provides a standard set of notifications that are sent to users upon occurrence of the following events:

• adding new ideas into the challenge
• updating the idea status
• commenting ideas

In order to receive updates on all ideas in the challenge, users can subscribe to the appropriate challenge. The administrator also receives notifications about left reviews and ideas pending moderation.

Customer Case sends multiple notifications about idea events when users become watchers of ideas. You become automatically a watcher of your own ideas and ideas that you have started watching or have commented. In this case, notifications about any activity on the ideas, for example addition of a new comment, or update of idea status will be sent to your mail box.

Administrators of the customer feedback forums can configure the required set of notifications about ideas through the native JIRA email subscriptions created on the basis of idea filtered results.

Reporting and Analytics

HunchBuzz provides a basic idea reporting engine, that allows you to view statistics data for individual ideas, as follows:

The Community Contributors block keeps track of the most active idea contributors.

If using Customer Case you can utilize the standard JIRA’s report generation capabilities to output the series of data tables with required information or multiple pie or column charts with the relevant information. JIRA’s JQL queries can also significantly simplify the way of getting the list of ideas matching your search criteria, for example, ideas from Customer Case project with more than 2 votes.

The written JQL queries can be stored as individual filters for the next time when you will need this information. The saved filers can be also used for viewing charts on your JIRA dashboard. The look and parameters of charts can be easily modified and adjusted to your actual requirements.

Customizations and Enhancements

HunchBuzz allows you to configure the color scheme for your community and load the branded logos.

Customer Case does not provide special augmentations for customizing appearance of your user community portal. By default, the system uses the JIRA project logo on the corresponding feedback forum as branding. You can leave your vote for the idea of portal customization in the company’s Customer Case.

Widgets and Social Media

HunchBuzz allows you to embed the feedback widget onto your website by inserting the corresponding widget code. When the user opens, he/she will see the pop-up form listing the recently added ideas and the field to enter new ideas.

It also provides the social sharing block for sharing ideas on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Customer Case does not allow you to add widgets for quick data accessibility from external resources, but StiltSoft team plans to add this feature in future releases of Customer Case. You can also leave your vote or comment for widget support and social sharing.

Pricing

HunchBuzz is a Cloud-hosted customer satisfaction platform that will no take extra money for maintenance or infrastructure support. This solution has several pricing plans, as follows:

• Lite – completely free. The following options are included: 1 administrator of the community, 10 users, 1 active challenge, public community and no capability to attach files to ideas.
• Standard – $75 per month. The following options are included: 2 administrators of the community, 50 users, 10 active challenges, public or private communities and 10-megabyte file attachments.
• Enhanced – $199 per month. The following options are included: 20 administrators of the community, 200 users, 20 active challenges, public or private communities, 20-megabyte file attachments and Rewards Store.
• Unlimited – price is agreed individually. The following options are included: unlimited administrators, users and challenges, public or private communities, 50-megabyte file attachments, Rewards Store, Domain Aliasing and AD/SAML Single Sign-On.

Customer Case as customer community platform that operates in integration with JIRA Cloud. You need to have subscription to both JIRA Cloud and Customer Case to start using the feedback portal with forums. We will provide price of the one-month subscription for both systems. The pricing shows the number of allowed users who are administrators or support agents in Customer Case, the number of visitors and users of the feedback portal is not limited, as well as the number of open and private forums.

X	Customer Case (Monthly Subscription)*	JIRA Cloud (Monthly Subscription)*	Total Monthly Solution Price
10 users	$10	$10	$20
15 users	$20	$50	$70
25 users	$40	$100	$140
50 users	$100	$200	$300
100 users	$150	$300	$450
500 users	$200	$500	$700
2000 users	$400	$1,000	$1,400

If using the yearly subscription, this solution will cost you less due to the yearly discount.

Conclusion

HunchBuzz is a simple customer feedback management platform that provides the required set of tools for collecting user feedback and measuring customer satisfaction with easy-to-use user interface. This system is an ideal solution for small companies with only several support agents involved.

Customer Case together with JIRA Cloud is a well-equipped multi-level customer relationship management system that will be ideal for both gathering client feedback and instant transition of ideas to production without long and tedious migration procedures. User-friendly interface and useful features will provide your customers and administrators of feedback forums with a really good experience in idea management.