Customer Case: feedback and helpdesk system for JIRA Cloud

The 21^st century dictates new ways of interaction with customers. Now you cannot just create some product and make it available in the market. You need to continuously promote your products or services, interact with customers, resolve their issues and improve your brand recognition.

How it can be done? It is difficult to say, as usually it depends on the niche of your product or service, your customers’ preferences and demand for your product. The only thing which is essential and mandatory is some platform for managing incoming requests from your customers.

There are dozens of solutions with the different set of features and capabilities and, of course, new interface and new configuration options. But what if you already use some product that meets most your requirements, and you do not want to migrate to a new solution. You may encounter such a situation when you use JIRA Cloud for tracking issues and incidents and do not imagine your work without this ecosystem.

So what can you do? – No worry, there is a handy and robust solution – Customer Case for JIRA Cloud. You get a plenty of options and capabilities to transform your JIRA Cloud into feedback aggregation and public helpdesk system.

If you want to immediately see Customer Case in action, open our customer feedback portal and find out all the advantages of our solution.

Setup of Forums

Your feedback and helpdesk system will be based on forums mapped to specific JIRA projects. You can use JIRA projects for either storing ideas submitted by users of your products or collect issues from your customers.

This is quite simple and will not take much time and efforts of yours. All you just need is a free project where you’d like to save ideas or support requests to. No long procedures and configuration, just enter the forum name and its description, and you are done.

Once you save the forum, you get a unique URL, which the forum is accessible on the Internet. Additionally, you can set the access restrictions and login options that will be used on the forum.

When configuring the login options you can enable login with the following accounts:

• Google+
• Facebook
• JIRA (for company employees)
• personal user accounts

If you have no social account, you can aways register a personal user account with entry of your email and password. Such accounts do not affect the licensing of JIRA Cloud, so you as a vendor will not get additional expenses.

The set of login options will automatically reflected on the login form of the forum.

Access restrictions can be applied to the whole forum or you can leave it as public, so everyone will have direct access to your forum and will be able to submit their ideas and support requests. If you decide to restrict access for a certain, you can do it for specific mail domain or for individual user emails. All the specified users will receive invitation emails to join the forum.

Feedback Forums

Once your customers proceed to the feedback forum, they will be prompted to log in to the forum with one of the available options.

After the login they will get the list of ideas or issues submitted by other customers or users of your products or services.

Ideas or issues can be filtered by status or category, or sorted by creation date, recent activity or votes.

When your users decide to submit some idea or report some issue, they can do it through the quick form for feedback submission. Creation of an issue or idea is quite quick and simple, just leave a short title and some description. The visual text editor can help you to apply some formatting to your text, add links or create lists.

Customers can comment ideas or issues, watch them or leave votes for further prioritization of an issue or idea. While watching the idea or issue, your customers will receive notifications about added comments or status change.

In the user profile, your customers can view ideas or issues they submitted, votes and comments they left, and ideas or issues they are watching. The email address is visible only to the user, other people will not be able to find out your email address.

Internal Feedback Management

Further management of submitted ideas and issues is performed in JIRA Cloud with its tools and capabilities. When you open the JIRA project mapped to the feedback forum, you will get a list of ideas or reported issues. This information is available in the dedicated section of the add-on.

Here you can open the required idea or issue for closer examination and transition to the next workflow step. You can perform a lot of other management actions on the idea or issue depending on your current needs.

You can utilize default JIRA workflows or customer them to meet your requirements. So after submission of an idea or issue, you can instantly put them to production, start investigation or assign to the appropriate member of the team.

Customer Case also provides an additional tab for communication with customers and users within JIRA Cloud. You can use the native JIRA comments for interactions with your teams, such comments will not be visible to your end users. The Ideas’ Coments tab of Customer Case can be used for communication with customers or posting official replies in Customer Case for the specific idea or issue.

Customer Case allows you to make a full-fledged feedback aggregation and issue management system from your JIRA Cloud with the minimum of efforts and expenses. Simple and intuitive interface will not let your customers get lost in the labyrints of ideas and issues, and you will be always aware of features your customers need and issues they encounter.

So are you ready to try this solution but do not know what to start with? No worry. If you already use JIRA Cloud, just click Try if for free link  on the Customer Case add-on page in the Atlassian Marketplace. For those who continue using JIRA Server, you can vote for the idea to have Customer Case for JIRA Server on our feedback forum.

If you are a newbie with Atlassian products but want evaluate a junction of JIRA Cloud and Customer Case, start a free trial of JIRA Cloud and then subscribe to Customer Case add-on. And here you are with the feedback and helpdesk system ready to work. If you still have any questions, feel free to contact us at support@stiltsoft.com.

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.

JIRA & Customer Case vs UserEcho

The modern customer is a very picky and particular about quality person who exactly knows what, when and to what extent he wants from your products. Today companies and vendors realize that besides selling products, you need also to capture your customers and satisfy their actual requirements. As a loyal customer is worth several new customers that only start using your products. Here just come customer community building platforms that allow you togather customer feedback, analyze the required updates and modifications in your products and services and measure user satisfaction and loyalty to your brand.

In our previous blog posts we have already compared the combination of JIRA Cloud and Customer Case against IdeaScale and UseResponse. In this blog post we are going to review and test customer community platforms – UserEcho and a bundle of JIRA Cloud and Customer Case. Community build tools will be compared by functionality and usability parameters.

UserEcho is a Cloud customer satisfaction platform that provides options for customer feedback management, helpdesk engine for handling customers’ support tickets and online support channel for instant communication via live chat. You can start demo to see this platform in action.

Customer Case is the JIRA Cloud add-on developed by StiltSoft team. It allows you to transition from the issue tracking system to the powerful customer community platform for aggregating user feedback and setting it to production without additional manipulations.

Both customer feedback management systems will be compared by the following parameters:

• 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

UserEcho allows you and your customers to log in to the user community portal with a personal account or with a social account on one of the following social networks or online services:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• VK
• Yahoo
• Windows Live
• GitHub
• Yandex
• OpenID

For signup to Customer Case your customers and users of your products can use their Google+ or Facebook social accounts to get access to the required feedback forum. Company support agents can sign in with their JIRA accounts without a necessity to have a separate account. Users having no social accounts can create a new account in Customer Case. It is a quick and simple procedure requiring entry or email and password, so you can almost instantly access Customer Case.

System Structure

UserEcho provides a single community feedback portal that is hosted in the UserEcho’s Cloud infrastructure. By default, your community forum gets a default UserEcho sub-domain, but you can always move to the sub-domain of yours.

The community portal is comprised of feedback forums used for storing the submitted user feedback items. The administrator can manage forums, as follows:

• add new forums
• delete the no longer needed forums
• regulate order of forums on the portal
• set branding icon for each forum
• define voting parameters for each forum individually
• manage basic data mappings (initial status of feedback items, associations with Helpdesk and Knowledgebase)

The community forum gets a set of feedback items, which you can use for categorizing user feedback. You get a set of 5 default feedback types, which you can only edit:

• ideas
• questions
• bugs
• praises
• news

If it is not enough, you can add your own feedback types with the default statuses (New, Planned, Completed) or add a new set of statuses adapted to your workflow. For any new feedback type, you can apply a specific icon for better visibility.

Management of categories for storing feedback items is quite simple. You can create the hierarchical structure with parent and child categories for better navigability and accessibility of your ideas. Optionally you can define which users can submit feedback to the category – either all users of your community portal or only staff members.

After installation of Customer Case add-on on your JIRA Cloud, you can start managing the client feedback portal with the alias similar to company.customercase.com. The ‘company’ name is automatically fetched from the JIRA Cloud account, which looks like company.atlassian.net. Customer Case support the mapping of your online community portal to a custom domain of yours. Details on this procedure are available here.

Once the customer feedback portal has been created, you can proceed to adding feedback forums and no extra limitations or fees will be imposed by your JIRA Cloud subscription. Feedback forums operate on the basis of JIRA projects that store the submitted ideas from your visitors and users of your products.

Creation of a new feedback forum requires entry of the forum name and its description, and selection of the appropriate JIRA project for storing ideas. The procedure is quite intuitive and simple, so even JIRA-inexperienced users will not have problems with this. Afterwards each feedback forum of yours receives a unique URL path, which you can use and share on your websites with customers and visitors. You can always add corrections or update the feedback forum, or remove it if no longer needed. All the submitted ideas will be preserved in your JIRA as separate tasks with comments.

Management of Ideas

UserEcho allows your customers to start entering their ideas or feedback right on the home page of your online community portal. The system samples entries matching the entered query and shows the list of similar ideas or feedback items.

Once you decide to add a new one idea, you will see the form where you can enter the header of your feedback item, add description and select the appropriate feedback type and category for posting your request. The visual text editor allows you to add formatting, attach files, insert links and paste tables. Additionally, you can manually regulate visibility of your feedback request on the forum if you want it to be private.

You can also embed some custom fields into your feedback collection form. One more enhancement is support for opinion polls that can be instantly inserted into existing feedback items.

After submission, your idea (question, praise, problem or news item) can be posted as is or moved to moderation when the administrator will take a decision to post this feedback item or not.

Once the user’s idea has been published the administrator can perform multiple actions on it, as follows:

• add the official replay to the posted feedback item
• change status of the entry
• edit the header or description of the idea
• assign the feedback item to the appropriate category
• add tags or assign performers to an idea or other feedback types
• manage translations for other visitors
• merge several feedback items in a single one
• view the voters for this feedback entry
• manage poll settings (creation of simple polls under the feedback entry)
• view information about the user who posted this entry
• move to another forum or delete the entry

Your users can edit their own feedback items, assign tags or delete entries. While viewing the list of feedback items, you can filter them by type and status, and sort them by top ratings, recent updates, comments, votes and categories.

Customer Case shows you the listing of ideas submitted on the current feedback forum. The set of filters allows you to get ideas of the appropriate status and category. Additionally, you can always sort them by the recent activity, number of votes or creation date.

Creation of a new idea is quite simple and requires from you input of the idea summary and description. The visual text editor allows you to set the required formatting, insert links and images into your ideas.

All customers and visitors of your feedback forums can leave comments, vote for ideas or watch the required ones.

Idea Moderation and Management of Idea Statuses

UserEcho is bundled with the moderation engine, which can be enabled by the administrator when needed.

• Moderation is off – all the information submitted by users will appear on the feedback forum without moderation.
• User-moderation – all the information submitted by users will appear on the feedback forum and users will be able to edit them, add tags, mark as inappropriate, spam or duplicate.
• Akismet filtering – all the information submitted to the feedback forum will be passed through Akismet spam filter. If any spam is detected, then content is moved to the moderation queue and then posted.
• Pre-moderation – all the information submitted to the feedback forum will be moved to internal moderation by the portal agents.

The agent has special interface for reviewing the feedback items, tickets and comments pending moderation. The administrator of the portal can moderate ideas while viewing them in the individual way.

By using the toolbar, the portal administrator can perform different actions. Bulk operations on feedback items are not available.

Customer Case also has the moderation section where the support agent can review all the ideas submitted by your customers on the specific feedback forum and open each feedback item for viewing details of it.

Here you can filter ideas by category or status or sort them by recent activity, creation date or number of votes.

Moderation of ideas can be performed in bulk or individually. On the list with ideas, you need to locate 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 batch operations are available to you:

• 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

The administrator of UserEcho can define the idea status while viewing the idea (bug, question, praise) or moderating it by clicking the corresponding option.

Management of idea statuses is available in the Setup section of UserEcho. Here the administrator can manage statuses for all customer experience items at once. The default statuses are read-only and cannot be edited or removed. All the statuses created manually by the administrator can be edited, removed and or moved up or down in the status order. During creation of a new status, the administrator should enter the status name, select its type and pick the color.

Customer Case utilize the internal capabilities of JIRA to manage idea statuses through customization of the project workflow. You can always adapt the idea handling workflow and add custom transitions for the associated idea statuses.

Voting System

UserEcho supplies users of the online community portal with a capability to vote for or against ideas, bugs, praises and questions. This can be done while viewing the list of feedback items on the home page of the community portal or when opening each item individually.

Administrators of the portal can also vote for or against feedback items while moderating them or viewing the overall listing. Knowledgebase articles can be also marked as helpful or not helpful. There is also an option allowing users of the portal to vote for or against comments of other visitors.

The administrator of UserEcho can also pin one or multiple users’ comments to the top of the comment thread or unpin if needed.

Customer Case provides your customers and visitors with the capability to vote for ideas too. Your ideas get your vote automatically, but you can always take it back if you wnat. Your customers and visitors are not limited in the number of votes per feedback forum and can vote for any feature they want. Voting for or against comments is not available now, as well as marking comments as featured.

Notifications and Subscriptions

UserEcho provides users and visitors of the portal with a capability to manually configure receipt of notifications about specific events on the portal. Users can also subscribe to some feedback sections if they want to receive regular updates on them. The user can also regulate subscription for individual feedback items, which he/she is currently subscribed to.

Basically, the user can get notifications about the following events:

• new topic creation
• new comment creation
• topic status update
• updates in watched topics
• topic merging
• news channel subscription

The administrator can also configure notifications for each user in particular.

Customer Case sends email subscription notifications about events when users become watchers ideas. You become automatically a watcher of your own ideas and ideas that you are watching or have commented. In this case, you will get notifications about any activity on the ideas, for example addition of a new comment, or update of idea status.

Administrators of the customer feedback forums can configure the required notifications about the ideas through the built-in JIRA email subscriptions based on idea filtered results.

Reporting and Analytics

UserEcho provides a series of basic reports on the submitted feedback items. These reports allow administrators to track the overall activity on the feedback ports and measure customer satisfaction based on its internal algorithms.

The system also provides the reports on the following KPIs:

• staff activity
• chat activity
• user’s satisfaction

Administrators can select the appropriate reporting period when generating reports.

The Community Stats dashboard shows the relevant statistics about registered users, added topics, left comments and votes.

Customer Case lets you utilize JIRA’s report generation capabilities to output either the series of data tables with information or multiple pie or column charts with the relevant information.

If using JIRA’s JQL queries you can instantly retrieve a list of ideas matching your search criteria, for example, ideas from Customer Case project with more than 2 votes.

The used JQL queries can be saved as individual filters for quick access next time you need them, or use these filters for viewing charts on your JIRA dashboard. The look and parameters of charts can be easily customized and its display parameters can be adjusted to your requirements.

Customizations and Enhancements

UserEcho allows you to customize the look of your online community portal, configure the order and set of data blocks shown on the portal. For each data block, the administrator can define its specific parameters, for example number of items to show, display only items of specific types, statuses or categories, order topics by some parameter and so on.

You can also apply your company branding, specify the color scheme for the feedback forum and define the position of the dashboard with widgets.

Additionally, you can can customize the look of the home page of your client feedback portal with optional interface modules and re-arrange their placement on the home page of the portal.

UserEcho also provides the ticketing and chat integration engines for better interaction with users. For display of the chat form, the administrator can set up special triggers for occurrence of pre-defined events, as follows:

• time on site
• time on page
• time since last chat
• viewed pages count
• visitor page URL
• visitor language

Customer Case does not provide any display augmentations for now, so you will be temporarily not able to customize look of your feedback portals. By default, it takes 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

UserEcho provides the feedback widget, which look and parameters can be customized and configured as needed.

The administrator just needs to paste the code of the widget on to the required website. It will allow users to quickly submit feedback items without visiting the feedback portal. You can define which forum and category the feedback items are submitted to, configure text snippets and colors of the widget, select the appropriate widget type and actions upon click on it.

The administrator can also enable the chat module, which can be displayed on your online community portal or on your company website.

Users can share information with friends on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) or directly email to friends about the following items:

• ideas
• problems
• bugs
• praises
• news items
• tickets
• knowledge base articles

Customer Case does not provide any widgets for easier data accessibility from external resources, but StiltSoft team plans to add them in future releases of the product. You can also leave your vote or comment for widget supportand social sharing.

Pricing

UserEcho is a web-hosted customer satisfaction platform that will no require additional expenses on maintenance or infrastructure support. Price is fixed and equals $15 per each support agent per month.

Customer Case as customer community platform that operates when integrated with JIRA Cloud. You need to subscribe to JIRA and Customer Case to start using the feedback portal with forums. We will provide price of the one-month subscription for both systems:

	Customer Case (Monthly Subscription)*	JIRA Cloud (Monthly Subscription)*	Total Price per One Agent	Total Monthly Solution Price
10 users	$10	$10	$2	$20
15 users	$20	$50	$4.70	$70
25 users	$40	$100	$5.60	$140
50 users	$100	$200	$6.00	$300
100 users	$150	$300	$4.50	$450
500 users	$200	$500	$1.40	$700
2000 users	$400	$1,000	$0.70	$1,400

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

Conclusion

UserEcho is a robust and powerful customer feedback management platform that provides your customers and users of your products with a lot of ways to submit feedback. Now you can quickly measure customer satisfaction with the well-planned interface and rich-in-features functionality. Chat module and helpdesk engine will become a good helpers for instant interaction with customers and keeping the support requests. This system will be ideal for small companies with several support agents involved.

Customer Case in bundle with JIRA Cloud is a complex multi-layered customer relationship management system that can be ideal for both collecting client feedback and rapid transition of ideas to production without any additional migration procedures. Intuitive interface and simplicity of use will become a really good experience to your customers and you will not spend your life on system deployment and configuration.