If you've wondered how enhancements and new features make it into our three major product releases each year and how you can get in the game, you're in the right place. Our overall product strategy derives from our organizational strategy, which means we are creating and expanding our products to fortify the lead we have over competitors in the global market. Some of these developments come from anticipating our customers’ future needs, some come from analyzing what else is happening in the market, and many come from the very people using the products.
This last group is the one we'll focus on today. No matter how much QA and UAT are built into our process, end users out in the real world will inevitably find things we missed or see better ways to perform functions, so we take a lot of interest in the feedback that comes through this channel. In fact, it's so important to us that we created a special forum within our Customer Community, called IdeaConneXion, to gather user-generated ideas and foster collaboration between users and product owners. (If you would like to register for the Customer Community, you’ll find instructions here.)
To illustrate how an idea becomes a feature, let's follow a real one from inception through deployment.
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CREATE |
One day a customer thought there should be a way for managers to delete dashboardsthat are no longer used, so he submitted the idea. (Note: If you are already a customer, you can view the idea submitted here in the Community.)
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VOTE |
Over time, other customers joined in on the request by voting and commenting on the idea.
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ADVANCE |
Once the idea collected 250 points (25 votes), the product owner was alerted that an idea related to his product was generating interest among users. The idea continued to acquire votes, reaching 1740 points!
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ALERT |
The customer who submitted the idea received an email alert informing him his idea has moved to the next stage. Actually, he received an email every time the status changed to help him follow the progress.
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EVALUATE |
The product owner evaluated many factors including, the level of user interest (votes), the effort required to develop, fit with the overall product strategy, other work that would be required (architecture changes or other product impacts), competitor offerings, roadmap commitments, and more. The idea was considered feasible and was added to the queue of development work. This did not indicate a commitment to a delivery date, just that it was going to be worked into the schedule sometime in the future.
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DEVELOP |
Eventually, requirements were documented and the work was picked up by R&D to start developing the feature to assign a permission to users allowing them to delete dashboards created by other users.
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DELIVER |
We added an icon to the Dashboard Deletion feature in theSummer '20 release notes to identify it as a customer-submitted idea. (Customers can access the release notes directly at this link.) |
Just like Schoolhouse Rock told us how a bill becomes a law, or doesn't, not all ideas make it to feature development. At any point in this process, an idea can be held up or drop out completely due to a change in strategy, obsolescence, or technical issues. Changes like these are communicated via the idea in IdeaConneXion section in the Customer Community.
As a user of NICE CXone, your experience is valuable to our development process and we want you to collaborate with other users in the Community and submit your improvement suggestions. Now that you know how it all works, get in the game and tell us how we can improve our products!
