JIRA & Customer Case vs UseResponse

The new Digital Age has brought new marketing understanding to most vendors and companies. A necessity to capture attention of the customer with a bright package has been replaced with a new ideology of customer community building and increasing loyalty to your brand. This necessity has driven modern companies to look for ways of how to improve customer satisfaction and increase brand awareness. These things cannot be imagined without a special customer support platform where the company representatives can openly communicate with customers, discuss their ideas about products, gather customer feedback and measure user satisfaction with provided services.

In our previous blog post, we were comparing JIRA & Customer Case against IdeaScale. In this blog post we will continue comparing customer community platforms - UseResponse and a bundle of JIRA Cloud and Customer Case - from the functionality and usability aspects, and as a a user feedback aggregation tool in particular.

UseResponse is a self-hosted all-in-one community build tool. It combines a customer feedback management suite, live chat and online support channel for evaluating customers’ issues. You can take a tour or request a demo to see this system in action.

Customer Case is the JIRA Cloud add-on developed by StiltSoft team. By its means you can utilize powerful capabilities of JIRA Cloud for improving customer satisfaction issues with the new functionality of feedback forums for storing user feedback. The collected ideas you can further use for improving your products and solutions.

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

UseResponse 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:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+

Customer Case allows you to use your Google+ or Facebook social account to log in to feedback forum. Company representatives can use their JIRA accounts for sign-in. Users without social accounts can create a new account in Customer Case. Registration requires email and password, so you will not spend a lot of time.

System Structure

UseResponse provides a single client feedback portal that is installed as a self-hosted service on your server. You also need to map your UseResponse instance to the appropriate domain or sub-domain of yours,

The system uses categories for grouping incoming requests by feedback type. The administrator can define categories for the following items:

• topics
• articles
• FAQs
• tickets

The administrator can configure category usage or configure selection of the category as required or optional. So customers and clients of your company will have to select the appropriate category during the idea submission.

The set of available actions on categories includes the following:

• creation of new categories
• editing the existing categories
• removal of the categories

While creating a new category, the administrator can select the appropriate request type, enter category title, add description, configure visibility of the category and upload the icon.

Installation of Customer Case add-on on your JIRA Cloud leads to automatic creation of the client feedback portal with the alias similar to company.customercase.com. The ‘company’ part is fetched from JIRA Cloud account, having the similar view as company.atlassian.net. Customer Case allows you to to enter a custom domain for your online community portal if you decide to integrate it with your infrastructure. Details on how it can be done, you can find here.

A single customer feedback portal can store as many as needed feedback forums, so no additional limitations will be imposed by your JIRA Cloud subscription. Feedback forums work on the basis of your JIRA projects, which store the ideas submitted by your customers and users of your products.

Creation of a feedback forum is pretty quick and simple. Just enter the forum name, its description and select the necessary JIRA project for storing ideas and that’s all. Each feedback forum is mapped to a unique URL, which you can share with your customers on your website or some web resource. If needed, you can remove the forum or update its name with description.

Management of Ideas

Your customers can start entering their ideas right on the home page of your online community portal. UseResponse will automatically sample ideas that match the entered query and offer them to select the matching one. If nothing matching the query is found, they can click the New Topic button and start sharing their customer experience with you. This option prevents duplication of ideas and problems within the same portal.

Besides adding an idea you can report a problem, ask a question or leave a word of thanks. The visual editor allows you to apply the appropriate formatting to your idea, and leave the contact information about the author of idea for showing on theonline community portal. Optionally, your visitors can select the category and define issue visibility, or add tags for easier categorization.

After submission an idea (question, word of thanks, problem) can be posted as is or moved to moderation when the administrator will decide either to post this customer experience item or not.

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

• edit the idea (question)
• move to the archive
• move to trash
• lock comments
• manage subscriptions
• set a reminder
• manage person responsible for resolution or development
• merge with another idea (issue)
• view the user card of the author
• view the change log of idea (issue)
• view statistics about the idea (issue)

The administrator can also mark the idea as featured for its showing on the home page. The administrator can also vote for ideas (issues) and perform the above mentioned actions on ideas through the corresponding icons. The similar set of actions is available for the rest of feedback types (problems, questions and words of thanks).

Customer Case displays the list of ideas and lets you quickly filter them by status or category. In addition, you can instantly sort ideas ideas by the recent activity, number of votes or creation date.

The idea submission does not require entry of much information, just idea summary and description.

All customers and visitors of your forum, can post comments, vote for ideas or watch the required ideas.

Idea Moderation and Management of Idea Statuses

UseResponse is bundled with the moderation engine, which can be enabled by the administrator when needed. It provides additional section for reviewing and approving the submitted ideas (questions, words of thanks, problems) that are automatically moved to moderation first. Users’ comments are also sent to moderation so you can always remove spam comments.

When the administrator points to the item, the Approve and Decline buttons are shown. The administrator can instantly approve the idea or open it for a detailed review. In this case, the set of available actions is the same as when editing an idea.

The administrator can also select multiple items and perform bulk operations on them:

• change the content type (idea, problem, question, word of thanks)
• change status (Under Consideration, Declined, In Progress, Planned, Completed)
• change visibility (normal, private)
• change priority (featured, normal, never on home page)
• change responsible agent
• change category
• lock comments
• move to archive
• move to trash

Customer Case is also equipped with the moderation engine that utilizes the internal capabilities of JIRA Cloud. The add-on adds a dedicated section showing all ideas submitted by your customers on the specific feedback forum.

You have a capability to filter ideas by category or status or sort them by recent activity, creation date or number of votes.

You can moderate ideas in a batch or individually. On the list with ideas, you can click the appropriate one 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

You can always perform a batch operation on the submitted ideas. The following 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 UseResponse can instantly set the idea status while viewing the idea (problem, question, word of thanks) by clicking the status label. Additionally, the status of idea (problem, question) can be changed while editing the item.

Management of idea statuses is available in the Administration section of UseResponse. Here the administrator can manage statuses for each customer experience item in particular. The default statuses cannot be removed just only edited. All the statuses created by the administrator can be edited and removed. The default order of statuses can be changed too. While adding or editing the status, the administrator can select the type of feedback item, enter the status title, pick the background and text colors for status labels and select the appropriate state – Opened or Closed.

Customer Case uses the built-in JIRA capabilities for managing idea statuses through customization of the project workflow. You can adapt the idea workflow and set the specific transitions for the corresponding idea statuses.

Voting System

UseResponse allows users of the online community portal to vote for or against ideas and problems. Visitors can only vote for questions and words of thanks.

Users of your community build tool can vote for ideas, problems, questions and words thanks while viewing the listing on the home page. The items that the visitor voted for are highlighted with a special icon, the visitor can remove the vote by clicking the vote counter. Users can also vote for or against knowledgebase articles and FAQ items. Additionally, your customers can also vote for or against comments of other visitors.

The administrator of the customer satisfaction platform can also vote for or against comments of visitors and mark answers as best. Such answers are shown at the top of the comment thread.

Customer Case allows you to vote for ideas too. Your ideas get your vote automatically, but you can take it back if needed. Your customers and visitors are not limited in the number of votes and can vote for any feature they want. Voting for or against comments is not available now.

Notifications and Subscriptions

UseResponse provides two types of notifications for users and administrators.

Your uses will receive notifications to their emails about different events, such as approved or declined comment or topic, password reset, topic merging, new comments or replies, access problems, new assignments and others.

In addition to the users’ notifications, the administrator will receive notifications about a necessity to moderate comment or topic (idea, question, word of thanks, problem). The system allows the administrator to manage a range of email templates for each language and make modifications in their HTML code if some customizations are required.

Customer Case starts sending email notifications about events when you become a watcher of some idea. Users become automatically watchers of their own ideas and ideas that they once decided to watch or commented. In this case users will start receiving notifications about any activity on the ideas, for example new comment, or idea status change.

Administrator of the customer feedback forum can configure multiple notifications about the ideas through the JIRA subscriptions with filtered ideas.

Reporting and Analytics

UseResponse provides the dashboard with basic charts to administrators and agents of the portal to measure customer satisfaction and get insight into activity on your customer community platform. It shows the charts and graphs with information about active topics, tickets, assignments and the thread with recent activity.

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

By using JIRA’s JQL queries you can quickly and conveniently search for ideas matching your criteria, for example, ideas from Customer Case project with more than 2 votes.

You can always save the used JQL queries as individual filters, and use them as basis for showing charts on your JIRA dashboard. You can customize charts and adjust their display parameters for each saved filter.

Customizations and Enhancements

UseResponse allows you to customize the look of your online community portal, enable mobile interface for visitors from smartphones and tablets, and enable WYISWYG editor for text input.

Additionally, you can customize the look of the home page of your client feedback portal. You can add or re-arrange tabs, adjust their position on the portal, enable or disable widgets and configure their options.

Administrators can also use one-question polls to measure customer satisfaction and perform quick evaluation of customers’ opinions. The set of available operations on polls is standard and allows you to view the polling results, edit the poll, archive the poll (the poll is automatically archived when expires) or delete the poll. The administrator can add answers, enable multiple answers, mark the poll as featured, set the expiry date and map the poll to the definite topic.

Customer Case does not have any customizations to modify look of feedback portals now. By default, it uses the project logo on the corresponding feedback forum as branding. You can vote for the idea of portal customization in the company’s Customer Case.

Widgets and Social Media

UseResponse provides two types of widgets – internal and external. Internal ones are shown in the selected places on your client feedback portal. Code of external widgets can be added to your websites or web resources where they will be shown.

The administrator can select between two widgets – Support Center and Chat. The Support Center widget allows you to show the feedback form for quick idea submission and contact form. You can also show the recent topics and knowledgebase articles.

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 about the following items:

• ideas
• problems
• announcements
• questions
• words of thanks
• articles

Customer Case does not support these features, but the vendor plans to add them in future releases of the product. You can also leave your vote for widget support and social sharing.

Pricing

UseResponse is a self-hosted customer satisfaction platform that will require additional expenses on maintenance and infrastructure support. There are no Cloud solutions, you can evaluate UseResponse in the Cloud only during demo period. It is available now as the limited time offer at $699. This package includes all the available features and modules except SSO. The next year support will cost you additional $199, Single Sign-On will cost you the same the amount. The price of the solution does not vary depending on your user tier and is the same for all. Upon expiry of the promo period, additional features will cost you extra money.

Customer Case as customer community platform works in integration with JIRA Cloud. You need to purchase both of them to get the system working. We will provide price the one-month subscription for both systems:

If you decide to use the yearly subscription, the total price will be smaller.

Conclusion

UseResponse is a flexible solution allowing you to get maximum of your customer feedback management platform and to measure customer satisfaction. User-friendly interface, rich functionality, chat module and helpdesk engine can significantly improve your customer experience and satisfaction and let you save some money. This system will be ideal for a large company with thousands of customers all over the world.

Customer Case in conjunction with JIRA Cloud provides you with a robust customer relationship management system for collecting client feedback and its instant transition to production without any necessity to migrate ideas to some external project management system. Simplistic interface and ease of use will bring the good user experience to your target audience and will let you get rid of sophisticated system configuration.