Track Multi-channel Feedback

On this page:

• Process Overview
• Check Your Channels
• Sort Your Mail Server
• Set Up a Feedback Project
• Configure the Mailbox Integration
• Create Reports
• Configure the Dashboard
• Feedback Processing in Action
• Enhancements

Thanks to our users, we receive lots of feedback each day. We receive feedback on our forum, over email, and in our issue tracker where customers can create issues and feature requests. We also get a lot of feedback over social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Of all these feedback channels, email and social media are the most difficult to track. It can be hard to track unanswered questions, identify who is engaged in a specific conversation, or verify who answered which question.

Another major problem with feedback is that you have no control over the type of information you receive. Many customers use their preferred channel to communicate with you. This means that you can get a lot of questions in feedback channels that should be handled by customer support. Your ability to identify these requests and bring them to the attention of a support representative can make or break your customer relations.

You can use YouTrack to monitor and process feedback. This setup helps you:

• Create issues from incoming feedback automatically.
• Monitor feedback from a variety of sources in one place.
• Categorize feedback to separate questions that require a response from spam.
• Reassign support requests that are sent to a feedback channel.
• Capture suggestions and feature requests that are sent as feedback and migrate them to your development projects.
• Ensure that you respond to feedback from all channels in a timely manner.

The goal of this setup guide is to create a dashboard that your marketing and public relations teams can use as a social media command center. This system configuration uses the following features in YouTrack:

• Mailbox Integration
• Workflows
• Reports
• Dashboard

This setup guide shows you one way to configure YouTrack to process feedback. You can always modify and enhance this configuration to suit your style. At the end of this guide, we provide some alternatives that you can consider.

Unlike the setup for using YouTrack as a help desk, we don't enable email notifications. If you enable this feature in the feedback project, you risk sending email replies to the mail server that forwards your social media notifications, not the customer who posted in the channel. The purpose of this setup is to categorize feedback and identify the questions that require follow-up. Customers who send feedback expect you to reply directly in the channel that they used to post the feedback. When you see a question that you want to answer, reply to your customers directly in the feedback channel.

Process Overview

To use a YouTrack to process feedback, follow these steps:

1. Check Your Channels.
2. Sort Your Mail Server
3. Set Up a Feedback Project.
4. Configure the Mailbox Integration.
5. Create Reports.
6. Configure the Dashboard.

Check Your Channels

The first step is to decide which channels you want to monitor on your dashboard. Consider all of the venues that you provide your customers for sending feedback. Gather all of the email addresses that you can use to receive notifications for each channel. Consider the following sources:

Sort Your Mail Server

Where possible, consolidate all of your email feedback on a single mail server. This may require that you update some of the email addresses that you use for notifications in different channels. If you have multiple mail servers, you can still set up connections to each server independently.

You also want to set up different folders on your mail server for each channel and route incoming messages to the folder that corresponds to each channel. This helps you track and manage feedback in each channel separately.

Get the login credentials for each mail server and make a note of the folders that are set up to collect messsages.

Set Up a Feedback Project

The project that you use to process feedback should be configured differently from a project that is used for a development team. For your marketing or public relations team, you can strip it down to the bare bones.

The configuration of the project is specific to this use case, so we describe it here in some detail.

To create a feedback project:

Configure the Mailbox Integration

Next, configure the mailbox integration for the feedback project. The goal of this setup is to create different mailbox rules that process messages for each channel.

• If you created separate folders for each channel on your mail server, just select the folder that stores messages by channel.
• If you don't have separate folders, you can use 'To' address to identify messages that belong to a specific channel. You can also exclude messages that match a specific pattern in the subject or body.

Keep in mind that mailbox rules are applied sequentially. Messages that match the filter that is defined in a mailbox rule are processed according to the rule and are not considered for processing in subsequent rules.

This procedure describes the basic settings that are required for this use case. There are some important settings in the Postprocessing section of the mailbox rule dialog that you can use to customize this setup.

To configure the mailbox integration:

Create Reports

When you have enabled and configured the mailbox integration, the feedback that is delivered to your mail server is processed and converted into issues in YouTrack. To collect and monitor this feedback, create some reports that let you present this information in a meaningful way.

Consider the following reports:

Configure the Dashboard

After you have configured the reports that you want to use, you are ready to set up the command center.

• If your YouTrack instance is connected to an external Hub service, you can configure the dashboard and share it with other users. Add report widgets for each of your reports to the dashboard and share it with the marketing or public relations team. For additional information, refer to the Hub documentation.
• If your YouTrack uses the internal Hub integration, each user configures their own personal dashboard. In this case, you can add the report widgets to your personal dashboard and share each widget with the marketing or public relations team. For more information, see Dashboard.

Here are some suggestions for widgets that you can add to create a command center:

Feedback Processing in Action

Now that you've configured YouTrack for processing feedback, let's see how it works. Here is how YouTrack handles a feedback from various sources.

1. You submits a comment in one of your feedback channels.
2. Email feedback is sent directly to your mail server. For other channels, notification that a customer has posted feedback in the channel is forwarded to the mail server.
3. The mailbox integration fetches the email messages from the mail server process them according to the defined mailbox rules. YouTrack converts the email messages into issues. The issue content varies by feedback source.

   Source	Description
   Email
   Facebook
   Twitter
   LinkedIn
   YouTube

4. The reports on the dashboard are updated to show that there are new unresolved issues.
5. The marketing or public relations agent reviews each new issue and performs one of the following actions:
   • The message includes marketing-related information for another product or service. The agent classifies the feedback as Spam and marks the issue as Answered. No further action is required.
   • The customer left positive or negative feedback. The agent assigns the corresponding type to the issue and writes a response in the feedback channel, then copies the response as a comment in the issue and mark the issue as Answered.
   • The customer suggests improvements to your product or requests functionality that is not currently available. The agent classifies the feedback as a Feature and writes a response in the feedback channel. The agent can then either mark the issue as Answered or reassign the issue to the development team.
   • The customer asks a support-related question. The agent classifies the feedback as a Question and reassigns the issue to customer support.

Enhancements

If you managed to get through the basic setup, you might have done enough configuration for one day. Go ahead — get some fresh air. This page will still be here when you're ready for more.

This section describes additional features that you can set up to track feedback.

Enable Email Notifications

We told you in the introduction that we weren't going to enable this feature. That's because email notification simply doesn't work for other channels.

That said, the email notification component of the mailbox integration is a huge time saver. This lets you automatically send an email reply when you add a comment to an issue. Email replies to notifications that are sent by YouTrack are also processed and added as a comment to an original issue. Why switch to an email client when you can reply to email messages directly in an issue?

The truth is that you can enable this feature. You just can't enable it in the project that you use to process feedback for social media.

To send notifications for email feedback:

Make sure that the users who work with these projects know when they can reply to feedback in an issue and when they need to switch to a specific channel and reply directly.

Attach More Workflows

We created a few workflow rules that you can use to automate feedback processing. This workflow is not available by default in YouTrack, but you can download it from the custom workflow repository and attach it to your feedback projects.

These workflow rules support the following functionality:

To enable this workflow: