The customer is the heart of any product worth its weight, and that’s especially true for our customers at Jim2. If you haven’t heard the super exciting news, recently we launched a UserVoice forum where you can have your say on the future development of Jim2. Your feedback has always been so influential to the development pathway, for the product you know and love, so we wanted a way to formalise that process and show off the fruits of your feedback.
It’s been a long road to finding the right solution, but where there’s a will there’s a way! And we’ve found a way to change the Jim2 game moving forward.
How it all began
At Happen, we know our customers are our long-term raving fans! How do we know this? Some of our most senior team members were Jim2 customers and users back in the day, including our CEO of 10 years – Steve Morris.
”When I was a customer, I absolutely loved Jim2. I was passionate about the product, so whenever I saw opportunities for improvement, I would send in emails to the team with my feedback and wish list items. Over the years I felt like there were a lot of things I’d asked for that just fell into a blackhole. I never knew what happened with that feedback.
When Steve switched gears from being a Jim2 customer to Jim2 team member, he realised that feedback hadn’t been sent to a blackhole after all.
”All of my suggestions had been logged in their own internal system, called Hugs. Some of it had even made it into development and into the product – but that information was never fed back to the customer who’d originally left the feedback. I never knew it was there! So when I started with Jim2, I knew that was something I wanted – and needed – to change moving forward.
Even though there was always an internal system at Happen – it was far from the perfect, customer-facing and driven solution we were looking for.
”While Hugs was used to log issues and enhancement requests, we had no way of knowing what our customers highest demands were. Our team develop Jim2 based on what our users actually want – not what we want, or what we think the customer wants. So it was important to find a customer facing version of the feedback log system that enabled our customers to be part of the process and rank what they wanted in development.
The second hurdle we had to overcome was that even if a customer’s idea was implemented, the communication would end up buried in release notes and that customer was never directly told of the outcome of their feedback. As a customer, you never knew your idea made it into the release! There was a break in the communication loop that we needed to repair.
Our user-driven solution
With customer feedback at the forefront of what we do, we started hunting for a solution that could do everything on our wish list. We knew it was important for customers to be able to log all of their ideas, but we also needed a way to rank the demand, and show customers an update and status of where their idea was in our product development pipeline.
The Happen UserVoice Forums became the solution that would allow us to do all of this and more.
The forum is now the place to go whenever you have an idea or request that you think will improve your user experience with the Jim2 product. You’ll have ample opportunity to have your say in new features and enhancements for Jim2, see what is currently in development and available in the current release. You also could join in any beta testing prior to launching a new product.
When you first log in to the Happen UserVoice Forum, you will see other customers have already started logging their feedback. You can vote on their ideas, or think outside the box and log your own idea in the portal.
The way that we use this feedback moving forward is by reviewing it in our development meetings. While we’d love to produce every single idea that makes its way into the portal, it just won’t be possible. So we will review each piece of feedback, especially those highest ranked in the portal, on a case-by-case basis. Our review will evaluate the value the development work would bring to the product and other users, or the problems it would solve.
Some of the work that are on their way to being implemented thanks to high popularity in the portal are bank feeds, Android compatibility for the mobile app, cheque remittances, and running Jim2 on two screens. All are things that you have said is valuable to your user experience, which means it’s valuable to our product.
The Happen UserVoice Forum is going to guide the future of the development and evolution of our Jim2 moving forward. And we can’t wait to have you along for the journey!
To start having your say, click here to access Happen UserVoice Forums today.
