BrightIdea Customer Portal
When we were building the new version of ServiceNow we wanted to find a way to connect with our users. We needed to create rapport and gather insights of what features would be helpful to them. At the end of the day, ServiceNow was for them. While doing research, we discovered that our users were adamant about letting us interview them. They often would ignore surveys and other communication efforts.
We felt that BrightIdea would be a great way to improve communication with the users. One of the main features that BrighIdea provides is voting. We envisioned the users giving us their ideas for new features. Users would chime in by voting or commenting such ideas. Essentially, we wanted to build a community and based on the number of votes, we could prioritize what features to work on.
Leveraging CMS features that BrightIdea has, we designed a home page that would explain the voting, acceptance and implementation process. We divided our processes into “streams” to better focus idea allocation. BrightIdea provided us with analytics that allowed us to better understand interactions between our users and our tool. We could see what streams had the most engagement which helped us prioritize ideas as well.
We were the first team at General Electric that leveraged this tool for crowd sourcing of new features. We customized the idea pipeline to align better with our process. Using automation, we kept ongoing communication to our users as their ideas moved through such pipeline.
The success of ServiceNow was in some ways tied with BrightIdea. It helped us to uncover some gaps between processes, features that we didn’t think of, etc. It allowed us to get some much-needed buy-in from our users. Historically ServiceNow had a bad reputation due to the lack of communication with users and cumbersome user interface. BrightIdea allowed us to create a stronger connection with them. Transparency is something our team was striving for and I believe it was accomplished.
