Create feature request form in the support portal
Problem Statement / What is the problem?
Customers regularly express their interest in specific GitLab product issues to the Support team (via Zendesk tickets) and Technical Account Managers (via a number of channels). The intent is to increase priority on the issue by adding the customer's weight (in terms of ARR) to the issue.
The current workflow is for support to post the Zendesk link in an issue note.
TAMs typically paste the customer's Salesforce link, along with supporting information. TAMs also track the issue by adding them to the customer's collaboration project.
The data generated from these requests are collected into dashboards leveraged by Product to make design / prioritization decisions.
Why is this a problem?
This creates load on the Support team by creating tickets that could be self-served by the customer.
It creates load on TAMs to manually enter information that could be collected in an automated fashion.
It creates a barrier of entry to asking for features, leaving many customers to generally announce their interest in the issue itself. This leads to missing data, because customer identifying links (Zendesk or Salesforce) are missing on these comments. Missing data may lead to inaccurate product prioritization decisions.
Proposal
- Create a feature request web form in the support portal. The form would capture fields aligned with the Product team's expectations for requests. Most importantly the link to the issue (like https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/$iid)
- Upon completion of the form, it pulls 3 external data fields available in Salesforce: Salesforce ID / link of the customer, collaboration project URL and Technical Account Manager (for TAM managed accounts)
- It then posts a note on that issue, containing the original web form fields, as well as the Salesforce link
- If it is a TAM managed account (collaboration project url and TAM fields not empty), the form also opens an issue in the collaboration project, so that the TAM can track it.
Required Resources
The form would only be available to customers logged into the support portal. It would need Salesforce API access.
Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider
Salesforce access could be difficult. I'm not sure how the mapping between customer login in the support portal and customer account in Salesforce is handled.
Desired Outcome
The web form reduces ticket load for requesting features while increasing the amount and quality of data we gather for Product.