How Socrata use Receptive to Save Time and Improve their Product

Socrata is able to avoid the black hole of feedback, save time and effort, and ensure its Product Team are building the best possible features after switching from Salesforce Ideas to Receptive.

Socrata provides cloud-based solutions which help Government organizations make data-driven decisions and operate more efficiently.

The Problem

For years, Socrata had employed the Ideas module of Salesforce to monitor and review feedback from both customer and internal team members. Unfortunately, as the company grew and more feedback was received, it began to run out of time.

Its poor Product Team spent Friday evenings and Saturday mornings hunched at their screens consolidating all of the requests. They had to deal with duplications and a overly-complicated interface. It was hard to manage any more than 50 ideas at once, and any workflows were excruciatingly painful.

Employees across the company bemoaned the “Salesforce Black Hole”, so named for its propensity to gobble up ideas and ensure they never returned.

The Solution

Socrata knew that something had to change. It was time to evolve and adapt its process. It was a case of love at first sight when Socrata trialled Receptive and demonstrated it to its leadership, its Product Team, and the rest of its employees.

After a painless process of transferring their historical request data over to Receptive, the Product Team were immediately able to triage the requests, employing the use of Receptive’s pre-saved responses to further improve their efficiency.

The Results

Six months on, and Socrata’s Product Team have a whole new triage process in place for feedback. For the first time they’re able to maintain a reasonable response time, addressing each and every request within two weeks.

Socrata’s employees feel like they’re being listened to and employee satisfaction surveys show that the Product Team is more responsive than ever.

The Product Team are able to use Receptive’s curated “Action Needed” list to easily and quickly spot which features they should be paying attention to and it’s far simpler for anyone in the company to identify the areas that need work according to both customers and employees.

Socrata is proud to use Receptive.io for collecting, triaging, and managing internal feature requests - the tool has simplified life for Socrata’s Product team, and has shown the rest of the company that the Product team takes their feedback seriously.
- Christian Hoogerheyde, Product Manager at Socrata