Hi everyone!

Can you believe we are halfway through November and quickly heading into the holiday season? Time flies when you’re having fun… and in our case, making a ton of progress! Over the past few months, we’ve released some new features, improved others, and made great strides on our long-term roadmap. 

We continuously strive to develop great tools that help you build robust communities. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features and enhancements we released since our last update.

Click below to skip to upcoming improvements

New Feature: Banner Widget
Capture your audience's attention and drive engagement with creative banners built directly on inSided. Use the banner widget to create fully-customizable banners that draw your audience in with better display images, larger text, and clear CTAs.

Enhancement: Pending Overview
Keeping your communities safe and all posted content relevant and appropriate is extremely important to us. Our new pending overview was redesigned to provide moderators with a complete view of all pending content. 

Enhancement: New Filter Operators
As we continue to build more filtering capabilities, we also needed to provide advanced filtering operators that allow you to segment by detailed user criteria. For example, you can now find users in specific ways like “Company equals XYZ” or “Questions asked equals 0”. For a full list of operators added, check out this update.

​​​​​​Enhancement: Ideation Voting Improvements
Based on community feedback, we’ve added some new functionality to the Ideation module to improve the voting experience and to assist in closing the feedback loop. First, when you submit an idea, your vote will automatically be cast for your submission. We now also automatically subscribe users to an idea after they voted for that idea. 

Enhancement: New Content Dashboard Metrics
Dive deeper into content analytics with the addition of the “Single user topics” and “Average response time” KPIs onto the Content Dashboard. We’ve added the ability to filter these KPIs by content type for a full picture of your metrics. 

For more information on all of these new features and enhancements, check out our Product Updates articles.

• Filter operators on the User overview
• A brand new pending overview
• Banner Widget
• Voting on an idea automatically subscribes user to idea
• Automatic vote for own idea
• Single user topic and Average response time now can be filtered by Content Type

Now let’s dive into what we are working on next!

Customization

Dynamic Content Widget
The dynamic content widget, currently in closed beta, allows community managers to dynamically display relevant content throughout their community. Easily promote your newest content piece or surface hot topics and discussions using content filters and sorting options. Leverage the widget to bring your content to life and boost engagement and user interactions.

Custom Pages
Flexibility and customization are key to building successful customer communities that support your company. Every community will look different, feel different, and have different requirements which is why we’re building Custom Pages. Custom Pages will allow you to create the dedicated landing experiences you need for your business. For example, persona-specific landing pages or promotional pages for large events. This feature is currently in development. Interested in learning more? Check out this research article and leave your feedback. We’d love to hear from you!

Custom Drop-Down Menus
The custom drop-down menu feature allows community managers to change the configuration of the drop-down menu (mega-menu) as per their requirements. This will serve as an extension to custom pages, giving customers the ability to add custom pages in the header or drop-down.

Moderation & User Management

Create and save user segments
Currently in open beta (opt-in via the Experimental Features page in the Settings category), our upcoming Segments feature allows you to apply filters on the User overview to identify groups of interest and save them as a segment. The Segments feature helps you to get better insights into how your community population is distributed among your segments (eg. power users), as well as show areas for improvement (eg. users that haven’t joined groups). Soon you’ll also be able to use segments as a way to automate email campaigns and create personalized journeys.

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Apply bulk actions to users
As you may have seen, we’ve made it possible to assign and remove a user role in bulk from the User overview, which allows you to be a lot more effective in managing your users. To build on top of that, we’ll be offering more bulk actions in the future, such as awarding a badge and sending a private message. 

Export to CSV
We’ve updated our filters to make sure you can do all the filtering magic straight on the User overview instead of having to download it and work your magic in Excel or Google Sheets. However, there are use cases for when you want to download a filtered set of users to CSV, to pass them on to marketing for instance, or to supplement another workflow outside of the community. Therefore, we’ll bring the Export to CSV button to the User overview soon!

Engagement Tools

One-off and Automated Email Campaigns
We’re currently working hard on our new Email Campaigns feature to both expand its use cases (to allow for automated targeted emails), as well as move it into an open beta phase for broader access. This feature will give you the tools to better engage with your community members (eg. send community digests, promote events, etc.) as well as set up onboarding flows and reactivation campaigns. 

Use segments in email campaigns
Apart from the filters we currently offer to build an audience in Email Campaigns (role, last activity, registration date), we’ll also allow you to address the segments you’ve created in the Segments page as a way to set up automated email campaigns. For instance, you can automatically reach out to your new users that haven’t joined a group within 30 days of joining, to try to increase group adoption.

Updates to Event creation and management
As events take an increasingly larger role in your community and CS strategy, so grows the need to offer a more robust and scalable Events solution. That’s why we’ll be making event creation and management a lot smoother and more efficient, by allowing you to save events as a draft, schedule them in the future, preview events, and duplicate events.

Improved Destination experience for Events
We’ll be bringing customization mode to Events, so you can customize this page with additional widgets, callouts, banners, etc. We’ll also bring the Events overview more in line with the Product Updates overview by adding filtering options and pagination.

Attendance tracking for Events
Currently, for Community RSVP events, we track the RSVPs for your event and allow you to export these to CSV. We’ll also be tracking the number of users that will click on the new “Join Now” button to help you track who, and how many people, actually joined the event. To get even better insights, we’ll also update the CSV to contain more information about your attendees.

Integrations

Integrations with Gainsight applications
A top priority for our team is building out a seamless and flexible integration between Gainsight products, including inSided, Gainsight CS, and Gainsight PX. The integration will allow users with multiple Gainsight products to connect their data for a more powerful customer success experience. This includes:

• Adding community engagement data to Gainsight CS 360
• Enhancing customer sentiment analysis with community content data
• Enriching shared data points to unleash unparalleled customer reporting across products
• Exposing community content directly in your app

Integrations with Intercom 
We’re working on a new integration with Intercom! With inSided's Intercom integration, you will be able to leverage federated search enabling your customers to seamlessly search content from Intercom Help Center right from your inSided platform.

As a next step, we plan to enrich this integration with ticket escalation from the community to Intercom.

Improved Thought Industries content filtering
We will continue to add capabilities to our integration with Thought Industries. Coming up, we will add the ability to filter content from within your community using custom fields.

Analytics:
 

Success dashboard improvements
As we improve analytics across the platform, we identified the need for the Success Dashboard to focus on the Community/Q&A module. This will ensure that the most relevant metrics are surfaced in the appropriate dashboard. With the upcoming changes, you’ll have more information and filtering options for authors, including filtering by user role of both the author of the question and the author of the best answer.

Product feedback table improvements
Maintaining an easy-to-follow view of product ideas submitted through your community is crucial to effectively managing incoming product requests. It is also important to see how your community is reacting to these ideas. Our upcoming improvements to the Product Feedback Table will provide these insights and make the Ideas module more actionable. We are working on a fully customizable table that will allow you to apply filters to votes, likes, views, authors, status, and more. 

What do you think?

We are always open to feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments! Keep your eyes peeled for the next Roadmap Update in February.