After configuring the basic Feedback account settings, as summarized in Pendo Feedback account setup, you can populate Feedback with historical data. You should do this before launching Feedback to your team members or customers.
This article provides guidance on how to import a request backlog or list in a CSV file.
Best practices
Show your users (team members and visitors) what to expect when they sign in to Pendo Feedback to encourage them to come back and use it. We recommend adding items that are already in progress to add your users' voices to projects that you know you'll be working on.
You don't need to import everything. If you have a high volume of requests or a lot of outdated requests, you can focus on the most recent or relevant requests.
We recommend populating your account with at least:
- 20 requests from your backlog.
- 5 to 10 recent releases that customers would be interested in.
- A few items that are currently in progress or on your roadmap.
If you have an active customer community around product feedback or a low volume of requests, it might make sense to import all of your historical request data.
Prerequisites
Before importing historical data into Pendo Feedback, we recommend that you consider the following:
- Set up Product Areas. Complete the tasks outlined in Pendo Feedback account setup. It's especially useful to set up your Apps and Product Areas because these can be brought in with your import file.
- Import Visitor IDs. If you're moving to Pendo Feedback from another feedback system and want your customer names to remain associated with past requests, ensure your customer records are already in Feedback. This allows you to use the Visitor ID to link existing customers to requests as part of the CSV import. For more information, see Add customers to Feedback.
- Create custom saved responses. Create saved responses for different request statuses. For more information, see Save custom responses.
- Turn off notification emails. If you don't want you users (team members or visitors) to receive notification emails while you import and change the status of your requests, follow the instructions for under Global email settings in the Notification emails in Feedback article.
- Create separate request files based on status. If you're moving to Pendo Feedback from another feedback system and you want your request statuses to remain associated with past requests, you must create a separate CSV file for each status. For more information, see Import request statuses in this article.
Import request statuses
If you're moving from an existing product feedback system, you can retain the statuses already assigned to your existing requests (for example, "Released", "Planned", "Building") by importing a separate CSV file of requests in each status, one at a time, and mapping these to the default Pendo Feedback request statuses:
- Not Reviewed
- Awaiting Feedback
- Planned
- Building
- Released
- Declined
You can rename these statuses later. For more information, see Customize status names. Some suggested status mappings include:
- Changing "Backlog" items to "Awaiting feedback".
- Changing "Recent releases" be changed to "Released" so that you can start populating your Release Log.
- Changing "Roadmap" to "Planned" or "Building" to automatically add these to your What's Coming list.
Requests are imported with a status of "Not Reviewed", which you can bulk update to the appropriate status in Pendo, providing that you import requests with different statuses in separate CSV files.
1. Import one of your CSV files containing requests with the same status (such as "Released").
2. Import your requests. All requests are automatically assigned the status of "Not Reviewed" in Pendo Feedback.
3. Navigate to the Browse page in the left-side navigation of Pendo Feedback.
4. Filter the requests list to show only those with a status of "Not Reviewed".
5. Select all the requests in the resulting table view.
6. Select the Actions menu that appears at the top of the table when you select requests. Note that this menu only appears when you’ve selected one or more requests.
7. Select Set Status from the dropdown menu.
8. Select the status you want to change your requests to.
9. Select a saved status response.
Repeat these steps for each CSV file of requests.
For more information on saved status responses, see Save custom responses. For more information on how to bulk update the status of requests, see Manage requests in the Browse page.
Import a request backlog or list
Populate your Pendo Feedback account with a CSV file (UTF-8) using our import tool in the Pendo UI and our csv import template in Google Docs. To use the template, you must sign in to Google and save a copy before populating it with your data. This template includes the following columns:
- Title with a minimum required, 192 character limit.
- Description in Markdown formatting.
- Tags. A comma-separated list of tags. Tags don't already to exist in Pendo Feedback.
- Apps. A comma-separated list of the Apps that the request belongs to. These Apps must exist in Pendo already.
- Added Users. A comma-separated list of user IDs. These must exist in Pendo already.
- Zendesk tickets. You can link Zendesk tickets to imported requests by referencing the Zendesk ticket here. The Zendesk integration must be configured before importing requests.
Ensure your CSV file is saved as Unicode UTF-8. Then, import your CSV file:
1. Navigate Feedback > Settings > Import.
2. Select Upload File.
3. If your CSV has a header row, select Yes.
4. Choose the appropriate title, description, and tag columns, and leave the rest as the default, Not used. As you choose the columns, you can see a preview of how your data will be imported into Pendo Feedback.
5. Once you’re happy with the setup, select Import.
When your data has been imported, you receive a confirmation message listing the number of requests that were imported.
Example CSV file
Below is an example CSV file that could be used to import requests to Pendo Feedback. You can also see examples in our csv import template in Google Docs.
We use Markdown formatting in the request description. This is removed when the import is complete:
If you have any problems, contact Pendo Support to send us the CSV file you’d like to import.
Caveats
- The CSV import doesn't allow request timestamps ("created" date). The request's timestamp is shown as the date the request was imported.
- There is no way to add comments to the import. Any comments you want to carry over must be added manually.
- Visitors must exist in Feedback already for their votes to be imported alongside the requests. For this reason, you might need to wait a few days after installing Pendo for the visitor records to be created.
- When uploading a CSV file with requests, Feedback assigns a request from a visitor belonging to multiple accounts to the first Visitor ID and Account ID combination it comes across during the upload. Usually, this is the visitor record that has most recently logged in.