An assignee is the team member given primary responsibility for owning and driving a specific idea or feedback item forward. This assignment makes it clear who's the point of contact for collecting information, monitoring progress, and ensuring a successful outcome for an idea or feedback item.
How it works
Ideas and feedback items are unassigned by default. A feedback item or idea can only ever be assigned to one team member at a time.
After an idea or feedback item is assigned to a team member, that team member is automatically notified via email that they’ve been assigned to it. If a team member is assigned multiple ideas or feedback items in bulk, they'll be emailed in batches. If you assign yourself to a feedback item or idea, you won’t receive an email.
A team member assigned to an idea or feedback item is automatically subscribed to the idea or feedback item. This means they’ll receive email notifications when the idea or feedback item they’re assigned to is updated.
The Assignee field is only visible to team members. Visitors can’t see the assignee field.
Only VOC Managers can assign any idea or feedback item to any user. Contributors can only assign their ideas to other users.
Best practices
We don’t recommend “triaging” all feedback and ideas by assigning them. Make sure you use the tools to set yourself up for scale and find the most important items using things like AI summaries and automation rules. Over time, many organizations find that manual, individual triage of feedback doesn’t scale, particularly as more sources of feedback are unlocked and the volume increases.
Some examples of where having an assignee on an item is useful:
- When an action or next step is expected from an item. This should be in exceptional circumstances only, for example you got angry feedback from a customer and want to kick off an SLA to follow up.
- When you want to assign items to yourself so you can easily find them again in your view. For example, you’re kicking off some exploratory work around a particular theme, and you’re searching your database for items related to it. First, use automation, AI and the search feature to find those items, and assign yourself to those. Then you can create a saved view by applying a filter to view items assigned to you.
Note that you can also apply the assignee field to feedback at scale using automation rules. Create a rule to assign someone to all feedback items based on rules you set, for example where a product area or app is applied, or where certain keywords are present in the feedback. For more information, see Manage feedback with automation rules.
Add or update assignee field
To add or update the assignee for an idea or feedback, including updating it to be unassigned, go to Listen > Validate Ideas or Explore feedback. From here, there are two ways to add or update the assignee field for an idea or feedback item:
- From the details panel of the idea or feedback item.
- From the row of the idea or feedback item in the table view.
From the details panel
- Find and select the idea or feedback item from the Ideas or Feedback table. This opens a panel on the right side of the page.
- In the Overview section, select the Assignee dropdown.
- Select the email address of the team member you want to assign this idea or feedback item to. If you’re unassigning an idea or feedback item, select (Unassigned) at the top of the dropdown. To assign this idea or feedback item to yourself, select Assign to me or select your email address from the dropdown.
From a table view of ideas or feedback items
- Go to Listen > Validate Ideas or Explore feedback.
- Scroll to the right until the Assignee column appears, then select the Assignee dropdown. Alternatively, you can search or filter for the idea using the options above the list.
- Select the email address of the team member you want to assign this idea or feedback item to. If you’re unassigning an idea or feedback item, select (Unassigned) at the top of the dropdown. To assign this idea or feedback item to yourself, select Assign to me.
You can filter this table view by assignee, or by unassigned items, via the filters at the top. This helps you identify items without an owner or review the ideas or feedback items assigned to you or your teammates.
You can reorder the assignee column to make it easier to find later in your table view. For instructions to do so, see Explore feedback with AI in Listen or Manage feedback in Listen.
Automatically assign ideas or feedback items
You can use automation rules to automatically assign team members to ideas or feedback items when certain conditions are met. For more information, see Manage feedback with automation rules.