Use the Customer Importance Score to surface your top-requested features

The Customer Importance Score (CIS) is an auto-calculated score that can help you surface your top-requested feature ideas.

It represents the number of people who've requested a feature (or expressed a need that would be solved by it), weighted by how important it is to them.

Note: Customer Importance Score used to be known as User Impact Score, and still appears as such on older board types. The two are functionally identical.

In this article: 

• Adding CIS to prioritization boards
• Adding CIS to roadmaps
• Scoring the importance of insights
• Suggested guidelines
• Importance score of a company
• Adding company column
• See also

Adding CIS to prioritization boards

To add the Customer Importance Score to a features board or grid:

1. Click the Add Columns button.
2. Select Default fields and toggle on the Customer Importance Score.

Once the Customer Importance Score is added to a features board, you can arrange your features as a sorted list based on their score. We recommend adding the Customer Importance Score to your Backlog and Prioritization boards and roadmaps. Adding the Customer Importance Score to the roadmap helps you to foster customer centricity and transparency. 

You can also use the Customer Importance Score column filter to show just the most pressing feature ideas or those that at least one person has requested with a given importance value, or across a given time period.

Filtering the Customer Importance Score is a great way to prepare for upcoming calls with customers. You can filter your board by Company and by the most relevant features to them, which is a great way to foster customer centricity and transparency.

Adding CIS to roadmaps

• Click the Configure button in the top right of the roadmap. 
• Toggle on Customer Importance Score.

Scoring the importance of insights

Once you've highlighted a new user insight and linked it to a related feature idea, it's up to you to indicate how important it is to the user. Whether the insight represents a feature request, a pain point, or an opportunity uncovered during user research, the precise significance of this value may vary. However the setting of the importance of each insight will ultimately help you surface the most impactful feature ideas, so it's a worthwhile investment toward facilitating prioritization later.

When you highlight and link a user insight to a related feature idea, that will automatically increment that feature's Customer Importance Score by +1.

You can also specify the importance of the feature to the user, which has implications on how many points are added to the CIS.

The CIS increases according to the following scale:

• Not important (+0 points)
• Nice-to-have (+1 point)
• Important (+2 points)
• Critical (+3 points)

Suggested guidelines

For consistency, it's recommended that you norm on a set of scoring guidelines with your teammates, such as the following:

• Nice to have: In many cases, users reach out with cool ideas that would be nice to have but won't make or break their experience with your product.
• Important: For features that could represent a major opportunity or solve a significant pain-point that significantly alters how much value users can get from your product.
• Critical: For those features whose absence is likely to lead directly to churn or lost deals.

Occasionally, Not important (+0)can be helpful as well. An example would be if you've polled all the members of your customer advisory board on how much value a feature would generate for them, and someone has said the feature would not be valuable at all. This way, you can capture this information without positively influencing the feature's Customer Importance Score.

Note: If you don't specify an insight's importance, it will increase CIS by +1 by default.

If the same user provides feedback on the same feature multiple times, their feedback will only count toward the score once. Likewise, if the importance of the feature changes for them over time, the most recent importance value set in the app will be used.

Limitation: When a user sets an importance value via portal or Slack, it is applied if no previous importance for a given user exists. As such, you cannot update importance via Portal and Slack, only create new value if none exists for the user yet.

Importance score of a company

The importance Score of a company can help you in B2B use cases when you can’t or don’t want to manage the importance of a feature on the user level but would like to represent it on the company level.

You can set one importance score on the company level or use the aggregation of the users in a specific company who've requested a feature, weighted by how important it is to them.

Adding company columns

To add the company importance score column to a features board or grid:

1. Click the  Add Columns button.
2. Select Companies and toggle on the companies that you are interested in.
   
3. The selected companies will appear on the board as a column.

The number you can see on the left side of the Company column is the aggregated company importance that was calculated based on the underlying user importance values.

The three dots on the right side of the column shows the company importance which is a standalone value and represents the company-level importance. It can be set manually on the grid by clicking the three dots.

Importance score of a segment

The importance score of a segment can help you make strategic decisions when you want to compare the importance of a feature by segment or look into the most important features of a specific group of users or companies.

The score aggregates the importance scores for the users or the companies that the selected segment contains.

Adding segment columns

To add the segment importance column to a features board or grid:

1. Click the Add Columns button.

2. Select Segments and toggle on the segment that you are interested in.
   

3. The selected segment will appear on the board as a column with the importance score of the segment.

   

school Productboard Academy Quick Tip Video

What’s the difference between a note and an insight? How do I create insights? What do I get out of it? This video shows you how to connect feedback to features and create better products based on user needs. 

Watch now

See also

• Quick start guide: Feedback
• Use drivers and prioritization scores
• Work with customer segments
• Link user feedback to related feature ideas using insights