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. 
   
   
   
   
3. Toggle on the Customer Importance Score.
   
   

Sorting by CIS

Once you've added the CIS column to a board, you can sort that board by the CIS values of its items. 

1. Hover over the top of the CIS column and click ••• More actions.
2. Select Sort ascending or Sort descending.
   
   
   

Adding CIS to roadmaps

You can visualize CIS as roadmap card attributes, providing context to viewers about the contents of a roadmap. 

1. On any columns board, timeline, or Legacy roadmap with features, click Card customization. 
2. Click Features.
   
   
   
   
3. Toggle on Customer Importance Score. The CIS for each item will immediately appear on its card.
   
   

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.

Company CIS columns

Company CIS columns show you the slice of an item's total CIS that comes from a specific company. This is particularly useful during research where you're more interested in the needs of specific partners than in the userbase as a whole.

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 Add columns.
2. Click Companies.
3. Toggle on the companies that you are interested in. Each company will be displayed as its own column.
   
   

Each company CIS column has two parts:

1. The number on the left is the amount of CIS attributed by this company to the row's item. Like the global CIS, this number includes both the CIS attributed directly to it, plus the scores of any subordinate items. Remember that each item can only gain a maximum of three points of CIS from any one company.
2. The three dots on the right let you manually reassign the importance rating of an item to a company, possibly changing the score of a relevant insight from, say, +1 (Nice to have) to +3 (Critical). Simply click on the dots to change the value.
   
   In the image below, you can see that the component I need to support my employees has a total CIS of 50, seven of which is coming from Sienar Fleet Systems. Sienar's CIS of seven comes from the combined scores of the three features subordinate to the component, plus one point of CIS attributed to the component directly. 
   
   

Segment CIS columns

Segment CIS columns are much like company CIS columns in that they represent a slice of an item's global CIS that comes from a particular source—except in this case, the source is multiple companies or users, not just one.

See Work with customer segments for details about creating segments. 

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.

Adding segment columns

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

1. Click Add columns.
2. Click Companies.
3. Toggle on the segments that you are interested in. Each company will be displayed as its own column.
   
   

Each segment CIS column has only one part—the numerical CIS attribution—which works mostly the same way that it does with company CIS columns, except that each item might have more than 3 points of CIS from any one segment. This is because segments represent multiple companies or users.

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