Herald Changelog

Collaboration is powered by free-flowing product discussions. We know that it’s essential to have the entire team weigh on in customer feedback before charting a path forward. Our newest feature, topic discussions, allows you to add your thoughts on any topic for the rest of your team to see.

Look out in the coming weeks for lots of improvements to this feature, including new views, the ability to @ your teammates, and notifications.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Performance improvements to search in the extension.

• Better text parsing in the date range filters for topics and feedback.

As your Herald feedback repository grows, it helps to assign out topics to teammates based on areas of responsiblity. Our newest feature, topic owners, makes it easy to let everyone know who the point of contact is for a given issue.

To use it, just head over to a topic’s details page. You’ll see a new section in the sidebar called “Owner,” where you can search for and select a teammates. Once your topics have owners, you can also filter by the owner in the topics list.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed a bug where CSV exports for topics didn’t include the full list of topics.

• Performance improvements to feedback filtering.

We know it can be challenging finding your way to your public portal, so we’ve integrated more entry points to it throughout the Herald app. You’ll see a handy link to a topic on the public portal in the top right of every topic details page, as well as links on every contact details page. We’ve also added a dedicated link to the portal in the nav bar on the left. We hope this makes it even easier to access and share your portal with your customers.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed a bug where date ranges weren’t working for filtering topics by when they were created.

• Fixed a bug with topics CSV export where the partial counts for topics were not appearing.

This week we’ve spent time porting the granular filters found in the feedback view to also be available in the topics view. This makes topic filtering far more powerful, giving you the ability to slice and dice by feedback-level properties like persona, priority, app, and more.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Improved Slack notifications to include more details about the feedback, including product area, labels, internal notes, and more.

• Added ability to filter custom attributes by a numeric range when defining personas.

• Improved the UX for creating new topics in the extension. Now, once you type a single word, we’ll automatically give you the option to use your search query to create a new topic.

We want your team to feel at home while using Herald. This week, we’re introducing the ability to customize the way Herald looks with your own branding. Head over to Settings to change your brand’s primary color (and add a logo while you’re at it) and get ready for Herald to switch into your company’s color.

And oh yeah, it works for the extension too.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed a bug where the back/forward arrows didn’t work in the survey section of the app.

• For workspaces with the “review topics” feature enabled, we no longer require topics created by admins to go through the review process.

• In the public portal, we now batch together the topics in the backlog with the "planned” section instead of the "completed” section

You can now configure your Herald Public Portal to display the total pieces of feedback provided for your public topics. Vote counts on the public portal make it easy to give your customers a sense for your most-requested features and easily “upvote” their own requests. We still encourage users to provide longer-form feedback, but give them the option to skip adding more details and just upvote an item.

Simplified Public Roadmap

We also gave Herald Public Portals some much-needed love this week, simplifying the design and refining the amount of information we show at any one time. Backlog topics have been moved to a separate section in order to give planned, in progress, and completed topics more attention.

“+1” as a Vote

Even if you are not using the Public Portal, you can also easily track customer upvotes for a topic by adding a short quote with the text “+1.” These will be converted to votes and shown on a separate tab when you go to a topic’s details page.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• We now periodically automatically re-sync your Linear teams for those have the integration enabled.

• Fixed a bug where users couldn’t edit a contact’s name.

• Fixed an issue where some users couldn’t see all teammates.

• We improved the documentation for integrating the portal with your product.

Customers no longer need to enable the Intercom integration to utilize Herald’s Companies feature. We can now automatically create companies based on the domains of your contacts. To enable this feature, just head over to Settings > Workspace and enable “Companies.”

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• You can now enable “smart suggestions” for topics once you have added 100 pieces of feedback. Herald’s AI will suggest the most relevant existing topic based on the quote being added.

• You can now delete personas and contacts.

• Made some design tweaks to the teammates view.

We have significantly improved how data export works. Not only should it now be faster, but we now also provide the topic type and product area for each topic when you export it as a CSV.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed a bug to allow filtering feedback and topics by absolute time range.

Herald now comes with a free plan. Enjoy Herald without putting down a credit card as long as you stay within the free usage limits, including unlimited team members. If you exceed your free usage limits, Herald offers many affordable plans.

We also have good news for our existing customers: we’ve removed feedback limits. Go ahead and collect as much feedback as you would like without worrying about any overage costs.

Do you want to mark some of your saved views as more important than the others? Now you can with favorite views. Your team has the ability to mark up to 3 saved views as favorites. This will allow your co-workers to easily understand the importance of these views. Furthermore, the results for these saved views are accessible directly from the Home screen.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed a bug where the wrong contact was being identified in the Front Plugin.

• Fixed bug where an onboarding task could not be marked as completed.

• Fix another bug where a product area or label could not be deleted.

Now you can institute a lightweight review process for newly created topics in your workspace. This will provide certain members of your team the opportunity to maintain uniform standards on problem wording/phrasing, product area, and labels. If you will have multiple team members adding customer feedback, we recommend enabling the review process.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Reduced the text shown for each of the filter options. It is now much shorter ;-)

Topics in Herald took a big step forward this week with the introduction of two new features:

Product Areas

It’s often important for teams to categorize topics by product area. For example, things that affect onboarding or the public API. Now, you can define the right product areas for your team in Settings > Labels and then apply them to any of your topics. You can then filter by product area and save those filters as a view for easy access.

Topic Types

We also rolled out the ability to categorize topics by type. While this is mostly for organizational purposes at the moment, in the future, we’ll add functionality specific to various topic types. For now, we allow you to categorize topics as one of:

• Problem

• Feature

• Bug

• Testimonial

• Other

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed a bug where newly created personas were not getting feedback properly attributed to them.

• Deployed a temporary fix for the Chrome Extension being extremely slow and unresponsive when used on secondary monitors.

After a week off for Thanksgiving, we’re back with some updates to help teams make the most of Herald. First up is saved views. This new feature allows you to create views of topics or feedback that are shared across your Herald workspace so that any team member can easily get to them. We’ve created a few useful ones like “In Motion” topics and “Recent Feedback” to give you a sense of what’s possible!

🏃🏼‍♂️ Improved Teammates View

We made some tweaks to the teammates view to provide you with some text you can copy and send to teammates to invite them to start using Herald. Remember, anyone with an email address on your company’s domain will automatically have access to your Herald workspace.

💼 Company Attributes Imported from Intercom

Herald now brings in company-level attributes from Intercom. This means you can build personas based on those attributes. So, for example, you can build a Herald persona of high-paying users based on the monthly_spend attribute of the companies in your workspace.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• The Herald UI has a new font! See if you notice the difference 👀

• We heard from a number of users that the word “Quote” wasn’t the most intuitive name for feedback, so we renamed it! You should see “feedback” throughout the UI in place of the items that were previously called “quotes.”

• Fixed bugs with filtering topics by quote count as well as by labels.

The Herald Chrome Extension and Firefox Addon now supports adding feedback directly from Zendesk! We’ll automatically parse the contact you’re clipping feedback from and attach it to their profile in Herald. That means collecting feedback from support tickets should now take a matter of seconds!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Redid the Herald onboarding flow for new customers to help them set up their workspace with the right labels and personas out of the box!

• Some minor design tweaks to reduce the number of lines throughout the Herald UI. Always trying to make it easier on our users’ eyes!

We now support multiple Slack workspaces being connected to the same Herald workspace. This is useful if you have both a private Slack workspace for internal discussions as well as a community Slack where customers can chime in with suggestions or issues.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Herald just launched on ProductHunt! We couldn’t have gotten here without the support and feedback of our early customers, so our sincerest thanks to anyone that has tried Herald over the past few months.

• We added a column to CSV exports from the topic details pages called remote_id . This represents the unique ID that your team has supplied to Intercom to identify a given user. It usually corresponds to how you identify the user in your internal database. This is useful for matching up the contacts in the CSV export with any other internal systems.

A picture says a thousands words, and often times, it provides much more clarity to customer feedback than just text. This week, we’ve added the ability to attach images to any feedback through the extension or the Front plugin. If you highlight content with an image, we’ll automatically pull it in. Same goes for if you paste content with an image into the quote text box. Give it a try today!

Shorten Links from the Herald Webapp

For customers that use our web interface to grab personalized links to feedback for contacts, we’ve also provided the ability to shorten them before copying them from the app (just like from within the extension).

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Added self-serve ability to change the billing email via our Stripe customer portal. Just go to Settings > Billing > Manage to make changes.

We find that many of our power users have the need to be able to edit details about contacts right as they are entering feedback from them. This is especially true of Herald’s custom attributes on contacts. So we’ve enabled the ability for anyone to edit details about a contact right from the Chrome extension, Firefox Addon, or Front plugin!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed issue with the extension on the Front webapp that wasn’t picking up the right contact on Whatsapp threads.

Herald’s Zapier integration just went live! Our first trigger helps you create issues in your team’s issue tracker based on details from an existing Herald topic. Once you set it up, you’ll be able to create new issues in apps like GitHub, JIRA, and more, directly from the Herald app!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed UI bug where topics were incorrectly sorted in the Kanban view.

• Fixed a bug where the UI wouldn’t recognize that a label was being created without a name.

You can now log into Herald with any business Microsoft account. We’re excited to unlock Herald’s user feedback management capabilities for a new set of customers. If you have any questions about the sign up process, give us a shout!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Fixed UI bug where you couldn’t hover over a reporter’s avatar to see their name.

• Fixed a bug where the warning about quotes already being added from a particular email or conversation wasn’t appearing in the extension and Front plugin.

Every quote now comes with a link that you can use to share it with teammates. This makes it easy to reference specific pieces of feedback when having discussions about user problems. Just hover over a quote, and you’ll see the new “link” icon to copy its URL to your clipboard!

Change Voice of the Customer Report Settings

You can now edit when your team’s weekly Voice of the Customer report will be sent out. Just head over to Settings to check it out!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Made a number of UI tweaks to support smaller screen resolutions. We also adjusted the design to fit better when new users have the onboarding checklist visible in the UI.

• The Front plugin has bigger search boxes now, which means you can see up to 5 search results at any time without having to scroll.

• We also edited the behavior of the Front plugin and extension so that it doesn’t clear out the selected contact when a quote is added. This makes it easier to add a bunch of quotes in sequence from an interview notes document (like on Google Docs or Notion) and to add multiple quotes from the same email in Front.

We spent much of this week thinking about how to best explain Herald’s value to new and existing customers. As part of this effort, we redid our marketing site to focus on how Herald can help product and customer-facing teams work together to accomplish their goals. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Added support for subscribing to Herald with additional editors, in case your team is growing!

• A bug fix for testing the survey email (by sending it to yourself) without first having to configure it.

We’ve added the ability to export data as a CSV throughout the application. This includes:

• The quotes list

• The bird’s-eye view under the quotes list

• The full topics list

This, combined with all the slicing and dicing that’s already possible with Herald makes it easy to pull reports on what customers are saying and recent trends.

Filter Quotes by Date Range

You can now also filter quotes by a specific day or date range. From the quotes view, open up the filters dialog, select “Filter by when quote was submitted” and type in a date or date range (like “july 10-20”) and we’ll automatically parse it and let you filter by it.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• If you need to see more than 40 topics or quotes at a time, you can click “see more” in the bottom left. It will pull up to 200 more.

• Fixed bug where the “Clear filters” button was shown even when no filters were applied.

This week, we’re excited to release Herald surveys to all users. It’s the easiest way to implement Rahul Vohra’s “engine for PMF fit” from his experiences at Superhuman. Herald Surveys make it easy to:

1. Enroll your users in the survey manually, using an API, or using automation software (Zapier, customer.io, etc).

2. Have Herald email the survey to customers with your logo and brand colors.

3. Easily tag responses to Herald topics to organize feedback.

4. Analyze responses to individual questions with the most precise slice-n-dice tooling.

Let us know if you have any initial feedback, it’s available to everyone under the Surveys section on the left-hand nav bar!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• We no longer fully hide quotes when editing a topic’s description from the details page.

• Fixed a bug where quote counts for topics weren’t always being updated correctly.

You can now edit any of your Herald personas. Change the name, description, or filter criteria right from the Herald UI.

🏋🏽‍♂️ More Topic Search Enhancements

We’re always tweaking the search functionality for our extension to make it even easier to find the right topic to attach a quote to. Now, we analyze words across all the quotes you’ve added to suggest the most relevant topics before you even type in a search query. Every keystroke eliminated matters!

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• Made the click target bigger for clearing a specific filter from the nav bar.

• Laid the groundwork for an important new feature we’re launching next week. (Hint, it rhymes with “scurvy.”)

Custom attributes on contacts are a great way to segment feedback between customers. We’ve made them even more powerful this week by introducing the ability to define a set of valid options for any custom attribute. For example, if you have an attribute that maps to the paid plan a customer is on, you can set the plan names as options on that attribute so that you always know the value will be valid.

💪 Superhuman Support

The Herald extension now supports parsing the customer’s name and email when clipping quotes directly from Superhuman. We know quite a few of our users love the client as their primary email app, so we’re excited to provide a much better experience for grabbing feedback.

Bug Fixes & Other Improvements 🚀

• We’ve made some tweaks to how we do search for topics in the extension—this should hopefully allow you to find the one you’re looking for with fewer (or no) keystrokes!

• We published an article with Routable founder Omri Mor about how customer development has shaped their company so far.