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How To Triage Feedback in Savio

You’ve set up your sources of feedback so feedback automatically gets pushed into Savio. Now it’s sitting in your Savio inbox. What do you do with it?

You triage it.

In this article, we’ll cover:

Overview video

Here’s a quick overview of triaging and assigning feedback to feature requests.

What is triaging?

Triaging means answering these three questions.

The goal of triage is to make sure that your feedback is assigned to the right person, company, and Feature Request so you can filter it nicely later on. We think of triaging as asking three questions:

Can you imagine solving this problem one day? If no, delete it or just mark it as triaged so it’s in Savio, but not assigned to a Feature Request.
If you can, does it make sense? Can you use the feedback as-is? If not, go back to your customer and ask for more information. Hit “snooze” to deal with it later.
Which feature request does this belong to? This is the most important step—attach your feedback to the feature request it belongs to.

Then, add any tags that are relevant. Maybe it’s feedback from your Q3 survey and you want to be able to roll it all up together later. Or maybe it’s a UX issue and you’ll assign all UX issues to one future sprint. Tags can be a powerful way to filter and group your feedback later, so think ahead and add them in the triage step.

Here are two pieces of feedback that need to be triaged.

Assign the right Feature Request

The more consistently you can assign feedback to the right feature request, the better. We know how important it is to find the right feature request, so we added some powerful search features.

You can search by keyword.

Here, we’re searching for all the feature requests with “integration” in the title.

You can search by tag.

Here, we’re looking for all the feature requests with the “retention” tag.

Assigning multiple feature requests to one piece of feedback

Imagine you get a single piece of feedback from a customer about wanting a Slack Integration and Zapier Integration. You might expect to assign the one piece of feedback to multiple feature requests—in this case, a Zapier Integration Feature Request, and a Slack Integration Feature Request.

You can’t do this in Savio. That’s because if you did, you’d see feedback about a Slack Integration on the Zapier Feature Request page (and vice versa). This means a few weeks or months later, when you were reading customer verbatims about the Zapier Feature Request, you’d have to mentally filter out feedback about people needing a Slack integration.

Instead, you should split feedback so each piece of feedback describes a problem that can be solved by a single Feature Request.

Feedback can be split

In real life, feedback is messy. You might get one piece of feedback that’s relevant to multiple feature requests.

It’s easy to deal with this in Savio. Just highlight your feedback and click “Create new Feedback with this text.” A new tab will open and you’ll have a new feedback card rearing to go. That way, you keep everything tidily where it belongs.

We’ve highlighted text here to create a new piece of feedback so we can keep the Zapier Integration and the Slack integration feature requests separate.

Who should triage? Here are three different models.

One person is in charge. We like the model where one person is in charge of triaging. Several people push feedback into Savio, but one person is the product and feedback expert and knows how all the feature requests are named. It's more work for that person, but it ensures that feedback are assigned to the correct features.

It’s a team effort. Another option is for your team to assign feature requests when they send their feedback to Savio. Then you can (optionally) have one person go through and double-check it. This model is more appropriate for companies that get lots of feedback because it puts less load on the feedback manager who triages in the "one person triages" model. The trade-off with this approach is that you may find that feedback is sometimes assigned to the wrong feature request.

Your customers triage. In this scenario your team never sends feedback to Savio. Instead, whenever you get a request that hits your support tool you ask the customer to re-submit it on your public voting board. The upside is that it's very little work for your team. There are a few downsides: first, your customers may not want to send you feedback a second time in a channel that's convenient for you, but not them. Second, all your feature requests will be public since it's all funnelled through your voting board. And third, sending customer feedback toff to your voting board usually means you don't get a deep understanding of the customer's use cases which'll make it tougher to build a great feature for them.

Any of the systems can work. But if you’re not sure, we suggest making one person the feedback expert to begin with.

How often should I triage?

It depends. The higher volume of feedback you have, the more often you should triage. We would say once a month, minimum.

A good rule of thumb is to have a triage cadence that’s the same as your product meeting cadence. If you have a bi-weekly product meeting, do a bi-weekly triage. That way, you’ll always be armed with the most recent customer requests.

Alongside your regular meetings, you can also discuss and clarify questions about feedback and feature requests with your team directly within Savio using Comments. Comments allow you to have an ongoing discussion with your team about the meaning of logged feedback or the best way to implement a feature request.

For more on Comments, read the Comments knowledgebase article.

Power-user feature: search by Feature Request AND tags

You can filter your feature request dropdown by tags. This is helpful when searching for the feature name returns too large a list of Feature Requests and you need to filter it down by tag.

Imagine you're looking for a specific Integration feature request but there's a long list:

You can filter the list to ones that include BOTH your search term AND ones that have specific tags by adding 'tags:tag1,tag2,tag3' to the END of your request:

Power-user feature: auto-set "Feedback From"

Here’s one more feature that can help you make triage a snap. You can create rules so that the Feedback From field is pre-filled. To use this feature, navigate to “Settings”.

Then scroll down to “Automatically Set 'Feedback From' Field” and click “Manage settings”.

Now you can create a rule to set the “Feedback From” field on incoming feedback based on the value of a Customer Attribute. For example, you might make a rule that says everyone who has an “Active” Stripe subscription should have a “Feedback From” attribute automatically set to “Active customer”.

Right now you can only create a single rule to auto-set Feedback From.

This is just one more way to speed up the Triage process. For more, check out these power-user tips for triaging effectively.

Read more: Setting the “Feedback From” Attribute

Power-user feature: Snoozing feedback

Need more time to triage your feedback for some reason? You can choose to “snooze” it instead.

What is snoozing feedback?

Snoozing feedback simply removes it from the “Untriaged” tab in your feedback inbox.

The feedback gets moved to the “Snoozed” tab in the feedback inbox.

Why snooze feedback?

Sometimes you don’t have all the information you need to triage your feedback:

The feedback may not be clear
The feedback may be missing important information
It may not be clear what feature request it belongs to

Snoozing your feedback lets you skip it for now, gather more information, and then come back to triage it at a later time when you have all the information you need.

How to snooze feedback?

To snooze a piece of feedback during the triage process, simply click the snooze button. You can select how long you’d like to snooze it for.

At the end of that time period, the snoozed feedback will return to the “Untriaged” tab in your feedback inbox and it will show up the next time that you triage your feedback.

Power-user feature: Keyboard shortcuts for triage

If you receive lots of feedback, triage can take time. We’ve built some keyboard shortcuts into Savio to make triaging faster.

1. Use the “Tab” key to cycle through fields. Use “Shift” + “Tab” to cycle through in reverse order.

Pressing “Tab” cycles through the five fields for each piece of feedback to be triaged. Pressing “Shift” + “Tab” cycles through them in reverse order.

2. Hit “g” + “r” to select the “Feature Request” field.

3. Hit “g” + “f” to select the “Feedback From” field.

4. Hit “g” + “t” to select the “tags” field.

5. Hit “Command” + “Enter” to mark the feedback as triaged.

6. Hit “j” to skip to the next piece of feedback in your inbox.

Pressing the “j” key skips to the next piece of feedback in your feedback inbox.

7. Hit “k” to skip to the previous piece of feedback in your inbox.

Pressing the “k” key skips to the previous piece of feedback in your inbox.

Tip: If you forget, you can find a list of the keyboard shortcuts right in the app by clicking the “?” beside “Triage Feedback”.

Power-user feature: Filtering feature requests by Product or Product Area

If you use Products and Product Areas, you can filter the Feature Request dropdown during triage to show only feature requests that match a specific scope. This makes it much faster to find the right feature request when you have hundreds in your list.

How it works

When you have Products or Product Areas enabled, a filter button appears next to the Feature Request dropdown. Click it to choose a scope:

All — Shows all feature requests (no filtering)
Product — Shows only feature requests in the same Product as the feedback you're triaging
Product Area — Shows only feature requests in the same Product Area as the feedback you're triaging

The filter reads the Product Area assigned to the feedback you're currently triaging and uses it to scope the Feature Request list.

Filter modes

There are three modes that control how the filter behaves as you move from one triage item to the next. You can configure your preferred mode in My Settings > Triage Filter.

Manual (default): The filter starts at "All" for every piece of feedback. You change it manually each time. Best for users who want full control.

Remember my choice: The filter remembers your last selection and applies it to the next piece of feedback. If the next item doesn't have a matching Product or Product Area, the filter falls back to the tightest scope that fits. Best for users who typically triage within the same Product or Product Area.

Auto-match: The filter automatically selects the tightest scope based on the current feedback's Product Area. Best for users who want the filter to always match the feedback they're looking at without any manual interaction.

Configuring your preferred mode

Click your name in the bottom of the left sidebar
Click My Settings
Find Triage Filter and click Edit
Choose your preferred mode: Manual, Remember my choice, or Auto-match
Click Update

Your filter mode is a personal setting — it only affects your account and won't change the experience for other team members.

Note: The scope filter only appears for accounts that have Products or Product Areas enabled. If you don't see it, check that you've set up Products and Product Areas first.

Last Updated: December 01 2022

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