Standardize Status visibility for a more accurate Salesforce–Aha! search experience

Today, the Salesforce–Aha! integration automatically excludes Ideas in a shipped status from search results by default. This creates confusion because those same Ideas can still be found if a user manually selects the shipped status in the filter. When no statuses are selected, users reasonably assume the search is pulling from all statuses, but it isn’t. As a result, they often believe an Idea doesn’t exist and end up creating a duplicate.

This leads to several downstream issues. The employee working with the customer or prospect may unknowingly give inaccurate information, since they believe the request has never been submitted or implemented. Product teams then spend unnecessary time dispositioning duplicates, and the employee must circle back to the customer to clarify the situation. This creates a poor experience and reflects negatively on both support and product.

The challenge also affects bug escalations, since we use the same Salesforce–Aha! integration for both enhancement requests and production issues. If a bug was believed to be fixed but is still occurring, seeing the shipped or completed status is important context. It helps teams confirm whether the new report is truly a duplicate or a sign that the issue has reappeared.

To work around this, we currently avoid associating any statuses with Shipped, which affects reporting but is less damaging than the confusion and repeated duplication created under the current design.

Provide a consistent search experience across both the Salesforce–Aha! integration and the Ideas portal. Aha! already allows statuses to be hidden from the portal. Applying that same logic to the Salesforce integration would allow teams to intentionally hide or show shipped statuses in a predictable way.

If shipped statuses must remain excluded by default, then the integration should automatically pre-select all non-shipped statuses in the filter. This at least signals to the user that their search is scoped and encourages them to expand the filter if needed. The current experience creates the impression that shipped Ideas don’t exist, even though they can be surfaced with the right filter selections.

The goal is a more intuitive, consistent, and reliable search experience that reduces duplication, avoids miscommunication with customers, and gives product and support teams the context they need.