Most product teams don't have a feedback problem. They have a feedback-reading problem. Feedback is scattered across Slack, email, support tickets, and spreadsheets, and nobody has the full picture. That's exactly the problem Userback is built to solve, and this guide walks you through the key decisions and steps to make sure you're getting the most out of it from day one.
Quick Reference: Setup Checklist
Launch
☐ Identify who owns feedback management and invite your team to Userback
☐ Install the widget and set up User Identification (name, email, plan, account ID)
☐ Configure Categories to match your team's language
☐ Enable AI Assist and Session Replay
☐ Create automations for Feedback Assignment, Default Assignees and Due Dates
☐ Connect your tools (Slack, Jira, ClickUp, Linear, etc.)
After Launch (First 30 Days)
☐ Review feedback daily and action any urgent items
☐ Invite your support and customer success team
☐ Use Reports to spot early patterns and inform sprint planning
☐ Set up Auto-confirmation and Resolved emails to keep users in the loop
When You're Ready to Go Further
☐ Add Email Forwarding to centralize feedback from your support inbox
☐ Launch Surveys with user segmentation for targeted NPS and CSAT insights
☐ Enable the Ideas Portal for public feature request management
Before You Start: Involve the Right People
One of the most common mistakes teams make is treating Userback as a solo tool. In reality, it works best when the right people are brought in from day one.
Think about who in your organization needs to be involved, you don't need everyone set up before you go live, but knowing who owns what will save you a lot of confusion later.
Role | Responsibilities and Benefit |
Product Manager / Head of Product | Owns the feedback workflow. Needs to configure the project, review incoming feedback, and connect insights to the roadmap. |
Developer | Installs the widget and sets up User Identification. The quicker this is done properly, the more valuable every feedback submission becomes. |
Designer | Benefits from screenshot annotations and session replay. Should be looped in to understand visual feedback patterns. |
Support / Customer Success | Often the first team to hear about issues. Can use Userback to capture and escalate problems with full context, reducing back-and-forth. |
The Setup Checklist
Work through these steps in order. Each one builds on the last.
Step 1: Install the Widget
The widget is how your users submit feedback directly from within your product. It takes a few minutes to install and is the foundation everything else builds on.
Go to your Userback project and grab your access token (look for the code icon in the dashboard).
Add the JavaScript snippet to your application, either as a script tag before the closing </body> tag, or via NPM if you're using React, Vue, Angular or Next.js.
Verify the widget appears on your live site or app.
📚 Where to find help
Step 2: Set Up User Identification (Critical)
With User Identification set up, every feedback submission is linked to a real user profile, including their name, email, plan type, account ID, and any other attributes you choose to pass. This transforms Userback from a feedback inbox into a tool that tells you exactly who is saying what.
To set it up, add user data to your Userback initialization code:
Userback.identify('USR123', {name: 'Jane Doe', email: 'jane@yourapp.com', plan: 'Pro', account_id: 456785});
You can pass any custom properties that are meaningful for your business, like plan type, company, role, region. These become filters you can use later when reviewing feedback.
📚 Where to find help
Step 3: Configure Your Project
Before feedback starts rolling in, take 10 minutes to set your project up properly. This makes a huge difference to how manageable things feel later.
Add categories that match how you think about your product (e.g. Bugs, Feature Requests, UX Issues, Performance).
Enable AI Assist, this automatically classifies feedback type, generates titles, detects sentiment, and flags submissions that need a response. This alone can cut your triage time dramatically.
Customize your feedback statuses to match your workflow (e.g. Open → In Review → With Dev → Resolved).
Setup your Automations like default assignees for each feedback type and die dates, so bugs automatically route to your dev lead, and feature requests go to the PM.
📚 Where to find help
Step 4: Design Your Widget
Your feedback widget is what users interact with, so it's worth getting right. A well-designed widget collects more useful feedback than a generic one.
Match the widget colors and placement to your product's branding.
Enable automatic screenshots so every submission includes a visual capture of what the user was looking at, even if they don't add one themselves.
Consider what feedback types you want to collect: bugs, ideas, general feedback, or all three.
Use targeting to control where the widget appears, for example, showing a different prompt on your dashboard versus your onboarding flow.
📚 Where to find help
Step 5: Connect Your Tools
Feedback that lives only in Userback is feedback that doesn't drive action. Connect Userback to the tools your team already lives in.
Slack: Route new feedback notifications to the right channels. Your dev team can have a #bugs channel; your PM team can have a #feature-requests channel.
Jira / ClickUp / Linear / Asana: Push bugs and issues directly to your development backlog, with two-way sync so status updates flow back automatically.
Zendesk / Intercom: Sync customer support conversations so your support team has full context when helping users.
The goal is to make Userback a source of truth that feeds into every part of your team's workflow, not a separate inbox that requires manual checking.
📚 Where to find help
Step 6: Set Up Automations
Automations are what turn Userback from a passive inbox into an active workflow system. A few simple rules can eliminate most of the manual overhead that kills feedback management.
Start with these:
Auto-assign bug reports to your developer(s).
Auto-assign feature requests to your product manager.
Set automatic due dates based on feedback type (e.g. bugs = 48 hours, ideas = 2 weeks).
Use the Inbox with Focus Mode for the person responsible for triage, so they only see what's assigned to them.
📚 Where to find help
Step 7: Enable Session Replay
Session Replay is one of the highest-value features in Userback, and one that teams consistently say they wish they'd turned on sooner.
When a user submits feedback, Userback automatically links the session replay so you can watch exactly what they were doing before they hit submit. No more 'it's broken' reports with no context. No more back-and-forth asking users to reproduce an issue.
Once enabled, session replay also runs independently, capturing sessions you can filter and review to spot UX issues and friction points even before users report them.
📚 Where to find help
Have a Workflow in Place Before You Go Live
The biggest predictor of whether Userback delivers value is whether your team has a clear process for what happens when feedback arrives. Without a workflow, feedback accumulates, nothing gets acted on, and the tool quietly stops being used.
You don't need anything complicated. Answer these four questions before you go live:
Question | What Good Looks Like |
Who reviews incoming feedback? | One person owns the Inbox and triages new submissions as they come in. |
How does feedback get prioritized? | Bugs vs. Ideas are categorized automatically. Urgent items are flagged. Due dates keep things moving. |
How does feedback connect to your roadmap? | High-signal feedback is tagged and referenced in sprint planning. Integrations push confirmed issues to your dev tools. |
How do users know their feedback was heard? | Status updates are visible to reporters. Consider a reply template for common feedback types. |
Once You're Up and Running: Going Further
Most teams discover additional Userback use cases within the first few weeks. Here's what to explore once your core setup is stable.
Internal Team Feedback
Install the Userback Browser Extension for your internal team. It lets developers, designers, and QA testers capture and annotate feedback on any page without needing code access, ideal for sprint reviews, pre-launch QA, and design feedback sessions.
Check out our interactive demo on the Browser Extension in Action
Surveys
Once your widget is collecting passive user feedback, add targeted surveys to collect structured insights, NPS scores, CSAT ratings, or feature-specific questions. Surveys can be triggered based on user behavior (e.g. after completing a key action) or shown to specific user segments. The value here is that survey results sit alongside your other feedback in one place, giving you a much richer picture.
Check out our interactive demo on User Surveys in Action
Ideas Portal
If you have a product with a large and engaged user base, the Ideas Portal gives your users a place to submit feature requests, vote on existing ideas, and see your public roadmap. This is a more significant step than the widget, it requires moderation and a public commitment, but it's extremely valuable for high-volume products.
Check out our interactive demo on the Feature Portal in Action
🚨Need more help getting set up? Visit our Help Center for our full range of help articles, check out our YouTube tutorials or reach out to the Userback team directly here.