Feature Request Management?

Hey Michael - 

We'll put your question in the next Community Roundup to see if we can't get some more user responses for you. 

Here at Zendesk, we created separate topics to intake product feedback on each of our products. The product managers for each area then can subscribe to those topics to receive notifications about feedback, so they can review it and ask follow-up questions where helpful. 

Recently, we also built an integration between the community and Support leveraging the API and channel framework, so that tickets are created every time a user creates a new post. We can then assign tickets to the appropriate product teams to respond to when we receive feedback, and use the tag system to track and report on how many feedback requests we receive about a given area of the product. 

I hope that helps, and let us know if you have follow up questions to any of it. 

Hi Michael,

We also have a feature request topic in our community. We have it set up much like Zendesk with the products being the topics and our product teams subscribing to the topics for their different areas. Separating by topic for us has worked pretty well. The drawback is we often have people posting in the wrong topic so there is some management that has to happen behind the scenes to get the posts in the right place.

When we created the product feedback topics, we didn't initially create a "General" topic. We did this purposefully but we learned that not having a General topic was frustrating for users who wanted to post something but didn't know where to put it so lesson learned - it may be worth having some sort of General topic for people to post in when what they want to post doesn't fit into any of the other topics.

As far as managing comments and follow ups, we don't have any structured way to handle this. The flow is supposed to be that if a product team sees a post for something they may add, then they create an internal ticket and reference the community post in the ticket. If/When that ticket is completed, the product team updates the community post. However, given how often I see this actually happen, I would venture to guess that most product teams aren't using this process:)

Happy to pass on any other lessons learned if there's anything else you are considering.

Thanks,

Maggie

We will have the Feature Management Team to follow the notifications. However as you stated in your first reply Nicole. It would be GREAT with tags function in the Community. To be able to efficiently tag/map out the feature requests this way, and also export it.

We are in the same state as you Michael, just starting to set this up. We will do a Early adopter feature request topic first where we only let in the "VIP" customers and learn our processes and monitoring from there:) 

Please let us know if you find the answer to your original question ! 

Very helpful suggestions, team.  Thank you.  I'm in the process of building out a revised community layout - more similar to how you (zendesk) have yours - product specific, rather than a catch-all repository for feature requests.

Nicky - your idea of restricting feature requests to a specific customer segment (VIP customers) is an interesting one.  Can you elaborate how you're doing this?

Hi Michael,

I'm not Nicky:) but figured I'd add my two cents as we have a few topics that are limited to only our key customers. In our case, we use user segments to manage this. We created a user segment with a tag. We then tagged our key users with that tag and then assigned that user segment to the forum. Now only those users with that tag can see that forum.

We use this in a few different ways - we used it to get initial feedback on some proposed changes we were making to the Guide, we use it for foreign languages so only french speaking customers see the french language forum for example, and we also use it for feedback on beta products that only hand chosen customers are using. 

Being able to have these "special" forums has been really nice and has been a great way to get more people engaged in the community area overall. Definitely a nice feature to be able to use.

Thanks,

Maggie

Is there a way in Community or through an App to create a form that customers will have to fill out regarding the feature request they want. Currently customers just write free text in the community and that doesn't give us enough information. I would love a way, similar to how customers can fill out a ticket, to fill out required fields for a feature request, that then gets added to the community. 

OR has anyone thought of other ways to help customers structure their feature requests? 

Hi Rona - 

We created a post that we pinned at the top of the product feedback topic that outlines how to write an effective feedback post. Not everyone sees it, but it does help. Whenever we direct users to the feedback forum, we make sure to link to it and encourage them to review it before posting. 

Having discreet fields we can manage would greatly improve this. Otherwise we may end up moving away from Zendesk for feature requests 

Just as an update - we were using custom forms for this purpose for some time for feature requests.  Ended up signing on with Productboard as we just weren't getting the visibility or the impact that we wanted/needed.  Decent pricing/user and has Zen integration (although we are now bypassing Zen for feature requests entirely)