This year, Zendesk is making a big investment in our user community. We are improving our community to make it more helpful, more useful, and to make sure you get what you need from Zendesk.
In order to understand the gaps, we have been doing work to hear from you - the members of our community. As you might have seen, a few months ago we ran a survey to get a broad understanding of what is working and what is not working in the community. We followed that research with several listening sessions to hear your feedback - going even more in depth than the survey. The feedback from the survey and the listening sessions has been guiding the investments you're going to be seeing over the next few months. Today, we're starting to address the top complaint we heard across the bar: the Product Feedback experience.
These are the first round of improvements and changes to the way we’ll be handling and communicating about product feedback going forward. This will be an ongoing, iterative process, with lots more opportunities for you to tell us what we’ve gotten right and where things could still get better. What you told us is that you want more transparency, communication, and responsiveness. So, here are the first things you’ll see, starting today:
- We’ve launched the Zendesk Product Blog, a community topic (this topic) dedicated to posts from product managers and leadership, to help you have a better understanding of how we’re thinking about our products, what we’re learning from the conversations we have with you, and how we’re approaching product innovation. We’ll also share insights about new product releases and features, and announce EAP opportunities, so be sure to follow this topic if you want to receive email updates about those new posts.
- Going forward, you’ll be seeing a lot more of our product managers. We’ve redirected some of their time to be spent in the community every week to read your comments, answer your questions, ask you questions about your feedback, and lead conversations around areas they’re focused on.
- Our product teams have also committed to providing updates each quarter following their regular roadmap planning meetings. We’ll let you know with more consistency what we’re incorporating into our roadmap, and what we aren’t.
We can’t promise that we’ll be able to respond to each & every request, and not every request can get built; however each Product Manager will be putting in time to make sure we make an effort towards engaging with every post and higher voted posts will receive top priority for engagement. You will start to see more of your feedback playing its way into the way we solve various product challenges.
You’ll start to see conversations initiated by product managers when they’re in various stages of development, so that you can help throughout the process and have a peek into what’s coming.
We know there will be more to do, more ways to create transparency and provide the updates and information you’re looking for. But we hope this starts us headed in the right direction to create a positive and helpful experience for all users.
Nicole Saunders
Senior Manager, Communities
Pablo Kenney
Senior Director, Product Management