Feature Requests (IDEAS) in SaaS Communities

Hi ​@Kamakshi V!

In my community, we passively collect a ton of feedback. What this basically looks like is a customer comes in with an idea, feedback, or a question (that results in idea/feedback/bug). We review the topic and if it is feedback, we tag it with the corresponding moderation label. At the end of the month, we pull a report on all the topics tagged as feedback, analyze for trends and observations, and then assemble a voice of customer report for our peers.

The dream would be to have our Product team directly in community interacting with ideas (instead of questions/conversations; this is also where we’d be leveraging automation significantly), but we’re not quite there so ^^^ approach is working well enough. The community team isn’t phased by volume or sentiment, so we’re able to put together a pretty objective and quantitatively backed report that helps inform our product team.

I think the biggest piece of knowledge I can share is to not actively solicit feedback if your organization isn’t ready to commit and act in a reasonable timeline. Far too many communities out there ask for ideas and then let them fester for years - and it’s a bad look and a terrible customer experience. Passive collection is a good place to start, build confidence, and refine processes.

Good luck!

Thank you for chiming in here, ​@jillian.bejtlich !

We are currently leveraging moderation labels as well, and it’s been working well for now, just as you mentioned. While our CSMs are actively encouraging customers to share their Ideas in the community, the challenge remains that product teams are not yet actively reviewing them due to a lack of streamlined processes. As you said, the dream is to get to a point where that’s possible!

I completely agree with your last point. It’s definitely not an ideal experience for customers when we ask them to drive innovation with their ideas but don’t follow up on them. That’s why we’re working on formalizing a program around this with executive support.