Feedback loop for features

I think it’s OK to say, “Thanks for sharing, we’ll get back to you” - as long as you do get back to them. It’s part of building trust with the community. Same thing with only promising what you can absolutely deliver. Users will start to see that you are someone to be relied upon.

Don’t be afraid to say “no” to people (often you find it wasn’t that important to them anyway), or to say, “That’s a good idea, but I don’t think the product team will go for it because...”. Be realistic in setting customer expectations.

Be bold and push the product team on your customers’ behalf when it’s important. You’re the conduit between customers and the product, and both of them rely on you.

On the technical side, set multiple Idea statuses and make sure you move them along. Close ideas without merit so they don’t sit for years without any activity. Better than leaving things open to decay. Automate as much as you can so you don’t have to remember to make manual updates.

Just be truthful. Do what you promise. Apologise when necessary. 

I hope that helps. I think this question is as much about your human processes as community functionality.

As a member of Gainsight's Community for years, I can tell you what I look for as a customer, which largely echos what ​@FMEEvangelist said:

• Expectations: I think it’s pretty easy to collect feedback and have some kind of response, but if a popular post in your community is 50 votes, and you have a 3 year old post with 100 votes and tons of community comments and it is a “New Idea”, what do your community members think the point of their contributions are? Age and popularity of course are only part of the story for the impact and cost to make a feature but remember - Community is what your customer see, not your Product Teams JIRA boards.
• Transparency: This goes hand in hand with the above. If you have some internal rubric on what gets looked at, or updated and when, don’t make your customers try and puzzle it out. In my experience it’s better to update that it won’t be picked up in the near term (or ever), than to have it languish online.
• Communication: Not to be repetitive here, but if part of your community is about customers engaging about the product and not just with each other, you need to have the resources to reciprocate. It’s not that PMs or community managers need to be in there 24/7, but if there is little to no company engagement and you rarely ever see anything make it into a product release from community (or it’s hard to spot) then it’s not a community, it’s a suggestion box.

All of this is really to build trust and credibility with the community, and should be a reflection of what you want to get out of having the community in the first place.

It might be that 75% of the ideas are rubbish but if it’s just used as confirmation bias for an already existing roadmap and doesn’t serve as a meaningful input then it’s only really performative, and expectations should be managed accordingly.

Agree with everything said above. 

If we get feedback in questions/conversations we invite them to submit an idea (feature request).

If a member is new and submits an idea, we wait about 24 hours and then welcome them and include our ideation guide to learn more about how the process works, and provide a link to somewhere else in the Community that might interest them. 

Welcome > Educate > Invitation to further participate. 

If they have submitted ideas before, we don’t respond until it hits our threshold to be reviewed by a Product Manager then they’d receive more info as to our decision.