How to Handle Customer Feature Requests: A Step-by-Step Guide [with Examples]

If you want your users to love your product, it's important that you make it worth it. This means you can’t just assume that your product is perfect and users are happy with it. Rather, you need to establish contact with your product users and ask them whether they like your product or not.

Are your customers happy with the current features of your product? Are they satisfied with the functionalities your product performs? Do they feel that something is lacking in your product? Are they getting offers from your competitors regarding products with more advanced features and better functions? Do they feel you need to upgrade your product with new features? The way to get the answers to all these questions is to simply ask your customers. And the right way to ask them is to send Product Feedback Surveys.

Measure Product Feedback & User Insights 💻

With Product Feedback Surveys, understand what users need and learn ways to delight your customers.

Product Feedback tells you what your product users think about your product and their experience with your product. It gives you real insights as to what they want from your product and how they want it to be for them. Through Product Feedback, you get to know whether your customers want something to be added to your product. It can be better functionality, more features, or anything that they feel is missing in the product.

And if you want to keep your loyal customers intact, you have to take their feedback seriously and keep on upgrading your product with new features and functions from time to time. For this, you need to have a well-organized system of managing feedback and feature requests on time and improving your products.

In this article, we will explore how you should handle customers' feature requests and build a great User Feedback System to manage such requests. We will provide here a step-by-step guide with examples. Let’s start by defining Feature Request.

What is Feature Request received in Product Feedback?

Feature Request is itself a form of Product Feedback that product users share as ideas to improve your product. It can be a request, a comment, a survey response or even just an ask to add a particular feature to your product to make it better.

Implementing Product Feedback to improve your product can include working on a Feature Request and adding a feature or a function to your product to make it better and in line with the customers’ demands and ultimately improve the overall User Experience.

Let’s learn the steps to handle and manage Feature Requests.

Let’s learn how you follow these steps.

1. Collect Product Feedback

The first step is to collect Product Feedback. Feedback is an excellent source of information about what your users want from your product, and whether your they feel there should be any other feature in your product that is currently missing. Use a good Product Feedback Tool for creating Product Feedback Surveys and collecting feedback.

Share surveys through multiple channels and be present on all channels to collect feedback. Use appropriate survey questions to ask your customers about your product features and whether they want any other feature to be added to the product. Here are some examples of such questions.

Is there anything you feel is lacking in the product?

What feature do you think should be there in the product?

Is there any specific feature you like about our competitor that is missing from our product?

With Zonka Feedback, you can ready-to-use Feature Request Survey Template through which you can obtain feature requests from your customers.

1. Identify the other sources of Feature Requests

Apart from Product Feedback collected through surveys, there are some other sources too that can help you get feature requests. These sources can be any request on your CRM like Zendesk, Salesforce, etc. where customers can make feature requests.

Moreover, there can be sources like customer emails, Slack messages, Live chat, and calls where these requests can be made. Check out all the data related to these sources and pull out feature requests wherever you find one.

You can use a good feedback tool that has powerful integrations that can make this task easier. For example, with Zonka Feedback, you get integrations like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Hubspot, Slack, Gmail, and more which enables you to pull out any feature requests you have received on these platforms. 

2. Centralize your requests in a single place

The next step is to gather all such feature requests in one place. In this step, you need to list down every feature request from all such sources and obtain centralized data in one place. This will help you analyze your customers’ demands and understand better the requirements of most of your customers when you have all their data in one place.

Tools like Salesforce with Zonka enable you to get a 360-degree view of your customers and their every interaction with your brand and different teams. 

3. Respond personally and politely

The next step is to respond to every feedback and feature request. Tell your customers that you have received the request and it would be taken into consideration. This is a powerful way to convey that you listen to your customers, and respect their time and effort to share this valuable information.

This will let them feel that you value their feedback and suggestions and this will help boost loyalty among them. For this step, you can set automated messages or email responses thanking them for sharing their feedback and suggestions and assuring them that you will look into them and see the possibilities to follow their suggestions and add the requested features to your product.

4. Analyze your Product Feedback, organize and prioritize Requests

The next step is to analyze the Product Feedback you have received. You can do this with the help of an effective Product Feebdack Tool like Zonka Feedback which has powerful reporting and analytics capabilities to serve your purpose.

When you analyze the feedback data and fetch the Feature Requests from them. Follow these steps:

• Pull the Feature Requests out of Product Feedback data.
• Among various requests, find out which requests are relevant and practical enough to be considered.
• Keep track of the product users who made the request, so that you can respond to them and contact them whenever you feel the need to do so.
• Keep a record of whether the customers making the requests are individuals or companies.
• Analyze the feature requests so collected, organize them in groups, and set the order as per priority.

5. Communicate to your product team and prepare a Product Roadmap

When you have collected, analyzed, organized, and prioritized all the feature requests derived from Product Feedback, the next step is to communicate the requests to the product team so that an effective Product Roadmap can be prepared.

Work with your Development Team to prepare a Product Roadmap that is influenced by Customer Feedback and Feature Requests. Make proper plans to add the features that users have requested and that you have finalized, and add them to your product roadmap to make it in line with the users' demands.

6. Work with the Development team to build features

The next step is of course to build the features your customers have requested. Work with your Development team to create the features, and be updated on the work. If there are some users to whom you have replied that you will build the feature they requested, keep them updated with the progress of the work.

7. Close the Feedback loop with customers

So you have worked with your Dev team, and your new Product Features are ready. The next step is to take final action and launch the new features. Before launching or announcing the launch of the feature, inform those customers personally who suggested that particular feature, that you have worked on their request and that the new feature is going to be launched soon. This will boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When you have launched the product, give another confirmation to the customers about the final launch and close the Product Feedback loop effectively. 

Conclusion

If you want your users to love your product and stay loyal, you need to be in contact with your users and collect Product Feedback from them time-to-time. This will let know what your customers feel about your product and if there is any feature or functionality that customers feel is lacking in your product.

You should use a good Product Feedback Tool to collect Product Feedback and obtain Feature Requests through them. Moreover, your Product Feedback Software should be integratable with other tools like your CRM and have all feature requests fetched and centralized in one place so that you can work on them with your Product Development team, upgrade your products with new features, and close the Feedback Loop effectively.

Zonka Feedback is one of the best Product Feedback Tools that enables you exactly do that. You get instant feedback alerts and notifications to work on the feedback and feature requests in real time. The tool is equipped with powerful integrations and reporting capabilities, and also enables you to close the feedback loop effectively.

You can Try Zonka Feedback for free for 14 days and see how it works for your product.