3 easy ways to delight your customers by welcoming feature requests
There’s an ongoing divide in our office between the Americans and the Brits. It’s not about Brexit, or how to make a proper cup of tea, or how to pronounce “jaguar”.
It’s about customer service.
We all expect a basic level of service but, if a problem comes up, the Americans will face it head on until they receive an apology, a refund, AND a coupon for their next purchase. (Sorry, Yesware and Craft & Dough.)
The Brits will shrug it off, pay full price, and go back the next day.
And when it comes to buying SaaS, the Americans (myself included) expect the same standards when it comes to customer support and responding to feature requests.
As a customer I’ve submitted countless ideas to SaaS companies. When I do, I usually ask if it’s possible to be updated when it’s been reviewed or updated. (Well what do you expect, I work at Receptive)
I usually receive the same response, with various ways of wording the bad news. Here are some real examples…
“The only thing I can do is pass it along, and put this in as a feature request. Unfortunately I can not make you any promises if this will be implemented.”
“We have received your idea and we will review it soon.”
“Unfortunately there’s no way to keep you updated on this request. It depends on the frequency of the request and this is not one that comes up often to my knowledge.”
“While the requests you mentioned have been submitted, I don’t have a timeframe right now on when they can be resolved.”
Evasive, generic responses like these are a huge missed opportunity in SaaS. Here’s why…
Customers want to be kept in the loop
It’s safe to assume that when people submit a request, they’d like to know if/when the product team reviews it.
This is the ultimate low-hanging fruit for customer-facing teams. Your support team can turn these vague, negative responses into an instant yes without even knowing (yet) what the product team thinks of the idea.
Your customers are doing you a favor. When a customer submits an idea, they’ve taken their time to help make your product better. Handling these interactions with speed and gratitude can turn customers into your most powerful advocates.
Your customers can help you uncover quick, easy wins
Even if you dog food your own product, you can never step fully into your customer’s shoes. You’ll never know what it’s like to use your product today, for the first time. You’ll never have all of their use cases or their customers.
Your customers know the little tweaks that could make your product work better day in and day out. Those little day-to-day niggles that waste their time and cause them to consider alternatives. Those features eventually lead to more upsells, increased MRR, and decreased churn.
The easiest way to uncover these easy wins is for your support and customer success teams to welcome feature requests.
How to make the switch
Whether you actively want more customer feedback or not, you definitely don’t want to leave a bad impression when your most engaged customers inevitably send it in.
Here are 3 simple ways to empower your customer-facing teams so they can impress the dickens out of all your customers (even the really demanding ones!):
Tip #1: Develop a process to keep customers in the loop
At Receptive, our process is (obviously) to use Receptive.
Here’s how it works for us: when customers send us any feedback, an idea or a feature request, we create it in Receptive and tie the customer to that request.
We have a Gorgias shortcut set up to respond:
“Thank you so much for the feedback! I’ve submitted this as a feature request here. Feel free to add additional details in the discussion section so our product team knows how this would help you.”
The customer is then automatically updated when that feature is reviewed by the product team - with reasons for being declined or moved to the roadmap - or when discussions happen around that request.
However, you don’t need Receptive to have a system in place! A lot of small SaaS companies use Trello or Google Sheets to track customer requests when the volume is easy to handle.
The important point here is there’s a process for ensuring customers will be updated on their requests, so your support team can close the request without additional back-and-forth.
Tip #2: Show customers you appreciate their feedback
View feature requests as little favors from your favorite customers. Have a separate channel for collecting feedback on your app or website. And for goodness sake, thank them for it!
Tip #3: Be transparent
Most customers would rather know that you’re not going to build a feature because you’re working on a bunch of other cool features than have their questions brushed under the rug. That’s why sharing a status of requests, release log and high level roadmap is so helpful.
Leave the vague, generic non-responses to your competitors ;)
It’s all about the process
Have a process in place and encourage customers to give you their ideas & feature requests. You’ll quickly discover what your customers really need to be successful with your product. The communication that comes with a solid process breeds a great company culture, builds your reputation as a responsive organization, boosts NPS but best of all, you’ll be making a better SaaS product for your customers and your company.
