Progress as a better Product Manager with the Best Feature Request Collection Tool

As a Product Manager, you’re likely to get feature requests coming in from all directions. Collecting all of them would be tricky, disorganized, and inundated. Usually, companies follow email strategies or social media engagement to follow-up on their customers and save all their responses in a spreadsheet.

We’re all about simplicity, right? But, collecting all feature requests and saving them overall by adding sheets will make you feel overwhelmed and you can’t decide what to do and that is why collecting feature requests in spreadsheets is not a better idea.

Using a powerful feature request collection tool will add you an advantage of being a successful Product Manager (PM), and makes your job even simpler! If you’re looking for a feature request tool, the following tips would help you to select the best one.

In this article, I will help you to cover-up on the following points.

Why should the PM go for a feature request collection tool?
How to select the feature request tool?
How to collect feature requests?
How to organize feature requests?
How can I be proactive with feature requests?
How to build better communication with customers?
What are all the best feature request collection tools you should try?
Bringing you the solution for your feature requests is not slipping through the cracks.

Why should you go for a feature request collection tool?

Extract insights with organized data without breaking a sweat:

You can’t decide what to do without the help of good data; unorganized data is useless!

With the feature request collection tool, all your data is organized in a single place; you don’t need to run a long-short to find your customer’s conversations. Instead, dive hunting the “qualitative pieces of stuff,” which means, analyse “where the feature request came from?” and “what is the advantage of adding it into the agenda?”

Identify the top feature requests:

Don’t stress yourself by collecting all the feature requests from distinct resources. Well, it’s a common problem faced by most B2B PM’s, but you can find the solution by determining the top priority feature requests by “feature voting” method in your feature request collecting tool.

Feature voting nothing but knowing your top requests list in just a matter of seconds. You can sort by votes received, to see what features are most important to your customers overall. All your customers, employees, development team, guest users, can vote for the particular feature which is dominating their bucket list.

How to select a feature request tool?

Select a tool with a user-friendly interface:

A feature request collection tool should be user-friendly. It should promote your customer’s experience as much as possible and flow should be natural with the rest of your website’s interface. If it’s overly complex or time-consuming, ultimately, the majority of your customers will switch to other similar feature request collecting tools.

So, always be keen on experimenting with UX/UI. Your design on the font, colour, integration should be natural and consistent; similar to your homepage. Customer experience is everything, make them comfortable on using the product as much as possible.

How to collect feature requests?

The internet has made it much simpler to collect feature requests. There are several ways to collect feedback from your customers but adapt to the one which helps you, not which puts in the trouble and time-consuming. One of the best ways to collect is by using the best feature request tool.

Ultimately, when you’re looking for a simple solution that cuts down your job, you need a dedicated platform to do this. That’s why you need to choose a proper tool that suits your firm and helps you handle all the feature requests without stress.

How to organize your feature requests?

Now, I am pretty much sure that you got a clear idea of how to collect the feature requests. But the triage stage is organizing them in the way, which never let you rummage through the tons of records recurrently. That’s why you need to prioritize all your features requests. This is not going to be the scariest Halloween when you consider the upcoming metrics.

Prioritize your feature requests:

Prioritize all your feature requests based on the organization. Check with the power users, who are the reason for your product success, categorize those organizations’ requests, and take it as a priority. Then you can categorize all other requests by using tags for better filtering and divide the requests into distinct categories.

The right feature collection tool will be able to collect all your customers’ needed features easily, combining similar suggestions as votes and make them appear on the first page where you will never miss to see it.

Here are three metrics, you should consider while sorting feature requests-

Analyze the benefits:

It is easy to categorize the feature requests when you can find the benefits! Try to figure out why they need this, for example, if customers are requesting for the features that will help them save long hours, group them, and plan a roadmap for it separately. Ultimately, settling on the best time-saving feature being asked. This also helps you avoid making recurring features that provide the same benefit.

Analyze which features top customers care about:

Another way to organize your feature request collection is by the demand that is what features most of the users’ needs. How many people are asking for this feature? And why is it important to implement or take into consideration?

Knowing which requests create meaningful changes will help you to make informed decisions. And, you can increase revenue by upselling a new feature that you know key customers would be interested in.

Focus on the cost of implementation:

Analyzing the several feature requests by the cost will give you a better idea of which features to implement right away, which can be budgeted later, and which are so exorbitant that they will never be worth implementing it. It’s a great way to help you focus on the best feature.

Pro tip: if you need more clarity on prioritizing feature requests methods check out my earlier blog on How to know what and when to build features for your product.

How can I be proactive with feature requests?

With the better picture of identifying what features are most important and useful to your users; you can handle feature requests in 2 ways:

Being reactive: responding to what the customers asked for.
Being proactive: dig into all the customer needs and build the feature that they need before reaching out to the support team.

Being reactive- never supports user experience, which means you’ll simply create a roadmap for what your users asked, without discovering the necessity of what you are building. Or based on what features competitors building- this is how most of PM’s end up with shipping features.

Being proactive- means examining what your real customers expect from your product. You have to determine which feature is most needed for your customers first, instead of granting every wish. Take insights from your customers, learn about specific user-profiles and use-cases, draw a roadmap for it, and make valuable product decisions.

You can achieve this by visiting the ”voter’s profile” that helps you to understand who is asking for what? Before you add something in your roadmap. Visit all your voter’s profiles and determine if the feature request is coming from the target users, reach out to those people for further research, and deliver them the feature proactively.

How to build better communication with customers?

It’s essential to make customers feel like their feedback is not only heard but also growing up with meaningful changes. But reaching out to all your customers from different resources will be daunting instead look for a feature request collection tool that makes it simple and easy.

Give personalized responses from the support team (not automated), for all the feature requests. This will enhance better customer relationships, make them feel appreciated, and stay connected with your service.

What are all the best feature request collection tools you should try?

Regardless of which feature requests collecting tools you decide to use, there are some things you should keep in mind before you select.

Your tool should collect requests from various resources as well as consistently
Should able to give you a clear picture of where the requests are received from and what is the use case of it?
Quickly spot movement and be able to emphasize faster.

When I sourced Google for satisfying the above points, these 5 tools stand out on their feature specification and performance that you and your customers will love.

hellonext.co
Usersnap
Feature upvote
Shipright
Front app

Bringing you the solution for your feature requests is not slipping through the cracks.

If you’re looking for a customer-friendly feature request collection tool, that satisfies the numerous factors of feature request collection like clear communication, organization, simplicity, integration, customization into a single, easy-to-manage platform try Hellonext.

With Hellonext widget, you can gather feedback straight from your website seamlessly, you can manage all your feature requests using custom labels and filters, real-time statistics to identify what your customer wants, the most beneficial part is getting access to the project list page that helps you to organize all the requests quickly without taking much time. And so much more you would love about Hellonext.

Feature request collection tools are the most valuable way for you to gather customer feature requests, organize them, and create a plan of action. If you’re fascinated by incorporating a feature request collection tool into your workflow, you can start a 15-day free trial with the Hellonext feature request tool.