Why you should use a customer feature voting tool

The best teams use a reliable feature voting tool for their product. Successful product teams treat a user feedback tool as their central repository of their customer feedback and prioritize them accordingly. We realized how crucial this could be for us, and we built a tool that empowers product managers.

How customer feature voting works

Let me keep things as simple as I can in this article for you. Feature voting is quite simple and can be a very powerful driver to keep your customers engaged with your product. Here's a step-by-step instruction on how feature voting works:

Provide a central place for customers to submit feedback or vote on existing ones that improve your product
You evaluate which feedback fits best for your product & vision based on the person who has given you the feedback and various other factors
When you start working on feedback, change the status to "In-progress" so that your customers who upvoted on that feedback know that you are working on it

How to evaluate a feature voting tool

You should always evaluate a feature voting tool based on the following criteria:

Is the tool easy to use for your customers
Is the tool powerful enough to manage a large amount of feedback
Does the tool have fast search capability
Is the tool securing your data and your customers' data

Why you should use a feature voting tool

Building a product in the blind is hard. A good feature voting tool for your product solves this by helping you prioritize features based on crucial customer-sourced data.

Since a feature voting tool has data that is voluntarily sourced from your customers, the feedback is valuable and authentic. As many customers need a feature someone else has requested, they just vote on the feature request, and you get to prioritize based on the votes, customer types, and more in one single platform.

The concept of prioritizing features with a feature voting tool is simple: the more the votes, the easier it is to know which feature you should build next.

Now, here's where we see the biggest advantage of using a feature voting tool:

Keeping customers engaged

We have consistently noticed that showing what you are working on to your customers and keeping them updated consistently increased their engagement with our product. Since the customers know what they are paying for and what's coming, they are engaged and eager to see you ship features they have asked for—ultimately increasing customer retention rates for our products.

Besides this, your customers also feel privileged to be a part of this community where they can give you feedback and watch it get supported by other customers.

Quickly prioritize roadmap

Building a roadmap for your product is almost always based on assumptions. Assumptions bring you uncertainty. Since a feature voting tool has all the data points you need from your authentic customers, building out a roadmap for your product becomes fast, efficient, and easy.

All we do now every month & quarter is to sort the customer feedback requests based on votes & comments, see which feature fits our vision for Hellonext, and build a roadmap around them.

Build things that your customers need

The end result of a feature voting tool is the ability to ship features that your customers really needed and cheered for that along the way. When your customers get an update from a feature voting tool like Hellonext that a feature they requested has now been shipped, it immediately brings a smile on their face for getting what they wanted and being damn right about the feature.

This feeling that you give your customers, by automatically updating them about the features they asked for, improves customer happiness. This goes without a say.

Your customer-driven product roadmap is essential

As of today, we have helped over 1,500 companies create their product roadmap based on customer feedback and feature voting. We have learned so much over the past few years, and showcasing what is coming to Hellonext based on the feedback we have received from our customers has definitely helped us grow.

Ultimately, we all are working to make the customers happy by building features they actually use. This is just the beginning of a ripple effect in your entire customer lifecycle. Try Hellonext free for 14 days.