10 Tips For Responding Graciously To Customer Feature Requests
Do you notice that you get many 鈥渂ad鈥?satisfaction tickets when customers are requesting product changes or new features? Picture this scenario: A customer requests a feature. Support politely tells them that it can鈥檛 be done while still providing top quality service. However, the satisfaction survey comes back as bad, with a comment about the product, not the service. Many of us have experienced similar situations before. The 鈥渂ad鈥?satisfaction tickets might be because we鈥檙e responding to feature requests in the wrong manner. In some cases, we might already be building the feature. It might be easier to reply the customer in this scenario, and let them know the feature is on its way. However, in most cases we won鈥檛 be planning on building those features, or at least not any time soon. Replying to these requests are more tricky as we have to tell the customer that they won鈥檛 get what they want while trying not to disappoint them. Regardless of the situation, how we communicate with customers who give feedback is very important.
Why do they give feedback? Before we dive into how to communicate with these customers, let鈥檚 take a look at why they would spend their valuable time offering us their feedback. These customers feel that they are a part of the company and want to help it become better and succeed. A research by InMoment鈥檚 market insights team found that when asked why they give feedback, four in five consumers stated that they enjoy offering feedback and making a difference. There are many benefits to listening to customers鈥?feedback, particularly gaining customer insight and learning how to improve your product. The feedback from our own customer community forum has had a huge impact on how our product has developed. However, this has only happened through responding, engaging and acting upon the great feedback we鈥檝e received from our customers. By responding to customers鈥?feedback and feature requests, we show that we are listening to them and that we value them as our customers. This helps strengthen customer loyalty.
Customers don鈥檛 just want to be heard by companies. They want to know what difference they can make. Customers expected companies to respond to them. So how should we go about communicating with these customers? First, let鈥檚 look at some overarching principles for responding to feedback. In fact, these principles can be applied to almost all conversations with customers and not only with those who give feature requests. Before we decide how to respond, it鈥檚 important that we have the right mindset. Instead of hiding the truth from your customers to look good, customers will appreciate transparency more. Regardless of the feedback, it makes sense to thank the customer for the time they took to share their thoughts with you. The next principle is to pay attention to your tone and language when replying to the customers. This matters a lot because you don鈥檛 want customers to feel like their suggestions have triggered an automated reply and that their suggestions will be going into the void.
Buffer uses a tone guide for communicating with their customers. Interestingly, Automattic does not use a formal tone or style guide. According to Andrew, 鈥淚t鈥檚 better to say that a feature is on the way and that a customer should 鈥楽tay tuned! Stating a date creates an expectation and failing to meet it might result in disappointment or dissatisfaction. Promising to fix a bug or implement what seems like a basic feature risks frustrating the customer. The 鈥渂ug鈥?may not be a bug. Or, the seemingly basic feature might turn out to be not feasible to implement. In Support Ops鈥?podcast on Working with Feature Request Emails, Jeff Vincent from Wistia mentioned that most importantly, customers want to be heard. They want us to understand what the problem is and why they are excited about this idea. A contextualized reply shows that you have given a proper thought to the customer鈥檚 feedback.
The hypothetical email above, suggested by Chase Clemons from Support Ops, does this well. By explaining why he thinks the suggested feature would be useful for users, he is showing that he considered the suggestion from the customer鈥檚 point-of-view. Now, let鈥檚 dive in deeper into the two main situations: feature requests that you are not working on and those that you have already planned to do. In The Ultimate Guide to Communicating Product Feedback, we show you how to make a case for your customer鈥檚 great feature requests. As much as we love our customers and their suggestions, we know that we do not have the resources to work on all the requests. Even when we could, it might not be the wisest thing to do. So do we. But we don鈥檛 want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. However, nobody likes to be told 鈥淣o鈥? Nobody likes to be rejected. So how do we say 鈥淣o鈥?and without angering them? Before replying 鈥淣o鈥?immediately, pause for a moment and think from your customer鈥檚 perspective. Why do they want that feature?