Improvements to product feedback in the Zendesk Community
PinnedThis year, Zendesk is making a big investment in our user community. We are improving our community to make it more helpful, more useful, and to make sure you get what you need from Zendesk.
In order to understand the gaps, we have been doing work to hear from you - the members of our community. As you might have seen, a few months ago we ran a survey to get a broad understanding of what is working and what is not working in the community. We followed that research with several listening sessions to hear your feedback - going even more in depth than the survey. The feedback from the survey and the listening sessions has been guiding the investments you're going to be seeing over the next few months. Today, we're starting to address the top complaint we heard across the bar: the Product Feedback experience.
These are the first round of improvements and changes to the way we’ll be handling and communicating about product feedback going forward. This will be an ongoing, iterative process, with lots more opportunities for you to tell us what we’ve gotten right and where things could still get better. What you told us is that you want more transparency, communication, and responsiveness. So, here are the first things you’ll see, starting today:
- We’ve launched the Zendesk Product Blog, a community topic (this topic) dedicated to posts from product managers and leadership, to help you have a better understanding of how we’re thinking about our products, what we’re learning from the conversations we have with you, and how we’re approaching product innovation. We’ll also share insights about new product releases and features, and announce EAP opportunities, so be sure to follow this topic if you want to receive email updates about those new posts.
- Going forward, you’ll be seeing a lot more of our product managers. We’ve redirected some of their time to be spent in the community every week to read your comments, answer your questions, ask you questions about your feedback, and lead conversations around areas they’re focused on.
- Our product teams have also committed to providing updates each quarter following their regular roadmap planning meetings. We’ll let you know with more consistency what we’re incorporating into our roadmap, and what we aren’t.
We can’t promise that we’ll be able to respond to each & every request, and not every request can get built; however each Product Manager will be putting in time to make sure we make an effort towards engaging with every post and higher voted posts will receive top priority for engagement. You will start to see more of your feedback playing its way into the way we solve various product challenges.
You’ll start to see conversations initiated by product managers when they’re in various stages of development, so that you can help throughout the process and have a peek into what’s coming.
We know there will be more to do, more ways to create transparency and provide the updates and information you’re looking for. But we hope this starts us headed in the right direction to create a positive and helpful experience for all users.
Nicole Saunders
Senior Manager, Communities
Pablo Kenney
Senior Director, Product Management
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Hi @..., That sounds promising but sorry for being skeptical, as till now, every feedback or improvement that we suggested was refused with a no-can-do. Even a small but extremely important change like changing the Internal Note color to easily differentiate it from the public reply was refused with "sorry.. we can't..." and to think of how many times I accidentally sent an internal note as a public reply to a customer....
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Hi @..., we hear you, and this change is not going to magically enable us to create extra capacity on our product roadmap or add hours to the day. However there are a few things we're focusing on:
1) We have not been responsive enough to feedback and product requests. We are engaging with more customers and being more transparent around our priorities (as noted in the post above).
2) We are engaging proactively with the community. Instead of always saying no, we're working on bringing our "yes" projects to the community, sharing the projects that we are working on and asking for feedback on some of the realtime decisions we're making.
3) We are also leaving room in our roadmap for some of the types of changes you're describing. We know that UI changes (e.g. Internal Note color) are important, and moving forward we're trying to leave capacity to make those changes.
These changes aren't going to happen overnight, and a blog post or a comment isn't going to be enough to overcome your well earned skepticism. However, @... and I (along with the whole of the Product Development team) are committed to overcoming that skepticism by establishing a new pattern of engagement and tweaking our development process along the way.
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Hi @...,
I'm not sure if your post should be a public post available to everyone.
I landed here be reading an e-mail from Nicole about changes in the community.
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Hi Nick,
The post that I linked to from the email is the one at the top of this thread. Pablo's comment is a response to Yaniv's comment on my post above. Apologies for any confusion there. -
Nu problem @... I thought it might be an internal comment. I'm a product director as well..hence my feeling :)
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