Pendo Feedback is designed to help you learn more about what your customers want. To this end, we recommend gathering requests to use them as a library of data, even if they stay in your backlog for long periods of time, for the following reasons:
- An idea that was once not on your roadmap can become a priority based on user votes and comments, which can prompt your company to reassess what it wants to focus on next.
- Depending on your company’s strategy or priorities, the Product team can use Feedback’s backlog of requests to explore needs and to make decisions about what to build next.
- If you're planning or building a new feature, you can wait for more requests and votes to come in to gather more data.
Ways of gathering requests
If you’re just getting started with Pendo Feedback, and would like to use it within your company first, without granting access to your customers, you can Launch Feedback and gather requests internally. Gathering requests internally is also a good way to keep lines of communication open between your customer-facing teams and your customers.
When you’re ready, you can then Grant Feedback access to customers. This increases the amount and quality of the data you receive. It also saves you time and effort that would otherwise be spent speaking with customers and translating their thoughts into Feedback.
If you’re still not confident about launching Feedback to your customers, we’ve created a number of features to help you “soft-launch”, so that you can safely benefit from the data and research opportunities that launching to customers provides.
Setting expectations
To set expectations, be open and transparent about this in your status update message when you move new requests to “Awaiting Feedback”. For instructions on writing a status update message, see Request status updates.
Add as much detail as possible to the status message of a request to help your Visitors understand where an idea is going. If you don’t have enough data yet, explain that you’re going through the top percentage of requests and, as a result, not all requests are considered by the Product team. However, over time, requests can move up the list based on demand and will be considered at a later date. Communicate this in your Product Feedback Policy, and consider including the following FAQ:
Question: "My request hasn't been reviewed yet and it's been over 6 months. What should I do?"
Answer: "If we haven't gotten around to reviewing your request, there are some things you can do to increase the chances of it being discussed.
- Set the request as your highest priority.
- Ensure the request is worded clearly, and that you explain why you need this feature. What problem does it solve for you?
Any further details can be added to the request as a comment."
Sometimes, requests stay in the “Awaiting Feedback” status for long periods of time without any update as you wait for other visitors to vote on and prioritize requests. We recommend hiding timestamps from visitors to avoid misconceptions about when (and if) requests receive a response. For instructions, see Settings for Pendo Feedback.
Status updates for new requests
When your requests come in, they’re automatically assigned the status of Not Reviewed. If you have a high volume of requests, we recommend bulk updating the requests to Awaiting Feedback with a response in the status message, including a link to your Product Feedback Policy.
By moving new requests to Awaiting Feedback and linking to your Product Feedback Policy, customers know that you’ve received their feedback, and that the request is open for voting and other data collection. This allows you to be less reactive and gives your product teams the scope to build use cases and to make decisions with more clarity, insight, and perspective on what the big problems and opportunities are.
To ensure that new requests aren't visible to end users, you can enable request moderation for statuses that are Not Reviewed, or your company's equivalent wording for new requests. If you've enabled request moderation, a request becomes visible again once it's progressed to the Awaiting Feedback status, or your company's equivalent wording for the next status. For more information on this setting, see Moderate requests.
Request votes and priorities
Votes and priorities help product teams make data-driven decisions about what to focus on next. If you're customer-facing, you can add votes to requests on the customer's behalf and update their priorities.