New Perspectives On Web Design

CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product

This is a huge challenge for us because when we demonstrate the

simplicity and speed of Perch for simple use cases, we sometimes fail to

promote some of the more complex tasks it is capable of. Customers asking

for current features indicate where this is happening. Often what’s needed

is better documentation, and you might want to check your marketing and

sales information to ensure that features are listed in places people might

try to find them.

Managing Feature Requests

I get support tickets that are nothing short of extortion.

— Andrey Butov

As I have described above, not all support tickets or posts to your product’s

forum will be issues that you can resolve, close before moving on quickly.

Many tickets will essentially be feature requests, especially in the early

days of your product. If you launched with a small feature set to test the

water, you will soon get a lot of requests for features and additions.

The above quotation from Andrey Butov was something he said in an

edition of the Bootstrapped podcast^5 that he hosts with Ian Landsman.

Butov spoke about supporting his mobile products and how customers

have threatened him with a one-star review in the App Store if a certain

feature wasn’t added. I’m glad I don’t operate in that world, but we do have

to manage customers who see one particular feature as vital, despite theirs

being the only request for it. How can you manage such requests and keep

the customer happy?

I have already mentioned my top tip for managing feature requests:

make sure that you log who asks for what, whether as a direct request

or when you have to tell a customer that your product doesn’t do what

they’d like.

5 http://bootstrapped.fm/