The level of interaction between product management and customers never seems to be quite right.
Most of the time you’re trapped in the building, managing releases. And when you do get onsite, you’re with a sales rep who has asked you to play the part of Chief Product Explainer.
What you want, instead, is more quality time with buyers and users, learning their immediate needs and their own strategic initiatives. You can build a better product that way.
It’s also healthy when customers feel they’re being heard by the person responsible for improving the product.
FeaturePlan lets you formalize the customer request process, and strengthen the communications link between product management and your customers. Clients can either use a web-based form to submit their idea, or send you an email which gets handled by the FeaturePlan Outlook plugin.
Just as importantly, they can receive immediate confirmation from your team. Printable reports of ideas coming from any given customer are built into FeaturePlan, which makes it easy to produce progress reports for your sales force - or for the customers themselves.
FeaturePlan also helps you avoid the biggest product management pitfall: If a customer submits an account-critical product request, the lack of a formalized process might mean it gets lost before reaching your desk. FeaturePlan prevents that from happening by introducing accountability and a "paper trail" into your customer interactions.
Software customers react well to detail-oriented, organized collaboration with product management. It helps manage their expectations, which leads to higher customer satisfaction.
