Hey folks!
I've had a great experience with Vendasta. Customer support for training and even a legit bug or two has been very responsive and truly helpful. I'm looking forward to years of usage, growth, and collaboration.
In that vein, I do feel like there is a significant hole after feature requests are made. A hole that I fear will breed frustration from a customer expectation perspective.
Feature requests are almost always quickly responded to with either "tell me more" or "great idea", but after the initial response, I'm left with a lot of questions. Like what's next? What features are coming? Where does this one fall in prioritization? What timeline should I expect? What's the plan? etc etc.
I'm not new to the world of software and large ERP/MRP/PM systems. There is always a balancing act of fielding user feature requests, platform stabilization/optimization, and gauging where you think the market demand for your software is going. The product dev team has my sympathy. ? ?
This problem has been consistent across nearly every platform I've used. With one exception.
While not perfect (and not a competitor of yours), Databox provides one of the best client-facing roadmaps I've ever seen and it feeds directly from their forum.
The forum is very simple and clean. Standard forum functionality. But when the product dev leadership deems a feature request has enough support, the thread's status is changed from Open to Planned and it shows up on the Roadmap. The roadmap is simply Planned, In Progress, and Live.
As platform users and partners, this goes a long way in feeling heard and significantly reduces frustration caused by unmet expectations. It also builds anticipation as we get to see our own and others' ideas move into the In Progress column and finally the Live column.
Databox doesn't gate their roadmap from the public, so here's a link to check it out below. Only registered users can vote or provide input though. I'll also drop in a few screenshots for easy viewing.
I know this is a big project, but I hope your leadership will give it serious consideration.
At the risk of providing too much feedback, the layout, organization, and user-friendliness of their Resource Center is excellent too. https://help.databox.com
Happy to chat more if you're interested.
Dave
Dave Forman
