Missing the bandwagon of the “suggestion voting board”
February 15th, 2007
I had wanted to implement something at work that few others were doing. But I think we missed the wave of first adopters.
I work at a pretty cool place. We’ve been debating the ups and downs of exposing aspects of our organization to the world. A favorite topic is the customer forum - incredibly useful for customer feedback, a tight rope walk for your public relations. Imagine that one upset customer that posts to no end how much he is disatisfied with your service. How can we give customers the visibility they crave without risking our hides?
As I work in product development, we talk features all day. A favorite tool of ours is the feature voting system or “suggestion voting board”, a darling of the democratic style characteristic of the open source community. The feature voting system can address topics more quantitatively than forums. Should we move that widget 50 pixels to the left? Red banner or grey? Vote now!
Unfortunately, Yahoo, Webmail.us and I’m sure many others have beaten us to it. Yahoo’s “suggestion board” looks just like Digg. Webmail.us uses Pligg, an open source content management system.
To illustrate the impact of such a tool, imagine your phone company. You are tired of having to pay your bills via snail mail. You want to setup an automatic payment option that will enable the company to deduct the amount once a month from your account. If the company were progressive enough (and most phone companies aren’t), you could visit the suggestion voting board and see that hundreds, maybe thousands of other customers would like the same. Surely the company wouldn’t ignore such feedback.
How can the phone company lose? At first glance, its cheap product research. However, making this stuff public is scary. The motion of the masses is to the short term–customers inherently see only tactical improvements. If you build your entire business from such improvements you’ll be left with a product that lacks focus and direction. So we’ve always said to manage the customers expectations, they need to understand that you are the experts on the business and will do whats best for the strategic long run.