Ask HN: Website to collect customer enhancement requests | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Website to collect customer enhancement requests

5 pointsGnarfGnarf5 comments

I'm looking for a Website that offers the following services:

- A software developer makes a list of proposed or possible features and enhancements to his product.

- Customers login and vote on their favorite enhancements. Each customer gets a limited number of votes to insure (s)he focuses on what is truly important to him/her. The votes could be weighed (first vote is worth 5 points, second is 4 points, ... fifth vote is 1 point).

- A customer can only vote once. In a really sophisticated system, a customer could change his vote.

- Customers are also given the opportunity to originate their own requests.

- The results can be viewed in real time by all customers.

Most survey and polling sites are too elementary.

Had the same problem a while ago with our saas product. We receive dozen of requests each week, and except a few exceptions (bigger things that we are already building anyway), most of them are pet peeves and very specific to single customers.

Long story short: we ended up writing our own solution, with a twist. Each week we assign votes to customers, unused votes expires after a while, and quantity of votes is function of customer value and seniority.

Let's be honest: a customer on the free plan or during the trial, that makes tons of request, cannot be weighed the same as a customer which has been with us for 3 years already and is on the biggest plan. A request from the latter is a serious thing for me... a request from the former not so much!

I was thinking about almost this same exact idea the other day. However, I wanted customers to be able to submit requests that would not be initially visible to public facing web. They would be vetted and made anonymous, then people could vote on them.

So something like User Voice?

https://www.uservoice.com/

That looks exactly like what I'm looking for... except the annual fee is "five figures". A bit out of my range :o)

He suggested "ideascale".

I suspect services like ZenDesk or other helpdesk software are likely to have this or something similar as a feature.

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