How to Сollect Feature Requests: The Ultimate Guide and Best Practices
If you want to stay ahead of customer needs and expectations and make data-driven product decisions, collecting customer feedback and feature requests is essential.Integrating customer insights into your product development process helps you build better products that truly meet user needs.
Feature requests allow users to communicate their needs and provide valuable input on how your product can be enhanced to improve user experience. The goal of collecting feature requests is to influence future product development and prioritize features that matter most to your customers.
In this article, we’ll show you how to effectively collect and manage customer feedback and feature requests using Ducalis.io. You’ll learn proven best practices for gathering actionable feedback, prioritizing feature requests, and turning raw data into clear, strategic product decisions.
Why are feature requests important?
Gathering feature requests and customer feedback is essential for any organization focused on sustainable growth. It helps you:
Stay aligned with customer needs
Feedback helps you keep up with evolving customer expectations and market trends, ensuring your product remains relevant.
Spot issues early
Collecting feedback allows you to detect problems before they escalate, helping you maintain customer satisfaction and prevent churn.
Build trust and loyalty
Showing customers that their opinions are valued strengthens relationships and encourages long-term loyalty.
Reveal blind spots
Even if your team knows the product inside and out, external feedback can uncover imperfections you may overlook internally.
Understand what works (and what doesn’t)
Learn what users love, what frustrates them, and why—so you can make informed decisions that lead to better experiences.
Create a customer-driven product
By acting on feedback, you shape a product that’s closely aligned with user needs—making it more valuable, usable, and competitive.
What Are the Different Types of Feature Requests?
Based on users’ intentions, feature requests can be divided into three categories:
Bug fix requests – When your product isn't working properly, users submit bug reports that require immediate attention.
New feature requests – Users suggest new features that could be added to better meet their needs.
Product improvement requests – Users recommend enhancements to existing features based on their experience with the product.
Understanding and categorizing feature requests into different types allows you to prioritize them more effectively.
Start collecting & managing feature requests with Ducalis.io templates for free → SignUp
Create Branded Voting Boards to collect feedback
You can make your Voting Boards instantly recognizable by customizing it to match your brand. Add your logo, favicon, name, theme, languages and even use a custom domain to deliver a seamless, professional experience for your customers.
Centralize feature requests in one place
At Ducalis, you can create Voting Boards (a place for collecting users feedback) for various types of feedback—feature requests, bug reports, general suggestions, and more. Users can submit new feedback, upvote existing ideas, comment, and engage in discussions. A voting board serves as a centralized place to collect feedback from different sources like emails, Telegram, Discord & Slack, or backlog tasks—either publicly or privately.
Start by populating your voting board with ideas from your existing backlog. This allows users to vote on relevant features and encourages them to share their own feedback. Connect your task tracker and let Ducalis AI automatically create and deduplicate feature requests from multiple channels.
No more manual sorting—just clean, organized, and actionable customer feedback in one centralized place.
Scale Feature Requests (even with 100,000 users)
With Ducalis, pull input from every channel, deduplicate feedback, and organize requests with tags. No more drowning in noise. Just a clear signal of what to build next.
You can also divide your product into several boards to collect different types of feedback—such as bug reports, minor improvements, and more.
Embed Widgets: Collect In-App Feedback Seamlessly
Feedback widgets are in-app forms embedded directly into your user interface, allowing users to submit feedback and feature requests on demand.
These widgets are ideal for collecting feedback without disrupting the user experience. Placed in easily accessible locations like the resource center, users can share their insights whenever it’s most relevant—without leaving your product or website.
Additionally, feedback widgets present a powerful opportunity to capture bug reports in context—right when and where the issue occurs.
Try Ducalis.io widget and embed boards
Localize Voting Boards
If you have user groups that speak different languages, make sure to localize your voting boards when collecting feature requests. Ducalis voting boards include built-in localization features that automatically translate board content. It requires virtually no effort—so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.
Close the Feedback Loop Automatically
When it comes to feature requests and customer feedback, it’s essential to show users that you’re truly listening. With Ducalis.io, you can automatically notify every requester when a feature is shipped.
This simple yet powerful gesture closes the feedback loop, reinforces trust, and shows your customers that your company values their input and takes action based on it.
What to Do After collecting Customer Feedback?
Collecting customer feedback is just the first step. Here’s what to do next.
Organize and Categorize Customer Feedback
Effectively organizing and categorizing customer feedback helps you identify recurring patterns, common feature requests, and key user pain points. Use labels and statuses, deduplicate ideas by merging similar requests, and link feedback to your product backlog for easier prioritization within your team.
Prioritize feedback
Collecting customer feedback and feature requests is just the beginning—what matters most is how you prioritize them. With the Ducalis.io prioritization system, you can score feature requests based on business impact, sales potential, opportunity size, and other key criteria. This structured approach helps you make informed, strategic decisions about what to build next.
Step 1: Tag and Filter Feedback
Start by tagging and categorizing the feedback data you've collected. Group similar feature requests, add relevant labels, and connect them to your backlog or roadmap. If you're using voting boards, you'll likely see some ideas with significantly more votes—these are great starting points. Read through the comments to understand the underlying use cases and user intent behind each request.
Step 2: Focus on High-Impact Requests
Pay special attention to feature requests that come from a broad segment of your user base. Highly requested features are often safe bets and can significantly improve user satisfaction and retention.
Step 3: Use a Prioritization Framework
To go beyond vote counts, implement a feature prioritization framework. One simple yet effective method is RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort). Define clear evaluation criteria to assess each request.
You can also customize your scoring system to reflect your company's values and objectives. Ducalis provides a wide range of options for setting up criteria and templates.
Step 4: Revisit and Refine Regularly
Prioritization isn’t a one-time task—it’s an ongoing process. Revisit your priority list regularly to adapt to changing user needs, business goals, and available resources. Balancing user expectations with strategic direction is key to building a product that grows sustainably.
Send Release Notes with Completed Feature Requests
While you’re working behind the scenes, don’t leave your users in the dark.
Acknowledge their submission as soon as you receive it—say thank you and explain your process for handling feedback.
Follow up once you’ve decided on a solution, and finally, share the good news when the feature is released. This can be done through an email or an in-app message, like the example below.
Feedback shouldn’t disappear into a black hole. When your customers take the time to share product feedback, they deserve to know what happens next.
Share Public roadmaps
Sharing your public product roadmap is not only a good way of keeping users up to date about what's coming, but also a powerful way to collect feature requests.
The roadmap's format shows your customers that you're already working on other's feature requests, encouraging them to submit their own as well.
Collect Feature Requests and Customer Feedback from All Stakeholders with Ducalis
With Ducalis.io, you can centralize and collect feedback from all key stakeholders involved in your product’s success—not just customers. This ensures you’re capturing a 360-degree view of feature requests, pain points, and improvement opportunities.
With Ducalis you can collect feedback from different stakeholders:
Customers – These are the people paying for your product. Their feedback often highlights missing functionality, usability issues, or critical features they need to see long-term value.
Users – Active users who engage with your product daily and rely on it to achieve their goals. They provide insights into user experience, efficiency, and functionality gaps.
Customer Success Team – Focused on helping customers succeed, this team frequently receives direct feedback on how the product can be improved to better meet user goals.
Customer Support – As the frontline for issue resolution, support teams receive bug reports, usability complaints, and recurring product issues that require attention.
Sales Team – Through conversations with prospects, existing clients, and even lost leads, sales teams offer crucial feedback on missing features, competitor advantages, and deal-breakers.
Marketing Team – Marketing professionals bring in competitive intelligence and industry trends that can inform your product roadmap and strategic positioning
and more…
By gathering structured feedback from all of these channels, you create a more informed and effective feature prioritization process.
Don’t Just Build What Customers Ask For—Understand the Problem
There’s a well-known quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Similarly, Steve Jobs once said: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
The key takeaway?
Customers are experts at identifying the problems they face, but they often don’t know the best solution. That’s your team’s job.
By deeply understanding customer feedback and analyzing the underlying pain points behind feature requests, you can design solutions that truly solve the problem—often in ways the customer never imagined.
