With so many people in the world and so many products on offer, it should not surprise you that occasionally you will receive a request to add something to your product or to create a whole new product entirely. While it’s very flattering that customers care so deeply about your product that they want to see it improve, it can also feel frustrating if the feature request is coming from a comparison to another product or competitor. When responding, answer with grace and acknowledge their issue, then align with them and let them know you understand the value, and assure them that you will pass on their request to your product team. Both for chat and for email, the interaction should look something like this:

Thanks so much for emailing — that’s a great question. We don’t currently offer anything like that within our product, but I could certainly see it being valuable. I’m going to talk to our product team about this and let them know that there is interest. While I can’t say that we will be adding anything like this in the near future, we like to track requests like this internally so that we can make shifts. Please let me know if you have any additional insights that you’d like me to pass along as well.

Thanks!

The reason that this is the same for both chat and email is that there’s no real additional immediate dialogue that needs to happen after determining that this is a feature request. Whereas normally with chat there will be some back-and-forth with debugging a specific issue, this does not need debugging and will most frequently be a one response conversation, unless they have additional insights to provide.

This accomplishes a few different things: it lets them know that you care about what they have to say and that you value their opinion. It also prompts them for even more information that you can track in your feature request logs. Your product team would likely love as much information as they can get, and as much detail as you can provide will be useful.