In the past the MacBU’s MacTopia’s Web site has served as the hub for customers to give the company feedback about its products. While MacTopia will remain the central place for product information, the company thought it was important to have a place just for feedback.
“The Mac Product Feedback site is a place where our customers can have a new direct communication line to the MacBU product group,” Erik Ryan, MacBU Product Manager, told MacCentral. “We are really making it easy for customers to give us their general feedback, their comments and let us know about ways we can improve our product and make feature requests.”
Using the new feedback page, customer comments are sent directly to the Product Manager in charge of the product you comment on. For example, if you want to make a feature request for Microsoft Word, you choose the product from the menu, type in your comments and the product manager will receive your email.
The MacBU team will evaluate the feature requests and post them to the company’s MacTopia’s Web site for the general public to see.
“This is an extension of our other channels on MacTopia. With Office v. X some of the features are a direct result of customer feedback,” said Ryan. “Features like multiple selections, auto-recover and customizable keyboard shortcuts all made it into Office v. X because we heard from our customers.”
The MacBU not only wants to hear feedback from its customers, they feel it’s an important part of the process in the development of their applications. MacBU Product Manager Gary Wilson has been visiting MUGs (Macintosh User Groups) to present the company’s products and get feedback from the groups on how to improve in the future. The MacBU has been involved with the MUGs since 1997. “We’ve always felt the MUGs were a key feedback group, said Wilson. “They know we’re listening and we care about what they have to say.”
“With each product release we think our record speaks for itself and hopefully we’re getting better — this will help in that respect. It’s a top priority of ours to listen to our customers,” said Ryan.