The scenario is all too familiar for product managers: there’s a million feature requests and ideas for development and just as many stakeholders with conflicting agendas about which should be prioritized. The solution – objectively determining what’s most important – isn’t always so easy to achieve.

Fielding user feedback seems to be one of Microsoft biggest strengths lately and the list of products receiving user feedback using 3rd party solutions like UserVoice has grown to include Bing. To make Bing better and more effective Microsoft has turned to their users to submit ideas using the popular feedback solution. Users can submit improvement ideas and vote on their favorites as well as share master searching tips.

UserVoice, the complete platform for managing in-app user engagement, feedback, and support, today announced explosive growth led by enterprise demand from companies such as Intuit, Microsoft, AVAYA, Rackspace, and Nokia. In an increasingly connected world an era of entitled customers has emerged; collecting customer feedback can no longer be an afterthought and companies big and small are beginning to embrace feedback as an irreplaceable tool. UserVoice will continue to build on its growth and expand its features and functionalities to better serve enterprise companies looking for a viable source of customer feedback to fuel informed, customer-centric product decisions in 2015.

Microsoft’s UserVoice site is a place where you can post ideas for any Microsoft product. One poster, Javier Gimenez, suggested all the major updates that were announced last night and he did it months ago.

UserVoice, the leading platform for data-driven product managers, today announced the launch of UserVoice 3.0. UserVoice 3.0 is a major expansion of the UserVoice Product Management Platform that enables product teams to collect, analyze, manage, and act on customer feedback across a wide variety of channels and build roadmaps that lead to better products, happier customers and more revenue. Specifically, UserVoice 3.0 brings a whole new suite of tools to help product managers prioritize roadmap decisions using data about customer preferences and individual traits.

In theory, entrepreneurship sounds awesome. You’re your own boss so you can set your own hours, work from home in your PJs and do work that really matters to you.

This official 2014 Empact100 List is a testament to the impact young entrepreneurs make on our economy and an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs. The list below is in no special order or ranking.

For many years a single bad customer experience didn’t really matter all that much. It might lose you a customer, or a handful of customers through word of mouth, but companies didn’t worry because they could drown out negative experiences with clever marketing spend.

The customer is always right is a great business philosophy for most business models out there. But how do you know what your customers want? By all means ask your questions and receive feedback on your social media accounts, but how many people will actually see them? It could be time to up your game and take advantage of the great online tools and apps that are available. Creating branded customer service and real-time customer support is the way to go. Collating customer feedback, offering immediate, online support services and continuously measuring the results is the new, cool kid on the block!

Meet the fastest-growing private companies in America.

Many .NET developers are familiar with Microsoft’s Visual Studio UserVoice Web site, a forum in which ideas are suggested, then voted on, by the community. But UserVoice is much broader than just the Visual Studio audience. There’s also an ASP.NET forum, and a Windows Platform Developer (WPDev) forum. And now, there’s one specifically for wanted or needed APIs.

For many years, a customer’s experience didn’t really matter all that much. A single bad experience might lose you a customer—or a handful of customers—through word of mouth, but companies didn’t really care because they could drown out negative experiences with marketing spend. Clever marketing trumped user experience.

Microsoft is actively listening to consumer feedback and that is why the devices and services giant has a UserVoice page for the Xbox One console. You can submit your feedback, suggestions, and ideas to the company and it just might make it to the console!

In the flood of Microsoft’s E3 2014 announcements, the company has also quietly launched a new way for players to provide feedback on their Xbox One consoles through a new UserVoice page.

At its TechEd event in Houston today, Microsoft is launching the latest update to Visual Studio. There are no massive changes here compared to the release candidate the company announced at its Build developer conference last month, but the company did make one announcement that will surely take some by surprise: as part of its recent push to making cross-platform development with Visual Studio easier, Microsoft today launched a preview of its Visual Studio tooling for the open source Apache Cordova project.

Richard White, co-founder and CEO of UserVoice, a company that helps businesses better understand their users and which is announcing a new API for Visual Studio Online, said working with Microsoft on the project was a cinch because “we’re a SaaS solution and they’re a SaaS solution, and you can get up the integration in less than a minute. We use Web hooks on both sides.”

At its TechEd North America 2014 conference today, Microsoft made a long list of announcements for developers regarding its various tools and technologies. Among the highlights are the release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 with improved tools for Windows Phone 8.1 and Microsoft Azure, tooling support for Apache Cordova, and ASP.NET vNext preview, but the company also launched a multitude of smaller additions that play into its vision for cross-platform mobile development and cloud-optimized Web development.

At its TechEd conference today, Microsoft announced the next step in its “mobile first, cloud first” strategy with a preview of Apache Cordova support in Visual Studio. Cordova is a toolkit for building apps for iOS, Android, and Windows using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With the Cordova integration, Visual Studio will directly support building apps for all of these platforms.

The final CRM Watchlist 2014 vendors, though we still have the consulting/SIs—three of them—to go. NexJ, PROS and UserVoice: Three companies not alike at all, but three companies having a major impact on the market. All winners. All even bigger potential.

We indie developers have a big problem: We do not have a support team to explain our users how to use our apps or how to solve certain problems/issues. Which leads to our next problem: users are customers. Customers want to be satisfied. It is our job to do this with our apps by providing them a high level user experience and feature rich apps.

Calling feedback ‘a gift,’ a company gives clients the tools to make better products and satisfy customers. There’s a lot of insight that can be gleaned from customer feedback; however, conventional methods for collecting this information are often cumbersome and ineffective.

UserVoice provides end-to-end customer engagement opportunities to foster customer satisfaction and encourage positive feedback. With self-service opportunities, in-app capabilities for mobile apps and integrated support systems for web apps, UserVoice enables brands to provide consistent customer support with every interaction.

We’re all aware of the gruelling process every Idol champion has to endure, and the most recent competition–which was of the highest standards yet–allowed for no exceptions. Entrants’ style, capabilities, potential and, obviously, performances were assessed in various rounds by the judging panel of industry royalty.

After coming from a family with 2 entrepreneurs, Richard White found himself doing sales pitches selling hospital equipment by the age of 17.

With the rise of the app economy and the shift to subscription-based (often freemium) models that come with it, there’s been an increasing focus on retaining customers. In this new world, customer retention is the new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, improving retention is especially challenging because it often involves making changes to your product that you cannot track instantly.

UserVoice, creators of a platform that makes it easier for 150,000 companies of all sizes to respond quicker to customer needs and gather more feedback from them, was recently named winner of the 2013 CRM Idol contest.

The third yearly CRM idol competition drew to a close last Friday, and customer engagement solution provider UserVoice was selected as the winner. UserVoice’s solution provides clients with customer feedback, knowledge management and satisfaction ratings through embeddable apps.

UserVoice, a provider of customer engagement tools for web and mobile applications, was announced today as the winner of the CRM Idol competition, an annual runoff of promising marketing tech start-ups awarded by leading companies and luminaries of the CRM world.

The final vote tallies came in this Wednesday and UserVoice has come out on top in CRM Idol 2013. UserVoice won out over a total pool of 44 companies, and a shortlist of finalists that included some truly great competitors like BlueCamroo and Cirrus Insight.

Sixty years ago, consumers could find great customer service at the corner barber shop, the mom-and-pop grocery stores—places where business owners valued keeping the customers they had over acquiring ones they didn’t. Places where human connection and conversation, even if they didn’t lead to sales, were encouraged.

Anyone in gaming knows that the biggest shift over the past couple years has been the shift from paid to free-to play-games - accounting for 79 percent (in the EU) and 90 percent (in the US) of mobile game spending.

Customer service provider UserVoice is out with an Android-targeted Software Development Kit for its in-app software.

Chances are that if you’ve ever used a website to vote on feature requests for a game or app, the voting system was driven by UserVoice. Founded in 2008, UserVoice has long focused on helping businesses retain customers by understanding their wants and needs and dealing with support issues.

UserVoice, a provider of solutions for managing in-app user engagement, feedback, and support, today launched the UserVoice SDK for the Android operating system.

UserVoice has today announced the UserVoice SDK for Android, bringing an all-in-one solution for managing in-app user engagement, feedback, customer support and more to developers. The SDK will allow developers to keep their users more engaged in their apps, even when they have problems, rather than leaving those users to search for support in other ways.

When people think of customer relationship management, they often think of vendors like Microsoft, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Zoho and a host of others that provide CRM services. Each of these companies has been around for years providing businesses with the tools and services they need to manage their customer base.

With consumers wanting vendors to pay attention to more than just their wallets, it’s more important than ever to provide great customer support, and more opportunities for them to contribute their feedback on how you can better service them. UserVoice looks to enable companies to provide better service and feedback capabilities at scale in order to improve customer retention efforts.

Well, everyone, here we are. After weeks of reference checks, mentoring, and demos - a rigorous process for all concerned, we have the names of the 12 semi-finalists. Yes, we do. These are the ones that are going to the next round.

With the rise of the app economy and the shift to subscription-based (often freemium) models that come with it, there’s been an increasing focus on retaining customers. In this new world, customer retention is the new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, improving retention is especially challenging because it often involves making changes to your product that you cannot track instantly. With this in mind, here are five proven techniques for improving customer retention without changing your product drastically.

For many companies, customers are the lynchpin of success. But are you really making the most of these critical relationships? UserVoice wants to get you out from behind the help desk and in front of customers with a suite of tools designed to encourage engagement and yield valuable, actionable data from support interactions. We chatted with founder and CEO Richard White about how Reddit inspired a new breed of customer support, and why UserVoice is poised to blow traditional help desk solutions out of the water.

There’s been a lot of talk about gamification being the future — specifically, the future of increasing customer engagement and retention. But before a single resource is put toward the emerging tred, there’s something important to understand: Gamification is not about creating motivation, it’s about reminding people of their inspiration.

Last Thursday I went back to camp — UserVoice’s Summit in San Francisco last Thursday celebrated the launch of its brand new Touchpoint Toolkit with a camp-themed afternoon complete with pine trees, picnic tables, and friendship bracelets. UserVoice hosted an array of speakers who discussed everything from how they’ve used UserVoice to the changing role of Helpdesk software in the tech world.

The first line of defense between your company and your customers won’t be found in the boardroom. They’ll look like a Time-Life operator but they’ll be doing much more; like responding to tweets and emails, live chatting on your website with customers and putting out fires involving your brand.

UserVoice yesterday released the next generation of its product suite with the addition of Touchpoint Toolkit, a collection of engagement tools. Touchpoint Toolkit extends meaningful, large-scale interaction and analytics throughout the customer lifecycle.

Mobile apps have a new weapon in the battle for customer eyeballs, a fight often lost because a company is too focused on getting new customers instead of nurturing current ones. UserVoice, a customer support vendor, has released a tool meant to increase customer engagement, and generate richer feedback right inside the app itself.

Customer service platform UserVoice announced today that it has integrated its service with ExactTarget’s Pardot marketing automation platform. With this tie-in, companies will be able to leverage their customer engagement data for lead scoring and implementing targeted marketing campaigns. UserVoice’s CEO and founder Richard White tells TNW that the integration is free to customers and should be easy to bridge the two systems.

Uservoice, the online support and customer engagement company, has announced Touchpoint Toolkit, an in-app engagement toolkit for app developers. It’s long been understood that pairwise comparison is a good way to establish which of a list of choices are more attractive, a much more effective technique than presenting the list and asking people to rate them or order them.

For SaaS companies, life is a near constant cycle of customer feedback and new feature implementation. The challenges with this model arise first in encouraging customer engagement, and then in sorting through the feedback to determine the most worthwhile features and those most likely to drive ROI. There are plenty of helpdesk and customer support products in the marketplace, but most still rely on significant customer service manpower — a real challenge in the lean startup era.

In January 2012, I wrote about five ticketing systems for development teams. Recently, I did an implementation of UserVoice in an application, and it has changed the ticketing systems game.

Q&A with Real Help Desk Users The ability to interact with customers efficiently and affordably are among the reasons businesses of all sizes and verticals are leveraging help desk software as part of their customer service strategies. If your company is toying with the idea of getting some much needed assistance in the form of a help desk let a pair of current users from two of the most wellknown solutions, UserVoice and Zendesk, be your guide.

UserVoice’s solution allows customers to reward support staff for providing good customer service with a “kudos” feature. Using a touch of gamification to acknowledge the good work of contact center agents, UserVoice’s Full-Service application enables support staff to bask in the glory and watch the success of their colleagues via a group dashboard.

Within a week, the suggestion had become the third or fourth most popular idea on the site, and he heard back from a Council representative who told him they were in discussions with university transit and would keep him posted. The bus stop was moved and a fan of the feedback site was born.

Attempts to predict the future are dangerous. But having an idea—even a vague one—of what the next few months are expected to bring is crucial for business leaders to plan ahead, secure the funding required for necessary investments, and make the essential changes in their organizational structure.

Sid speaks with Richard White, CEO of User Voice about how companies can empower their customers to better communicate with them.