How Suggestions Are Handled
We get a lot of suggestions here at Covenant Eyes. We try to answer every email we get with a personal reply, including suggestions. So for those who have submitted suggestions, I thought you might be interested to hear how they are handled.
Suggestions from Covenant Eyes members have been one of our greatest tools in development of the program. Really, some of our best features started out as a suggestion from a member.
One of the best examples of this is how, over the years, various tech-oriented people have found ways of circumventing the program. Fortunately, they let us know about it, and we have been able to block those means of circumvention. We take accountability very seriously, and believe that if the program can be easily circumvented, it really doesn’t provide much in the way of genuine accountability. As a result, there is no other program that is more difficult to circumvent than Covenant Eyes.
When a suggestion is sent in, it always goes to an appropriate manager. Unless it is something that we already do, or is something that we have already decided not to do, it then goes to our “ideas team.” Each and every suggestion gets added to a list that is reviewed by the team. The team then decides whether it is a good idea, one that we should try to incorporate into the program. If it is, then we prioritize it. We either make it a “current quarter” priority, or a “this year” priority, or we simply keep it on the list for future prioritization. But each and every suggestion is seriously considered.
Unfortunately, we often miss letting the member know when a suggestion is implemented. We’re trying to keep better track of that… maybe someone has a suggestion on how we can do that?
This discussion of the information and idea prioritization was very useful. It may be of interest to users to show them a “roadmap” of planned products & modifications, as well as a priority list. It may be that what is important to users may not be to the development team, and vise versa.