Microsoft has been using the third-party service UserVoice for many years to collect feedback about its own services, but this partnership is about to end. After users noticed the closure of the Office 365 Uservoice website last week, the company has now confirmed that it will be gradually replacing these sites with in-house tools starting this year.
“We will be moving away from UserVoice feedback sites throughout the 2021 calendar year on a product-by-product basis. We will leverage 1st party solutions. Customers can continue to communicate with Microsoft and provide feedback through a number of different channels,” the company says on a new support page.
A Microsoft spokesperson also told us “We are always striving to better serve our customers, including how we can improve the tools and processes for collecting feedback. We are leveraging 1st party solutions and are evaluating enhancements and standardizations to improve and streamline how we communicate with customers and collect their feedback.”
As of today, users of Microsoft services have various ways to submit feedback to the company including in-app feedback modules, the Windows 10 Feedback Hub, or the Microsoft Community and Microsoft Tech Community websites. However, all these different channels work differently, this is apparently something Microsoft wants to address. “We are evaluating enhancements and standardizations to improve and streamline how we communicate with customers and collect their feedback,” the company said in the support page.
For now, customers can also continue to submit feedback through existing Microsoft UserVoice sites while they remain active. As an example, the UserVoice sites for Microsoft Teams and OneDrive are still available, and they can be a great source of information about upcoming features. It doesn’t seem that all this content will be transferred to Microsoft’s first-party solutions, though we hope the transition will eventually make it easier for users of Microsoft services to share their feedback with the company.
