Customer Requests
What are customer requests?
Customer requests definition
Customer requests are queries from customers about sales, deliveries, features, or other aspects of a product.
As a product manager, you might wonder when endless feature requests mean a market demand and when you should start validating customer requests. As a general rule, your product strategy should always be flexible, but consistent. So it’s important to know when to incorporate customer requests into your roadmap and when to stay the course.
Customer requests can be urgent, insistent, and distracting and might push you to frantically adjust the entire product roadmap and its prioritizations. But, despite the old saying, the customer is not always right. Before validating a customer request, analyze all factors before making any drastic change.
Strategies to gather and manage customer requests
Put all the feedback in one place.
Create a system for managing and receiving requests.
Maintain customer engagement.
Prioritize and classify requests.
Discuss feature requests with relevant stakeholders and teammates.
Create and maintain publicly a product roadmap for the product developments to be easily tracked
Challenges of customer requests
Customers can often be wrong when they make demands or requests and they usually react in the following ways:
The Unreasonable Customer - The unreasonable customer often has a short temper and will demand features that would suit their personal needs, but often wouldn’t suit the needs of the rest of your customer base. They also expect every one of their requests to be implemented – and fast.
The VIP Customer - VIP customers are often corporate customers with a healthy ego. They might try to persuade you to implement features or make changes in your product by using saying things like “Do you know who we are?” or “Do you realize how important we are?”
The Confused Customer - Customers often don’t know what they want. At best, they are aware of a problem they have with your product, but can not articulate how to solve it.
Benefits of listening to customer requests
Listening to customers is all about establishing a connection and making people feel heard. The benefits of doing this the right way are priceless.
Improve and raise customer loyalty
Reduce the amount of customer churn
Possibilities to upsell or cross-sell
Create delightful and wholesome customer interactions
Increase the customer retention rate
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