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
Techniques for prioritizing customer requests
Keeping track of customer requests can get a little messy. You have fresh feedback every day from various channels, and every customer believes that their request is the most important. You need some form of prioritization for your customer requests — otherwise, some may slip through the cracks.
The good news is that you can keep user request prioritization simple. Try one of the following techniques to ensure your customer requests are being addressed correctly and in an appropriate amount of time.
Urgency
As we mentioned, all customers will think their request is the most important. Yet, many will be self-aware enough to realize what is essential to the product’s functionality and which requests would just be nice to have. Allowing users to self-prioritize their customer requests is a great way to determine how critical their requests may be and helps speed up your prioritization efforts.
Type of request
Customer requests aren’t always things they’d like to see from your product. Sometimes a customer request can be as simple as a bug report. Create a hierarchy of request types so you can quickly identify which user requests need addressing first.
Type of customer
Categorizing your customers is a great technique for your marketing teams and a great way to prioritize requests. For example, if you’re looking to increase long-term usage, you can look at the requests from long-term users to focus on any issues that might drive them away.
No matter how you prioritize your customer requests, the important part is to respond as quickly as you can. The longer a user request goes unacknowledged, the more likely the customer will seek a company that takes their feedback on board.
Use data-driven decision-making to validate customer requests
The easiest way to prioritize user requests is to use the data you have available to you. With airfocus Insights, you can gather customer feedback and user requests from various channels. This lets teams see everything in one place, making organization and prioritization a breeze.
Tips for handling negative feedback
Negative feedback is inevitable no matter how good you think your product is. You can’t please everyone, so knowing how to handle negative feedback is crucial. Keep this in mind next time you get some rough feedback.
Remember, not all criticism is the same - Constructive criticism is one of the best ways to learn what isn’t quite right about your product. Understanding what criticism is helpful can turn a negative comment into a learning opportunity.
Don't take it personally - The user isn’t targeting you — they’re just frustrated with the product.
Clarify issues - Sometimes negative feedback will come from frustration, with little information to help you understand what went wrong. Be sure to follow up on negative feedback to try and clarify what the issue actually is.
Respond quickly and act on feedback - Just because the feedback isn’t positive doesn’t mean it’s not worth responding to. Treat negative feedback the same as positive feedback or customer requests. Respond quickly, acknowledge their viewpoint, and act on the feedback when appropriate.
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