Handling product feedback and feature requests..
It’s one of the trickiest jobs in SaaS and customer success.
How do you work with customers who have persistent feature requests that your product team doesn’t agree with?
A few ideas:
1. Identify the objective
What’s the customer looking to accomplish… the problem they are trying to solve? Do we understand the business need that’s driving the request?
2. Workaround
Is there a workaround — even one outside your product — that could be a solution? This is where it pays to have business domain experts who understand the processes, common practices, and possibilities.
3. Engage the customer community
Identify the problem, then recruit 3-5 customers who have the same problem and are willing to talk through it. Have a live discussion. In the process you may identify a process or third party solution. Or, you may find that there IS a problem worth engineering into your product and get Product on board.
The question we must keep top of mind is…
What problem are we trying to solve?
The best possible thing we can do is understand the “why” behind a customer request.
What is your playbook for handling product enhancement requests?
View original discussion on LinkedIn
