F53-045: How To Handle Customer Requested Changes & Feature Requests

Show Summary: In today's show, I'm talking about change request, customer request to changes, feature request - a general concept of you have something you either do or produce (product or service) and you've been asked via different mechanisms to change it, modify it, or incorporate something new. We’re going to talk about the process that I put around that and the mentality you should have when you're getting these types of requests and changes. This is something near and dear to my heart as a leader inside of mini-organizations. Especially on the software development side, this is a lot of my job managing change request, feature request, and functionality request that came in. So this is something I have a lot of insights on that I hold near and dear to my heart and something I was horrible at managing early on which backfired a lot. The key here is communication. What is a change request? It refers to whenever a customer, a co-worker, a vendor that wants to change x in your product or service. X could be as simple as a color change or a big fundamental change in the product you're delivering. Regardless of the change itself, understand what the change means for you and your organization. What's the cost of doing it? How much is the cost in time, resources, and money? Very quickly alongside that, you need to know the cost of not doing it. Is this change so significant that if you don't do it, fixing a problem for example, it will have a negative impact on your business? The cost of not doing it oftentimes outweighs the cost of doing it. It's very important you look at both and understand what they are. Have processes in place to manage these change requests or the things coming in. Have somebody or something receive a message. As a consumer, if you're using a service or product and there's something fundamentally wrong with it or an improvement you'd like to see, you'd like the ability to be able to suggest that or have someone to address it for you if it's an issue. Have some recurring time to assess all of these things that have come in and figure out which ones are worthy to be worked on. This is a deeper dive into the cost of doing it, the cost of not doing it, and the ramifications and their impact to your business and customers, and all those things that go into good business decision making. Close the loop with the asking party. This doesn't mean promising something is going to get done. It maybe as simple as, "Hey Susie, we received your online inquiry about this function of our website. Thank you for the note. We appreciate and value customer feedback. At this time, we're going to review it and it make our list of things to do but there also may not as we continue the build a great product for people to use. But thanks again for letting us know. We know that our customers mean everything to us and to know that you care means the world to us. Thank you." Something like that is closing the loop with them. That makes them know that you accepted it. You're looking at it and you're considering it. And it may not be done. There is nothing worse than getting a request and the customer has this belief in their head that this might get done and then it festers slowly. What is the flip side to this? What happens normally and naturally is dangerous and these are knee-jerk reactions. When there is an issue or a great new thing that came out, there will be a knee-jerk reaction oftentimes from a competitor or someone inside of your organization, or someone you really respect. It could be your boss or a boss in a different division. They send you a thing and then tell you that you need to do it right away. This is a change request so this has to be looked at with the exact same due diligence that you look at anything else. What's the cost of doing it? What's the cost of not doing it? It's very important that you understand that you don't just knee-jerk to it. The same thing is true with customer-driven ones. Have a process to accept, log, and acknowledge the changes. By grabbing them by a customer service agent and saying you're going to do it won't cut it. You need to have a way to accept them, log them, and acknowledge them. Logging them is valuable as it enables you to look back at those things you decided not to work on and see some trends that you can take action on. This is powerful stuff. In individual instances, a new feature or product may not make sense. But over time, with multiple people asking for that same thing, it could be a business opportunity. Have some form of logging mechanisms that you can go back and look at them. Have a way to evaluate what you work on next. These could be changes or not. It might be something you can ask your users to help you out with and it might not be. How much time do you spend in operations improving what you have versus new products? I find this mentality and process that people go through to assess very interesting. You get a lot of different perspectives on it but the core is you have to have some way to evaluate whatever comes in on a regular basis. My last point here is that you must close the loop with whoever requested it. Don't just think about external customers but also, internal customers, employees, peers, etc. You must close the loop and put some sort of definitive snap - you're doing this, you're not doing this, or you've seen it and this will be reviewed later. It will save a lot of problems in the long run. Close the loop in communication. Do not react to a knee-jerk thing. Just because one user that you have a lot of respect for requested something doesn't make it the right thing to do your business. Don't torture your employees with that. There is nothing more frustrating than to assign something to an employee and the reason for doing it is because some rich or influential person thinks it's a good idea. I guarantee you, you will not get the best work out of your employees when that's the reason for doing something so heed that warning.   Books, People, & Resources: Eye9design - A boutique web design and WordPress agency that just celebrated 10 years in business (an eternity in the web design space). They built hundreds of websites for businesses of all sizes. Finding a web design company is hard. There are lots of options, lots of good ones but lots of bad ones. Let the team at eye9design take care of you. If you need a great website for a great price, visit www.focus53.com/eye9. Mention this ad and get 10%. 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