Understanding Customer Needs in Product Development

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Understanding customer needs is important while developing a successful product. Some Product Managers do meet customers directly, some do meet with their Sales Executive and gather information and some do research in what competitors do offer.

Sitting at your office in four walls without understanding customer needs will not let you design a successful product. You might provide features in a product that is not what the customer is looking for. Furthermore, information will provide you ideas that will enhance your product. Customers, Databases, Account Managers might provide you information you have never thought of. Perhaps your customers had meet with your competitors and they will tell you about their features and provide you comments that will make your product better. Perhaps the information in the database will provide you how much your customer is willing to pay and where mostly they spend their money?

Developing new products, setting price and providing different options of the product to the customers will be enhanced after understanding customer needs.

Whether you are a small business or in a big enterprise it is important to understand customer needs. Whether you are in Business to Consumer market or Business to Business Market you need to understand customer needs.

Some of the managers do comment that meeting with customers takes a long time and it is a waste of time. Some managers argue about the budget.

Online tools might be helpful to gather information. SurveyMonkey  is an online form that you can develop a form and collect information. Professional social media is useful. Linkedin can provide you the opportunity to meet with your customer and professionals and provide you more information how to enhance your product.
Challenge of budget can be solved through social media as opening a discussion and gathering information.
Using your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is useful tool. It includes data about your existing customer. Analyze them and try to get information from them.

The more you gather information, the better you understand his requirement.

You may use the following methods:
  1. 1You can meet with him face-to-face.
  2. 2Use Online tools such as lindedin.com
  3. 3Use your existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  4. 4 Provide him a trial period then meet with him and request for comments.

For a new product, In B2B, providing a trial period then having a meeting with him to gather comments is a very nice method.

I published a survey in Linkedin with the question, “When developing a product what is your opinion meeting directly with customer or gather information from account managers to tell what customer wants?”

The result is in the below graph:-


Having an idea of what your competitors provide and their successful products will provide information about customer requirement. An Account Manager with several accounts with strong relationships with them is a good method to understand customer needs.

In my opinion, using a combination of both From Account Manager and meeting with customers is a good approach. 


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