Oh how many times have I heard “customer requests” collected by call centers, and then CX managers insist to get these implemented, because this is exactly what customers want, after all they told us so.

And then everybody acts surprised, when after spending time and money to implement these changes, they make little to no difference in retention rates, customer satisfaction, hell often nobody uses the feature at all.

The hard truth is: asking the customer what they want directly, isn’t going to help you find out what they really need.

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want”, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

— Steve Jobs

So what to do with these requests by customers, considering that they went as far as contacting you and telling you they want feature x? First of all, users who complain aren’t your standard representative users. Otherwise you’d be drowning in complaints (don’t think that users who don’t complain have no problems with your product whatsoever that would be the worst fallacy!).

So why does improving the product according to the most demanding users’ voiced needs often not result in increased profits? Because these users are loyal customers who are already buying what you are offering. In so far they are not entirely dissatisfied with your product.

A dissatisfied customer does not complain; he just switches.

— Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Your users aren’t UX designers, or product managers, you shouldn’t rely on them for solutions. You should only rely on them for problems. It’s up to you, the out-of-the-box thinker, to find solutions that address your user’s pain points (and hopefully go above and beyond, solving problems your users didn’t even know they had).

Yes once in a blue moon there might be the exceptional customer who might propose an innovative new solutions or idea. But this is the exception that proves the rule. So what to do?

1. Focus on changes to increase the number of people starting to use your product.
2. Focus on fixing the things that made customers switch from your platform.

Don’t spend time and money on features that won’t increase your user base, or make sure people stay on your platform. Just because company A has feature x, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have the same feature, too. If not having that feature makes people leave your platform, by all means go for it, but otherwise take a good hard look what implementing a feature would do to your user base and retention rate and whether you couldn’t spend the same time and money more effectively working on the next big thing instead.