How to use Receptive for customer research

The Importance of Research

Despite what your customers might like to think, you can't build everything they ask for. That doesn't mean, however, that you should bury your head in the sand and ignore their requests. It's important to listen to your customers, and then balance the feedback you collect with your strategy and judgement.

Far and away the easiest way to do that is to use Receptive to research a specific product area. This way you can control which feedback you analyze, and more importantly keep control of your product. It also means that you can be confident you're building the right things.

So, how exactly do you use Receptive for customer research?

The Research Process

Research is a key part of the Receptive workflow (more info here). While you should definitely be collecting feedback 24/7, the directed, purposeful research that you can carry out with Receptive is going to make the biggest difference to your product.

The first thing you need to do is search for any relevant requests for the product area you're researching. You can do this by searching or browsing tags.

If there are relevant requests in Receptive, send out a flexible email to those who have voted, and ask for everyone's updated use cases based on the project you're researching.

You can also send this email out to a new segment of customers and team members. For example, if you're working on a project for Enterprise customers, then you can send it out to your Enterprise accounts.

If you don’t find any relevant requests in Receptive, create a new request for that project, explaining what you’re hoping to achieve.

Then you can use flexible emailing to ask relevant users for any feedback they have and get a discussion started.

Here's an example email we sent out to determine what our customers would need from a new feature we were researching:

This will give you amazing information that you can use to enhance the work you’re already doing.

Keep Control

By using Receptive to conduct customer research around the product areas you've decided to improve, you're ensuring that you maintain control of you product while still listening to your customers' requirements.

This means your product heads in the direction you want it to, but also keeps your customers satisfied and on-board with it.