How One Question in a Client Call Gave Us a New Feature — and Happier Clients

At Edeal we run these conversations on a yearly cadence, and selectively throughout the year. The product world calls this Customer Development — research into customer needs through live interviews. In practice it's just an honest conversation in which you listen, not sell.

Three Mistakes That Kill the Interview

The most common one is promising the client something for participating: a discount, a bonus, a gift. It sounds logical but works against you. A person who's been promised a reward says not what they think but what's nice to hear. The result: pretty answers, zero value.

The second is asking blunt questions. "How would you rate our company from 1 to 10?" — that isn't customer development, that's a survey. The client answers formally and moves on.

The third is treating "everything's fine, I like everything" as success. That's a failure, not a compliment. It means the person doesn't trust you enough to be honest — or the question was framed in a way that closed off any criticism.

How We Do It

We start with the scale — but go deeper immediately. We ask: "What would we have to do for your score to be 12?" Not "why did you give an 8," but "what would need to change to push past the maximum."

This removes the defensive reaction. The client stops justifying the score and starts thinking about what they actually feel is missing.

Then we ask for advice. Not a review, not a recommendation — advice. "How can we find more clients like you? What should we add as an additional service?" People like being experts. When you ask sincerely, they answer sincerely.

And the final question — my favorite. It sounds roughly like this: "What's missing for your business to make Forbes?" Every manager has their own phrasing, but the point is the same: get the client to dream out loud. Sometimes those dreams sound unrealistic. Sometimes it turns out they're a week of work away.

An Example from Early June

Last week a manager brought a client's pain point: "I pay you regularly, sometimes several times a month. Each time you send an invoice, I forward it to my accountant. Why can't you just charge me automatically and send the report?"

It wasn't a new request — it just hadn't been written down as a task. The client wasn't complaining. He was suggesting.

Today we shipped autopay: the client adds payment details in the dashboard, and from then on everything happens without their involvement. The dialogue now looks like: "Need to pay" — "OK" — "Paid, done."

It isn't a major product update. But it's exactly what the client needed — and we didn't invent it in a conference room. We heard it in a conversation.

The strongest improvements to a business come not from product-manager ideas, but from the questions clients ask in ordinary chats. If you don't have a process that turns those questions into tasks, you're regularly losing the most valuable hints the market gives you for free. — Anton Chekhov, founder and CEO of Edeal

What to Do If You Haven't Run Customer Development Yet

Start simple. Pick 3–5 clients you already have a normal relationship with. Schedule a 20–30 minute call. Say honestly: "We want to get better — and we want to hear your view."

Don't pay. Don't offer a discount. Just talk.

Ask follow-up questions after every answer. Write things down verbatim — don't interpret. Analyze later.

In our experience, even one such conversation per month gives more useful information than a quarterly checkbox survey.

The Short Version

Customer development isn't a fashionable framework or a separate budget line. It's a habit: regularly listening to clients, turning their questions into tasks, and refusing to confuse polite "everything's fine" with real feedback.

At Edeal this process is built into the bookkeeping and legal practice. When a CPA or business attorney talks to a client on a routine matter — that's the point where a request can be heard that becomes tomorrow's new service or new dashboard feature.