Today’s product decisions need to be balanced between projects, product teams and the information provided by users. By focusing more on their users’ needs, product teams can quickly adjust their development priorities to improve the user experience, boost customer satisfaction and increase analytics adoption rates, all while still meeting the engineering team’s needs. So how can you gather the kind of user data that can best inform your product strategy?
1. Identify customer needs
Organisations have a wide range of user data waiting to be tapped, from transactions and buying behaviours to complaints and support tickets. Put that data to good use to discover which features or updates would be most beneficial to your users, then take it a step further and talk to your users. That means physically leaving your office and visiting your customers or end users. Go and see their processes and have a conversation in person. You will get far more useful information from an in-person conversation than you would have received over the phone or by email.
Other ways to engage with your customers are to become a more user-centric company by creating customer advisory boards or user groups. Gathering data about your customers or end users and their workflows helps you discover what they need, what their pain points are and how you can improve your data product to address those needs. After all, the key to a data-driven strategy is using data to identify the wants, problems and needs of your specific customers.
2. Improve customer experiences and UX
A customer-obsessed company focuses its strategy, energy and budget on engaging with its customers, and a great customer experience will only become more important to your product strategy. Gartner found that, within two years, 82% of B2B CMOs expect to compete mostly or entirely on the basis of customer experience (CX), and companies should prepare for this possibility today.
Invest in technology that lets you gather the information you need to understand how the right experience will keep your users coming back. People who want to keep current customers loyal and engaged always ask: “How can we use information about product and feature usage to improve our users’ experience?” The answer is to truly understand your users. The better you can relate to their situation, the better you can meet their needs.
3. Infuse insights into your product development process
Use data and insights not only to understand your customers and how your product will evolve, but also to infuse your product with ideas that deliver value to your customers:
- Rethink Big Data: large, diverse and messy forms of data can create new sources of customer value. Think about additional data sources and how you can use them to generate new insights.
- Personalise: use data to fuel machine learning and real-time efforts. Your edge will come from cycles of real-time, two-way, insight-driven interactions delivered exactly where your users need them.
- Move a step ahead: accelerate innovation by using Big Data not only to anticipate customer needs, but also to deliver new or unexpected value. Incorporate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics or natural language generation to create contextual and engaging experiences.
4. Get everyone thinking about customer and end-user needs
Forrester found that the disconnect between committing to improve the user experience and actually doing it is often down to a lack of executive commitment, which is surprising given that revenue growth for CX leaders is 5.1 times higher than for laggards. Invite executives and engineers to take part in customer advisory boards and user groups. This is an excellent way for them to learn customer workflows and hear about their experience first-hand.
Tracking and measuring the results of the four points above will let you show the correlation between investing in understanding the customer and evolving the product, and adoption and growth. Share those results across teams and organisational leaders: it is an effective way to get everyone to start thinking about customer needs and, ultimately, to improve adoption and loyalty.
Measuring all of this requires clean data and reliable dashboards. At Digital Fox Data we make it possible with our Business Intelligence consultancy in Qlik, Tableau and Power BI. If you are not sure where to start, read why invest in Business Intelligence? or let’s talk.