Investing in a product experience strategy can help your business achieve more success.
No matter what kind of product you offer, providing a positive product and customer experience is essential. Without this, you’ll struggle to grow your brand and stand out from the competition.
By building a great product experience strategy, you’ll be able to closely align your product offering with your customers’ expectations. Ultimately, this means offering a more compelling, valuable product.
This guide will explore exactly what a product experience strategy is and how you can implement one to offer your customers the best possible experience.
What is a Product Experience Strategy?
A product experience strategy covers every aspect of interaction a user has with your product. A product experience strategy is your plan to offer customers the best possible experience with your product and company.
This includes understanding their expectations of the product and looking at how the product meets these.
Product experience is an essential area to focus on if you want to improve your customer’s experiences, develop greater brand awareness, and boost retention. The product experience refers to users’ perceptions of your product’s design, features, and functions. By providing a great product experience, you can boost product adoption, and ultimately sell more products.
Building a product experience strategy helps you develop and improve your product so that it’s better aligned with your customer’s needs and wants. There are many factors to consider in a product experience strategy: customer feedback, user expectations, motivations, and more.
The better you can align your product experience to your target market’s expectations, the more effectively you’ll be able to grow your business. This is why having a solid product experience strategy in place is so important.
Why a Product Experience Strategy is Important
If you want to grow your business sustainably, develop a positive brand image, and build a base of loyal customers, focusing on a great product experience is vital.
Your product experience has a direct impact on the success of your business. Let’s explore why this is the case.
Improves Customer Retention
One of the most important reasons to invest in your product experience is to improve customer retention.
Your business might have an impressive sales strategy in place, with a killer product demo and excellent win rates. However, customer churn can easily take effect. If you have a high rate of churn, then even the most impressive sales figures start to lose their value.
To get real value out of your business, you’ll want to develop long-standing relationships with your customers. This will help you generate more revenue, while also helping you build a stronger company reputation.
An effective product experience strategy will help you improve the customer experience and boost satisfaction with your products. This is essential for reducing churn and improving customer retention.
Provides a Good Customer Experience
80% of businesses think they provide a great customer experience, yet only 8% of customers agree that this is true.
So, how do you know that your business is making customers happy?
By focusing on your product experience strategy, you’ll be able to bridge the gap between customer expectations and customer satisfaction. This makes it a lot easier to make your customers happy and meet their expectations. This will have many positive effects on your business.
Helps You Develop a Stronger Product
No matter how good your marketing strategy or customer success team is, this doesn’t mean much if your product offers a bad experience. With a great product experience strategy, you’ll be able to access customer feedback. This can help you to upgrade your product so that customers are satisfied!
Investing in a product experience strategy is a great way to continually make your product better. This will help you solve any issues that exist with your product and develop a more competitive product.
A great product speaks for itself and will help your business to grow more organically. No matter how much time, effort, and resources you invest into selling a product, if the product is subpar you’ll have a hard time generating meaningful business growth from it!
How to Create a Product Experience Strategy: Step By Step
There’s a lot that goes into building an effective product experience strategy. This involves developing a strong understanding of your customers and how they use your product.
Here are some of the main steps you’ll need to take when implementing an impactful product experience strategy.
Collect and Analyze Data
A product experience strategy isn’t based on a gut feeling or idea. Instead, you need to develop this strategy around data. This helps you understand exactly what your customers think about your product and areas to improve your product in.
Your product experience strategy starts with collecting and analyzing data from your customers. This involves gathering information about their opinions, behaviors, and preferences, and understanding how this relates to your product.
You’ll need to do this whether you are improving your existing product or launching a brand-new one.
First, establish what kind of data you’re going to collect about the product. For digital products, this could include setting up user tracking to monitor how users interact with your product.
Next, select metrics that help you understand how your product is performing and how users are enjoying the product experience. The more you learn about your users and how they use your product, the more you can make informed decisions on improving the product experience.
Collecting and analyzing the right data will help you identify areas of friction in your product. This is necessary for improving your overall product experience.
Establish Product Objectives
Any good product experience strategy should have clear goals in place. This involves understanding your target audience, and knowing what kind of value they want to get out of your product.
One effective tactic here is to develop detailed user personas. Understand your different user segments, and what motivates them to use your product. This will help you understand the kind of value that each user wants to get out of the product.
Next, establish what your main product goals are, based on your target audience. Setting product goals and objectives will help you develop and implement a more effective product experience strategy that has a greater effect on your customers.
Gather Feedback From Customers
One of the best ways to improve your product experience strategy is by gathering direct feedback from customers. This helps you understand exactly what users think about your product and what kind of value they’re getting out of it.
Collecting feedback directly from your customers will help you connect the gap between customer expectations and what your product delivers. Your customers also want to be heard, so reaching out to them for feedback is always welcomed.
When gathering feedback from customers, have clear objectives in place for the kind of feedback you want to gather. Ask specific questions about the user experience of your product, and make sure you gain clear insights that will help you make more informed decisions on improving your products.
The more direct feedback and context you can get from your customers, the easier it will be to improve your product to best serve their needs. This can be achieved through simple customer surveys or individual outreach to each user.
Try New Ideas
Yes, you should base your product experience strategy around data and customer feedback. At the same time, it’s important that you experiment with new ideas and constantly try new things to improve your product.
Product development teams should be willing to take risks and experiment with new ideas. While this should be managed carefully, it’s important to experiment if you want to improve innovation in your product.
Of course, this needs to be done with caution and should involve plenty of testing in a safe environment. A good strategy is to combine customer feedback and data insights with experimentation and novel ideas. This will help you achieve more with your product experience strategy and find the best ways to improve your products over time.
This often involves making many small developments and steps. While these small developments may not seem like a big deal, many small improvements to your product will help you develop a significantly better experience over time.
Continually Reevaluate Your Product
A product experience strategy should be ongoing. Once you’ve identified your core product goals and have made steps towards achieving them, it’s important to continually reevaluate and assess these goals. Always go back to your users and continually gather feedback from them. You should also continually monitor the right data to help you understand how people are using your products.
The more you do this, the more you’ll find ways to improve your product experience over time. This is important because user habits and industry trends are always changing. You also need to verify that any changes you make to your product experience are positive ones.
So, constantly monitor changes and look for new ways to optimize the product experience. By making your product experience strategy an ongoing process, you’ll always find new ways to add value to your users.
Enhance the Entire Customer Experience
Finally, it’s important to realize that your product experience isn’t necessarily limited by the product’s user experience. A product experience covers every interaction a user has with your product, which includes any steps taken before they even get started with the product.
Consider every touchpoint a customer has with your brand, and look for ways to optimize this. This should involve improving how you address your customer’s pain points and what kind of product expectations you set customers up for. Everything from your marketing strategy to your sales cycle can be optimized for a better product experience.
If a user starts their journey with your product with clear expectations, and these expectations are met, then their experience will be a positive one. So, make sure that every step a customer takes, from pre-sales right through to retention, is optimized for a positive experience.
Conclusion
Implementing a product experience strategy will help you understand your customers and what they get from your product. The better you understand this, the easier it will be to optimize your product for a better experience.
Remember that an effective product experience strategy should be an ongoing process, so you must be always evaluating the customer experience and how well your product aligns with this. The more you can optimize and improve your product, the more successful your business will ultimately become.
A great way to align your product with your customer’s expectations is to offer personalized sales demos. Customers will be able to understand exactly what your product has to offer, how to use it, and how it can benefit their business operations. Consider using Saleo to create epic demos!
