5 Keys To A Data Driven Product Strategy
Product decisions used to be based on engineer wants and intuition. Today, they’re based on feedback and information provided by customers. Collective intelligence and collective learning can quickly inform development priorities for enhanced user experience, improved customer satisfaction and increased adoption rates. Business intelligence on your customer usage and experience can unearth insights to optimize products.
1. Know Your Customer: Listen to their data
People say tech empowered customers now know more than you do about your products, pricing, and reputation. How is that? And how can you find out what they know? Technology has tipped the balance in favor of the customer. Organizations have a wide range of customer data just waiting to be harnessed—from transactions, to purchasing behaviors, to complaints, to support tickets. Experts from Conversionrate.store highly recommend using the data you already have to maximize customers’ benefit.
2. Become Customer Obsessed: Identify Customer Needs
As Manan Goel of Teradata says, companies now mine their data, both structured and unstructured, to read their customers’ needs, keep them involved, and engage them with their products. The key to a data driven strategy is to use data to identify your specific customers’ desires, problems and needs.
Integrating and analyzing a combination of data sets
is the only way to gain insights into your customers’ behavior
and form a 360-degree view of the individual.
Manan Goel, Senior Director of Big Data Marketing, Teradata
3. Revamp Technology: Improve Customer Experiences
Forrester says, “A customer-obsessed enterprise focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of and engagement with customers and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.” Brands like McCormick & Company, Mini USA, and Nike are improving customer engagement and boosting revenue through enhanced customer experiences generated by “contextual marketing engines.”
- These proprietary digital platforms create sticky, highly engaging environments for customer interaction and generate unique, proprietary data and insights.
- T-Mobile recently embraced a pro-consumer attitude, using data driven disruptive marketing to increase its pre-paid offerings and implement a ‘No Cancellation Fee’ program.
- Firms like Lowe’s, Macy’s, and Walgreens use big data to respond to customer needs based on context and subsequently develop deeper insights about their customers’ preferences.
- American Express achieved an 8-fold-improvement in identifying at-risk customers using big data.
4. Improve Product UX: Drive Brand Loyalty
People who want to keep current customers loyal are always asking me: ‘How can we use insights about product and features usage to improve our customers’ product experience?’ I say treat them as individuals. According to Forrester, understanding your customers’ context will make, or break, your ability to succeed in their moment of need. The better you can relate to their situation, the better you can serve their needs.
Here’s what you can do to infuse insights from data into your product development process:
- Take a Positive Pill: Reset what big data means to you. Large, diverse and messy forms of data can create new sources of customer value. And insight from that data can increase your operational agility: making you more in tune and in service to your customers, and improving brand loyalty.
- Get Personal: Use data to fuel a real-time contextual marketing engine. Your edge will come from self sustaining cycles of real time, two way, insight driven interactions with individual customers.
- Jump a Step Ahead: Accelerate innovation by using big data to anticipate customer needs. Emerging methods like “location analytics” and “device usage analysis” can generate the real time and personalized insight you need to deliver engaging, contextual experiences customers will clamor for, and tell their friends about.
5. Transform Your Focus: A Step-by-Step Guide for CMOs and CIOs
As Forrester says, “Customer obsession is easy to talk about but hard to do. It requires remaking your company, systematically, to re-orient each element toward improved customer experience.” Lucky for the rest of us, they’ve put together a blueprint for updating product strategy in today’s Age of the Customer, based on four key strategic imperatives:
- Transform the customer experience with a systematic, measurable approach.
- Accelerate your digital business future to deliver greater agility and customer value.
- Embrace the mobile mind shift to serve customers in their moments of need.
- Turn big data into business insights to continuously improve your efforts.
This article was made possible by GoodData.
