If you want to improve your customer’s experience, you have to crawl into their skin and see what they see. That’s what the best product analytics will let you do. They peel back the user’s experience, so you can understand what they’re going through and tweak your product to enhance their experience.
Unfortunately, many SaaS organizations focus on the wrong metrics or misleading product analytics—and their plans to improve the customer experience fly off course. We’re here to help you fuel your product enhancements with better data. In this article, we nail down the five product analytics your organization can use to improve customer experience.
What Are Product Analytics?
Product analytics are tools you use to collect and understand in-product user data. Product analytics are valuable to SaaS companies because they help inform customer-centric decisions, and they unite all of your teams around a common goal: improving the customer experience.
Additionally, product analytics are essential to successful product-led growth strategies. That’s because they show product leaders and managers what decisions to make in order to improve the user’s experience and grow the product.
5 Product Analytics Tools Your Company Needs To Use
If you want your product analytics tools to help you pull back the veil that’s shielding you from your customer’s experience, it’s important to avoid vanity metrics. Vanity metrics may make you look good to teammates, but they tell you little about the actual experience your customers have. Instead, here are five product analytics tools that are designed to help you bolster customer experience:
1. Path and Funnel Analysis
Path and funnel analysis chart the steps users or customers are taking as they engage with your product. With funnel analysis, you can track important interactions, such as page views. It also lets you see what features customers are using or where they’re dropping off. Similarly, path analysis shows you each user’s course as they get to know your product’s features and overall layout.
Both types of product analytics are valuable because they display your customers’ biggest objectives, and they reveal where the biggest friction points sit. With that info in hand, you can focus on those rough patches—and create a smoother customer experience.
2. Onboarding Analysis
Onboarding analysis helps you examine how well you are introducing users to a new product or features. This set of analyses reveals whether or not users are picking up on the features they need to enjoy your product. It can also show you where you need to add more education, in-product user guides, or checklists in order to help users learn about your product faster.
3. Adoption Analysis
Adoption analysis shows you how often—and to what extent—customers are using your product or new features. It’s an important area to dig into to improve both the customer’s experience and team morale. After all, if your team spends hours creating a product experience only to have it shrugged aside, there’s a good chance your team will become frustrated quickly.
One great way to use adoption analysis is to examine this data after a new launch. That way, you can see how eager your customers are to embrace your new feature or why they’re hesitating. And you can clear the way to faster product adoption. At the same time, adoption analysis can help you identify the sticky features in your product and bring them to the forefront of your product experience.
4. Retention Analysis
Retention is perched high on most product leaders’ priority lists. In fact, well over half of all SaaS leaders say customer renewals are a high priority. That suggests leaders already realize how important retention analysis is to improving the customer’s experience and growing the product.
Retention analysis is a tool that helps you drive this critical figure higher. It lays out important retention KPIs, so you know how well your moves are impacting long-term contracts. At the same time, this tool reveals the friction points that are plaguing your users—including those users who are most vulnerable to churn. By leaning on this data, product leaders can identify the weak spots in the product experience, actively mend them, and boost the user’s experience, increasing retention along the way.
5. Feedback Analysis
Feedback is the fuel you need to ignite better user experiences. When you use feedback analysis correctly, it will inform your decisions and help you refine your actions.
Survey analytics can hand you a solid jumping-off point where you can analyze customer sentiment or identify rocky experiences. You can also take feedback analysis to the next level by placing customer feedback loops in your product. In this process, you use feedback to inform decisions, and then you collect feedback after you make your improvements. That way, you’re constantly refining your moves and driving the user’s experience higher.
Lead Your Organization to More Growth
Product analytics are a central cog that powers your product-led growth strategy. And if you want to supercharge your user’s experience, there are even more tools you can access. Read “Building Winning Product Experiences” to learn how to use product data to back your decisions, improve your users’ experience, and kick your product-led growth strategy into motion.
