Here’s a harsh reality: To grow your product, your team has to be laser-focused on the customer’s experience.
In the modern SaaS world, disappointed users will flee to the competition the moment they start feeling neglected. Unfortunately, as a product leader or manager, you probably feel like all of the extra feedback you’re receiving from stakeholders, fellow employees, and users is blocking the path to a better user experience.
That’s why product analytics is a razor-sharp tool for product leaders.
Product analytics is the machete that you can use to slice through the thickest feedback and shape your product growth strategy. In turn, it makes it easy for you to see the clearest route to creating a better user experience, so you can waltz on to faster product growth.
Wondering how? In this article, we lay out the five ways product analytics enhance your customer’s experience and make your job easier.
What is product analytics?
Product analytics describes the usage data that you gather from your product and the system you use to analyze that information. Product analytics allow you to pull user data out of your product and examine that data in visual reports. For product leaders and managers, that means you can gaze into the user’s experience, identify the customer’s biggest objectives, spot what friction points are standing in their way, and eliminate those challenges. Essentially, product analytics inform decisions that align with the user’s needs and give you evidence to back or refine the moves you make.
Why is customer experience important?
Wondering if it’s really worth it to spend your time and effort improving the customer experience? Chances are, it’s not just important—it’s critical. With so much competition flooding the SaaS market, users now expect products to exceed their expectations. According to PwC, nearly a third of all customers now say they’ll stop using a brand they love after a single negative experience.
What’s more, this customer-first approach to your product roadmap also fits perfectly into recurring revenue models. Since subscriptions, freemium models, and other recurring revenue plans rely on ongoing revenue from your users, it only makes sense that you would need to improve customer experience in order to grow.
How do product analytics tools help boost customer experience?
Not all product leaders and managers realize it, but product analytic tools can make it easier to push the entire organization to rapid product-led growth. Here are five ways product analytics enhance the customer’s experience:
1. You see what your customer sees.
If you want to boost your customer’s experience, you need to understand what they’re facing. Product analytics tools give you this insight by showing you what the customer sees. For instance, with behavioral analytic tools such as path analysis, you can track the path your users take as they travel through your product. By spotting friction points in your user’s experience, you can use product analytics to understand your user’s challenges and deliver a better experience.
2. Product analytics tools inform your decisions.
Feedback is great, but for product leaders and managers, it can sometimes feel like you’re being flooded with opinions from all directions. You have customer feedback streaming in as well as thoughts from co-workers, higher-ups, and stakeholders of all kinds.
Product analytics helps you rise above this oversaturated world of feedback and chart a clear course to growth. Because analytics pull data directly from the user, it can inform your decisions and guide your product roadmap choices in a direction that’s aligned with the user’s needs.
3. You can measure and prove progress.
In addition to informing your decisions, product analytics lays out a solid set of data to back your choices. By pulling up KPIs and metrics, you gain immediate benchmarking tools that show you how well your efforts are paying off or where you need to continue improving. Ultimately, that helps you refine your plan even more, and it can prove ROI for key stakeholders, securing more support and more resources for your team.
4. You can anchor decisions in feedback.
Product analytic tools don’t just weed out the feedback that distracts from your vision, they can also embed a pipeline of valuable feedback within your product. This is where customer feedback loops directly improve the customer experience. Customer feedback loops are processes you build into your product, where you’re consistently gathering and using feedback.
In this interactive process, you start by gathering customer feedback. That feedback then shows you what decisions you need to make to improve the customer’s experience. From there, after you introduce improvements, you gather more feedback about the enhancements. The whole process refines your decisions and drives your customer’s experience higher.
5. In-product analytics frees up your Customer Success teams.
Once upon a time, it was the norm for Customer Success teams to spend their time addressing customer complaints. However, with product analytics, your entire organization has the tools to actively improve the customer’s experience before problems surface. That means your Customer Success teams will have more time and energy to create next-level customer experiences.
Learn how to craft an unbeatable product experience.
With product analytics and a sound product-led growth strategy, you’ll have the recipe to ignite growth and uplift your customer’s experiences. Still, if you want to take your product experience to the next level, you need to become a product growth expert. Download “Building Winning Product Experiences” now to learn how to improve your product and spark long-term growth.
