Product Experience Blogs, Events & More | Push to Production by Gainsight Software Wed, 27 Sep 2023 07:31:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3 Achieving Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable World With Effective Product Experiences https://www.gainsight.com/blog/achieving-predictable-revenue-in-an-unpredictable-world-with-effective-product-experiences/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/achieving-predictable-revenue-in-an-unpredictable-world-with-effective-product-experiences/#respond Mon, 30 Jan 2023 14:00:18 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=46128 By Tori Jeffcoat, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Gainsight.  Life used to be predictable.  Take TV, for example. For decades, popular shows like The Simpsons and Law & Order delivered a new season of episodes every year. But these days, your favorite new Netflix series might get canceled after a single season—1899, I’m looking at you!  The world of SaaS has similarly been turned upside down. Gone are the days when growth at any cost was the most reliable road to success. Simply enlarging your customer base year over year is no longer a viable business model. Now, companies that want to survive—and thrive—are focused on maximizing revenue from their existing customer base. Drive Net Revenue Retention With Product Experience In this new economic environment, successful tech businesses are leveraging product experience (PX) to drive durable growth in their digital offerings. These companies are delivering more value to customers, and they are being rewarded with increased adoption, expansion, and most importantly, Net Revenue Retention (NRR). Here at Gainsight, we have seen the results firsthand, as many of our customers have pivoted their product focus to a more customer-centric model. We also know that many companies are still waiting to take the […]

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By Tori Jeffcoat, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Gainsight. 

Life used to be predictable. 

Take TV, for example. For decades, popular shows like The Simpsons and Law & Order delivered a new season of episodes every year. But these days, your favorite new Netflix series might get canceled after a single season—1899, I’m looking at you! 

Sassy Over It GIF by Nickelodeon - Find & Share on GIPHY

The world of SaaS has similarly been turned upside down. Gone are the days when growth at any cost was the most reliable road to success. Simply enlarging your customer base year over year is no longer a viable business model. Now, companies that want to survive—and thrive—are focused on maximizing revenue from their existing customer base.

Drive Net Revenue Retention With Product Experience

In this new economic environment, successful tech businesses are leveraging product experience (PX) to drive durable growth in their digital offerings.

These companies are delivering more value to customers, and they are being rewarded with increased adoption, expansion, and most importantly, Net Revenue Retention (NRR). Here at Gainsight, we have seen the results firsthand, as many of our customers have pivoted their product focus to a more customer-centric model.

We also know that many companies are still waiting to take the next step.

There are lots of reasons for that. Resources are stretched thin, and everyone is juggling lots of priorities. We get it. 

But the thing is, there’s no time to wait. That’s because the longer you take to get proactive about customer needs, the more likely it is that they will churn. 

Another way to think about it is that your customers use your product every day. That means every day is a new opportunity to give them a fantastic experience. And every day you don’t is a wasted opportunity. 

Improving your customer’s product experience in real time requires agility, but it doesn’t require complexity. As a matter of fact, simplicity is your secret weapon. 

Adhering to the following principles is a good place to start:

  • Keep it simple. A good product experience is a simple product experience. 
  • Rely on data. Product experience starts and ends with facts, not speculation.
  • Iterate early and often. The market is constantly evolving, so you don’t need to worry about getting the product experience “right” the first time.

So be smart, stay simple, and don’t be afraid to pivot on a dime. But what does that look like in practice? How can Product and Customer Success teams actually improve the product experience?

Deploying In-product Communications to Guide the User Experience

Guides, knowledge centers, and surveys are well-known and widely used tools to help customers learn and succeed with a product. The challenge is that too often, these tools exist in a vacuum, disconnected from the customer experience. 

The truth is that when customers are not actively using a product, they probably are not thinking about a product, and they are much less likely to engage with product-related content.

The best time to engage with customers is while they are actually in the product itself. That’s when they are going to be most receptive to instructions, advice, and announcements. It’s also when they are most likely to give meaningful feedback. 

But engaging customers in-product is only the first step. You also need to ensure that whatever engagements pop up fit seamlessly and meaningfully into the product experience. After all, there is no point in ruining the product experience with the very tactics that were intended to improve it. 

In general, engagements should be concise, precise, and timely. To accomplish that, we advise that you start with the principles we talked about above. But we also want to share some specific best practices that we discovered during our research.

In-product Guides

According to our research, in-product guides up to five steps resulted in >30% completion rates. 2–3 steps are optimal. 1-step guides had a completion rate of 75%.

In-app guides can be used to give instructions, inform users of support issues, capture sentiment, announce new features, and much more. But what is the best way to keep them short and sweet?

While in-app guides should cover key moments in the customer journey, they don’t need to cover every moment. Some features are obvious enough to users that they will naturally use them without prompting. You don’t want to spam your users. 

Throttling – or limiting – the frequency and amount of engagements can help make sure users are not overwhelmed. Throttling settings impose strict controls over how many guides a user can view during a single session and/or over a certain time period (for example, 5 days).

In-app Knowledge Centers

Our research found that guides launched from in-app knowledge center bots with up to 5 steps had a >50% completion rate. The completion rate was >30% with up to 8 steps.

A knowledge base or knowledge center bot is an in-product assistant that guides users to learn a product via embedded checklists, articles, and linked in-app guides. This quick, self-service content helps users overcome obstacles and makes it more likely they will complete desired actions in the product. 

The key word here is “quick.” Users like self-service because they don’t want to wait for Customer Support when they are stuck. By the same token, they don’t want to go down a knowledge center rabbit hole when they just need a quick solve. 

Because knowledge center guides are self-service, they can be slightly longer than normal in-product guides. Knowledge center engagements are perfect for tasks like onboarding, as they are highly effective for educating users on complex features.

One way to deliver compelling self-service value from a knowledge center bot is to fill it with embedded video content. Video is highly recommended because it helps users quickly grasp concepts and functionality.

Surveys

While NPS surveys are heavily used, Boolean and CES Rating Surveys achieved close to 40% response rates, compared to 25% for NPS. 

In-product customer surveys are an effective way to get insights into customer opinions and sentiment about a product. Deploying surveys in-product can greatly increase survey response rates, giving you a more trustworthy picture of real sentiment from a wider, and thus more accurate, sample size.

Among our customers, we have seen survey response rates increase exponentially when they are moved in product. For example, Dealerware increased their responses by 2700%, while ReviewPro increased theirs by 3900%.

Defining a clear goal that keeps a survey precise can help with completion rates. Too often, longer surveys are essentially a fishing expedition because the company is not sure of what information they are trying to obtain. To help streamline your surveys, ask yourself the following questions when creating a survey:

  • Who is the survey targeting? Usage data can help you identify the appropriate group of users and create specific questions for them.
  • What features am I interested in? Timing a survey around a specific action—without disrupting user workflows—will help you hone your questions.
  • Do the survey questions make sense as a group? Conditional survey branching allows you to skip unrelated questions based on previous answers, so users are only presented with highly relevant questions for a better experience.

Delivering an Effective Product Experience

In uncertain economic times, effective product experiences have become the North Star for companies in search of revenue stability and scalable growth. Reorienting your digital product experience around the needs of a customer doesn’t have to be complicated, but a roadmap can help any business get started.

To learn more about Gainsight’s research insights into this topic, you can check out our latest ebook, Best Practices for Effective Product Experiences.

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The Ultimate List of Product Experience Resources for 2023 https://www.gainsight.com/blog/the-ultimate-list-of-product-experience-resources-for-2023/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/the-ultimate-list-of-product-experience-resources-for-2023/#respond Fri, 06 Jan 2023 14:00:02 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=45828 As the business world prepares to weather this year’s economic headwinds, savvy SaaS organizations are doing more than battening down the hatches. They’re investing in product experience (PX) and product-led growth (PLG) strategies to efficiently chart a path to durable growth—and smooth sailing when market conditions improve. In a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) report sponsored by Gainsight PX, researchers found that 81% of survey respondents strongly agree that a strong digital product experience positively impacts business growth. According to the report, “Today, the most successful digitally powered B2B companies are built with a combination of product-led growth for acquisition and adoption, customer-led growth for expansion and retention, and community-led growth for advocacy and engagement. The common thread between these three approaches is the product experience.” If your company has its eye on product-led growth, Gainsight has good news for you. We compiled our best product experience resources from last year, including blogs, ebooks, webinars, and more. This list is filled with the help you need to deliver the ultimate product experience for your customers. You’ll learn everything from utilizing product analytics and product adoption strategies to career advice for product management professionals. Product Experience  Are Product Managers Chief Executives […]

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As the business world prepares to weather this year’s economic headwinds, savvy SaaS organizations are doing more than battening down the hatches.

They’re investing in product experience (PX) and product-led growth (PLG) strategies to efficiently chart a path to durable growth—and smooth sailing when market conditions improve.

In a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) report sponsored by Gainsight PX, researchers found that 81% of survey respondents strongly agree that a strong digital product experience positively impacts business growth. According to the report, “Today, the most successful digitally powered B2B companies are built with a combination of product-led growth for acquisition and adoption, customer-led growth for expansion and retention, and community-led growth for advocacy and engagement. The common thread between these three approaches is the product experience.”

If your company has its eye on product-led growth, Gainsight has good news for you. We compiled our best product experience resources from last year, including blogs, ebooks, webinars, and more. This list is filled with the help you need to deliver the ultimate product experience for your customers. You’ll learn everything from utilizing product analytics and product adoption strategies to career advice for product management professionals.

Product Experience 

Product Led Growth

Product Analytics

In-App Engagements and Product Communications

Product Adoption

The Relationship Between Customer Success and Product

Gainsight PX

Do you like what you’ve read? Great! We have more information in our Resource Library. You can also subscribe to our email newsletter to be the first to get our insights on product experience strategies and access to events, webinars, articles, ebooks, and more!

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Harvard Business Review and Gainsight Report on the New Responsibilities for Product Leaders https://www.gainsight.com/blog/harvard-business-review-and-gainsight-report-on-the-new-responsibilities-for-product-leaders/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/harvard-business-review-and-gainsight-report-on-the-new-responsibilities-for-product-leaders/#respond Wed, 14 Dec 2022 14:00:15 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=45427 During times of economic uncertainty, the secret to survival is to double down on your customers. That doesn’t mean just more time with Customer Success (CS) or building great products to meet customer demands. It also means delivering positive product experiences and overall exceptional customer experiences.  At Gainsight, we’ve seen firsthand that the most successful digitally powered B2B companies focus on delivering a positive product experience (PX) to their customers. Positive PX is an important pillar for any organization looking to deliver a superior customer experience and orient their business toward product-led growth (PLG). That’s because the most direct, efficient, and intuitive interactions with your customer happen within the product. Product adoption is a great example: self-serve onboarding processes and personalized workflows empower the customer to take care of their own journey and become emotionally invested in your product, creating a stickier customer experience.  Essentially, the product itself takes over the heavy lifting of helping customers to realize value from your offering. And while that puts product managers front and center, it also makes them part of the team along with more customer-facing roles like Customer Success. Product-led growth actually helps focus the entire organization around the customer experience. What […]

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During times of economic uncertainty, the secret to survival is to double down on your customers. That doesn’t mean just more time with Customer Success (CS) or building great products to meet customer demands. It also means delivering positive product experiences and overall exceptional customer experiences. 

At Gainsight, we’ve seen firsthand that the most successful digitally powered B2B companies focus on delivering a positive product experience (PX) to their customers. Positive PX is an important pillar for any organization looking to deliver a superior customer experience and orient their business toward product-led growth (PLG). That’s because the most direct, efficient, and intuitive interactions with your customer happen within the product. Product adoption is a great example: self-serve onboarding processes and personalized workflows empower the customer to take care of their own journey and become emotionally invested in your product, creating a stickier customer experience. 

Essentially, the product itself takes over the heavy lifting of helping customers to realize value from your offering. And while that puts product managers front and center, it also makes them part of the team along with more customer-facing roles like Customer Success. Product-led growth actually helps focus the entire organization around the customer experience.

What Product Experience Means for Customer-Centric Businesses

PX and PLG have long been areas of focus for SaaS startups, but enterprises are only just beginning to understand their potential to cut costs and drive growth. For established companies, that means product teams are suddenly on the hot seat, with new responsibilities to lead the charge on customer experience outcomes that used to be the purview of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. 

What organizations need are insights and best practices for how to shift an organization in the direction of product-led growth. With that in mind, Gainsight has sponsored a report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, based on surveys with 275 business leaders who have built digital products at their own companies. 

Here’s what we found.

The PX Revolution Is Already Underway …

Delivering a positive product experience is no longer a “nice to have”—it’s a core priority for any business interested in growth and profitability. According to the report, 86% of respondents have already implemented a digital product experience, or are in the process of doing so. Companies are implementing these strategies because product-led growth leverages the product itself to acquire and retain customers and drive conversion and expansion. This approach is not only more efficient in terms of resources, it is also more effective because it targets customers where their attitudes and decisions are actually being formulated—that is, within the product. 

While the benefits of PLG are clear to industry insiders, implementation is lagging behind. That’s good news for product managers, who still have the potential to gain first-mover status within their sector. There is plenty of room to grow, and companies that start moving now have the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

… but the Challenges for PLG Implementation Are Real.

The challenge for many companies is that the transformation to PLG is lagging for real reasons. At the top of the list is finding the right people—39% of respondents said that it was hard to find talent with digital product experience, skills, and expertise. Labor shortages caused by the Great Resignation are only exacerbating the lack of qualified product professionals.

Compounding the problems that exist within the Product team are larger organizational capabilities and attitudes toward digital experiences. 33% of respondents said they had difficulty developing a digital product experience-centric culture and mindset. It is often responsible for procuring and managing digital solutions, and they often prioritize technical criteria—such as ease of deployment and operating efficiencies—rather than user-centric considerations.

The Right PLG Strategies Build Positive Product Experiences …

Fortunately, leading organizations are already adopting strategies to make positive experiences a core business capability. One approach is to close the PX knowledge gap by educating Sales, Marketing, and other teams on the 360º customer perspective. 43% of respondents said they were increasing their focus on improving workers’ knowledge of digital product experience. Getting people out of their siloes and helping them visualize the entire customer journey goes a long way toward turning product-led growth into a company-wide, team effort.  

Another strategy that facilitates cross-functional collaboration is putting the right people in charge of product experience. There are many ways to go when it comes to PX leadership, as some companies opt for IT, Customer Success, or some other function to head up the effort. 93% of survey respondents say product teams should have some responsibility for contributing to an organization’s revenue growth. Gainsight agrees with this approach because product teams are usually best positioned to understand how customers are actually using the product.

… and Positive Product Experience Is Built on Data.

Underpinning successful PLG efforts is the extensive use of data-driven PX solutions. Organizations are proactively using data to understand customer behavior and sentiment, giving them vital insights into how to drive product growth, increase conversion, and reduce churn. In fact, 40% of survey respondents are providing product teams with better data insights to deliver a more effective digital product experience. 

Data should be gathered throughout the product experience. That includes both analytics on usage data, as well as qualitative data from user surveys and in-product feedback. These days, there is no shortage of solutions for gathering and processing customer data, so there is no reason for product managers to be in the dark about customer behavior and sentiment.  

Given the effectiveness of data-driven strategies, we anticipate that reliance on data-centric solutions will only increase going forward. 

The Tipping Point for Positive Product Experience? Company Culture.

Our experience indicates that company culture is the single most important factor that predicts the success of product-led growth—and the HBR survey agrees. 95% of respondents strongly agree or agree that a corporate culture that recognizes the value of digital product experience is critical to business success as a whole. While data-driven solutions and other technological capabilities make a huge difference operationally, you need the right people—with the right mindset—to achieve an understanding of customer behaviors and turn that understanding into actions that actually drive revenue.

Product experience culture is built on collaboration, resilience, and agility. PLG is a high-performance environment that constantly challenges the status quo, and it is often more art than science. This innovation-driven culture can be a tough sell for larger enterprises, which is why it is so important that transformation is supported from the top. Senior leadership needs to be all in for PLG initiatives to truly infuse the entire organization. 

Product-led Growth: The Throughline From Product Experience to Revenue

No one said creating positive digital product experiences is easy. But organizations who have done their homework are in a prime position to succeed. With smart strategies in place, the right data-driven solutions, and a commitment to building a customer-centric culture, any organization can be well on their way to achieving greater product experience success. In these times of economic volatility, product-led growth is an opportunity for product managers to reset their organizations for durable growth over the long haul. 

To learn more about creating positive product experience, we invite you to read Achieving Growth With Positive Product Experiences, a Pulse Survey from Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, sponsored by Gainsight.

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How product experience drives Net Revenue Retention https://www.gainsight.com/blog/what-is-product-experience-how-does-it-drive-nrr/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/what-is-product-experience-how-does-it-drive-nrr/#respond Thu, 29 Sep 2022 13:00:28 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=44696 Three major impacts all companies should leverage. SaaS is a hefty $152 billion market, partly because tech stacks are growing. Companies use an average of 75 technologies to manage everything from business intelligence to web conferencing and gathering e-signatures. However, not all SaaS companies know how their business customers use their products, let alone how to increase engagement to make customers more successful. Aligning a product with customer expectations means digging deep into how customers use a product and then using that information to improve the customer experience. The reward is an increase in Net Revenue Retention (NRR). NRR represents the percentage of revenue a company retains from its existing customers over a certain time period. In addition to revenue, this measurement of financial success incorporates churn, expansion, and downgrades. It offers a complete understanding of growth over a specific ‌period. An NRR of over 100% indicates a company gained revenue from expansions and upsells at a greater rate than it lost from downgrades and churn. To increase NRR, companies need data on how and why customers use products. So let’s look at what product experience (PX) includes and how it connects with revenue. What Is Product Experience? PX is […]

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Three major impacts all companies should leverage.

SaaS is a hefty $152 billion market, partly because tech stacks are growing. Companies use an average of 75 technologies to manage everything from business intelligence to web conferencing and gathering e-signatures. However, not all SaaS companies know how their business customers use their products, let alone how to increase engagement to make customers more successful.

Aligning a product with customer expectations means digging deep into how customers use a product and then using that information to improve the customer experience. The reward is an increase in Net Revenue Retention (NRR). NRR represents the percentage of revenue a company retains from its existing customers over a certain time period.

In addition to revenue, this measurement of financial success incorporates churn, expansion, and downgrades. It offers a complete understanding of growth over a specific ‌period. An NRR of over 100% indicates a company gained revenue from expansions and upsells at a greater rate than it lost from downgrades and churn.

To increase NRR, companies need data on how and why customers use products. So let’s look at what product experience (PX) includes and how it connects with revenue.

What Is Product Experience?

PX is a way of looking at the customer journey through a specific product, from onboarding to retention, expansion, and advocacy. It’s a subcategory of user experience (UX) that involves monitoring customer behavior within the product, using engagement, feedback, and analytics.

The goal of PX is to get granular about where and how customers succeed (and sometimes give up on) using your product. PX professionals might bring together data from surveys, demographics, factors associated with high engagement, bottlenecks, and actions taken to understand user behavior.

Ultimately, PX creates a roadmap for product improvement. It also allows for more individualized support, providing a better experience at every step. For companies, PX benefits include increased trial conversions, faster onboarding with less time to value, increased stickiness, and higher retention rates. Companies see greater profitability and can concentrate on making new products to serve customers’ needs rather than trying to intuit why users are getting frustrated with the current ones.

3 Major Impacts of PX on Net Revenue Retention

Because NRR depends on customer success, improving how a product works is crucial to identifying where a company can engage to keep more users. Here are three core ways PX impacts NRR.

1. It helps companies target support.

Get a handle on customer experience over multiple personas to personalize guidance. By learning which customer groups are churning, companies can address friction points with contextualized support. PX can give it to them through segmented onboarding or individualized e-mail campaigns that highlight features to promote awareness.

2. It drives expansion

Besides providing valuable insight into users, PX also includes data about events. Bringing the two together can help clarify opportunities to grow usage among existing customers, lowering customer acquisition cost. One way is through personalized upselling and cross-selling recommendations based on data about actions a user takes within the product. For example, educational articles on how to use additional tools to augment users’ favorite features can show the value they’ll get by upgrading to a premium level of service.

3. It lowers churn and downgrades.

Customers leave a company after having even a single bad experience, in fact, 80% would leave after having two. Insulate users from poor experiences by proactively working to identify and eliminate friction points. Employ surveys to find out why customers churn. Pinpoint patterns to determine who is most likely to throw in the towel, then respond with product upgrades or support to ensure current users never reach their breaking point.

Increase Your NRR with Gainsight

Unless they focus on product experience, companies will have insufficient data to keep users happy. They’ll struggle to improve customers’ core frustrations. They’ll fail to differentiate user needs across a variety of personas. And, as a result, they’ll be unable to stem the tide of churn before it happens. That blinds companies to tangible growth opportunities.

Harnessing the power of data can help companies understand their users better. No one understands customer success data like Gainsight PX, which we designed to help companies get the information they need to make better decisions.To learn more about product experience and how to deploy it for improved NRR, download our e-book, What Is Product Experience?

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Product-Led Growth Index 2022 – Benchmark Tool https://www.gainsight.com/product-led-growth-index-2022-tool/ https://www.gainsight.com/product-led-growth-index-2022-tool/#respond Wed, 24 Aug 2022 10:21:34 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=44129 Wonder how your company’s Product-led Growth compares? In partnership with RevOps Squared, Gainsight has released the Product-Led Growth 2022 Index Report – see how your PLG stacks up.

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Wonder how your company’s Product-led Growth compares? In partnership with RevOps Squared, Gainsight has released the Product-Led Growth 2022 Index Report – see how your PLG stacks up.

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Instagram Proves Product Experience Is Customer Experience https://www.gainsight.com/blog/instagram-proves-product-experience-is-customer-experience/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/instagram-proves-product-experience-is-customer-experience/#respond Thu, 04 Aug 2022 13:00:12 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=43833 All innovation requires some amount of risk. Whether you’re releasing your product for the first time or adding new features to an established favorite, introducing something new leaves room for major misunderstandings. If you happened to miss last week’s news cycle, Instagram released a new user interface that included full-screen photos and videos, similar to what you might see while using TikTok. The update also heavily favored suggested posts from the Instagram algorithm rather than posts from the people that users choose to follow.  If you evaluate the product features themselves, the update wasn’t bad. In fact, it looked good. The problem was users don’t think about the value of a product strictly in terms of features. “Make Instagram Instagram again” memes flooded both Instagram and other social media platforms. Users made it clear that they use Instagram as a photo-sharing platform. Additional features that made it harder to see and share photos not only didn’t add value but they also made the experience of using Instagram worse.  To their credit, Instagram worked swiftly to address the feedback and roll back changes. Most accounts saw the older version of the Instagram interface within a few days. The internal team lost […]

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All innovation requires some amount of risk.

Whether you’re releasing your product for the first time or adding new features to an established favorite, introducing something new leaves room for major misunderstandings.

If you happened to miss last week’s news cycle, Instagram released a new user interface that included full-screen photos and videos, similar to what you might see while using TikTok. The update also heavily favored suggested posts from the Instagram algorithm rather than posts from the people that users choose to follow. 

If you evaluate the product features themselves, the update wasn’t bad. In fact, it looked good. The problem was users don’t think about the value of a product strictly in terms of features. “Make Instagram Instagram again” memes flooded both Instagram and other social media platforms. Users made it clear that they use Instagram as a photo-sharing platform. Additional features that made it harder to see and share photos not only didn’t add value but they also made the experience of using Instagram worse. 

To their credit, Instagram worked swiftly to address the feedback and roll back changes. Most accounts saw the older version of the Instagram interface within a few days. The internal team lost weeks of work, but mostly all was well, with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, saying, “I’m glad we took a risk—if we’re not failing every once in a while, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough. 

Product experience drives customer experience

Mosseri’s perspective on failure is the right one—one that will certainly lead to more success for the future of Instagram. But, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. You can make big, bold choices with your product without risking the trust and loyalty of your user base. The trick is to create a customer experience that matches the product experience in terms of value and relevancy.

Remember that your product experience is the journey your customer goes through within your product. The customer experience includes the product experience, plus any engagements they have with your company, including conversations with team members, advocates, detractors, owned or earned media, and more. The customer experience includes interactions pre-purchase and post-purchase. 

 Here’s how you can create a data-driven product experience that improves the customer experience:

1. Build a data-driven roadmap based on customers’ behavior

Determining your product roadmap requires balancing the needs of several, often conflicting, stakeholders. In the case of Instagram, we can assume the overwhelming popularity of TikTok influenced their roadmap decisions. It appears that the internal team lost focus on what their unique value proposition was. They tried to keep pace with the competition and forgot that they provided an entirely different value for users that didn’t include these new upgrades. 

While it’s important to listen to the perspectives of your stakeholders and understand new trends in your industry, you should never prioritize outside forces over the information your customers are providing. The features they use daily, the feedback they provide in surveys and directly to your Customer Success team, and the features they abandon should all be the highest priority for your team during roadmapping sessions.

2. Identify potential user frictions and strategies to overcome them

Any changes made to your product will elicit feedback. It’s impossible to make everyone happy. However, you can improve your product launches by focusing on an exceptional customer experience. 

Use data from previous product launches to identify potential obstacles such as: 

  • Which step in onboarding may cause customers to abandon the process
  • Which customers prefer self-service training to personalized training
  • How to communicate the unique value for each customer segment

Developing engagement strategies that address each potential obstacle ensures that your customers understand why your team prioritized this release and how it will help them reach their specific goals. Remember, the quality of your product depends on the customer’s experience of your product. If your customers are confused by your product, it won’t matter how powerful it is. They won’t be logged on to see it.

3. Identify the right bold choices

The competition is too strong for companies to ignore all bold choices. Just as the wrong features can lead to churn, a stagnant product that doesn’t evolve with the needs of its customers can also lead to a dwindling customer base. But with the right data and an open feedback loop between your product team and your customers, the right risks will reveal themselves. 

Identify the right innovations for your team and test them on a pilot group. Keep an open feedback loop with your customers so you always know exactly what makes people click and the reasons they keep logging on to your product.

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The Essential Guide to Product Experience https://www.gainsight.com/blog/the-essential-guide-to-product-experience/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/the-essential-guide-to-product-experience/#respond Fri, 15 Jul 2022 05:33:56 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=43126 Introduction: Look around you. How many people are on their computer? Their cell phone? We’re surrounded by digital experiences, both at work and at home. Whether you’re a SaaS or cloud business, or if a digital experience is just one facet of your offerings, it’s imperative that you deliver an amazing product experience. As a product leader, the weight of this responsibility falls on your shoulders and if you want to create competitive products, you need to develop a customer-centric mindset. Understanding product experiences inside and out will benefit your customers and your career. We’re no longer transitioning to a new era of business, we’re deep in it, and if you want to keep up, you need to be in tune with your customers and deliver continuous intrinsic value. Otherwise, you’ll be obsolete before you can say, “Blockbuster.” In this ebook you will learn the value of a great product experience, the components necessary to deliver it, and best practices to align your company around the customer. Travis Kaufman says: “The world is changing and we’re all feeling the pressure. Product experience isn’t a radical new idea, but it hones in on the most important element: the user. Building a […]

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Introduction:

Look around you. How many people are on their computer? Their cell phone? We’re surrounded by digital experiences, both at work and at home. Whether you’re a SaaS or cloud business, or if a digital experience is just one facet of your offerings, it’s imperative that you deliver an amazing product experience. As a product leader, the weight of this responsibility falls on your shoulders and if you want to create competitive products, you need to develop a customer-centric mindset. Understanding product experiences inside and out will benefit your customers and your career. We’re no longer transitioning to a new era of business, we’re deep in it, and if you want to keep up, you need to be in tune with your customers and deliver continuous intrinsic value. Otherwise, you’ll be obsolete before you can say, “Blockbuster.” In this ebook you will learn the value of a great product experience, the components necessary to deliver it, and best practices to align your company around the customer.

Travis Kaufman says: “The world is changing and we’re all feeling the pressure. Product experience isn’t a radical new idea, but it hones in on the most important element: the user. Building a product is hard enough. Getting people to come back is the ultimate challenge. Know what your customers truly love and you’ll have loyal customers for life.”

1. The Product Experience Imperative

The customer hasn’t always been the driving force behind company decisions. Before digital transformation began and the Age of the Customer emerged, it was a volume game. Companies operated with a product-centric mindset. “How much can we sell and how quickly can we sell it?” was the question fueling businesses of all shapes and sizes. Consumers had fewer choices, so businesses had the power. With the shift to a digital model, now the customer gets all the power. It’s easier than ever to create digital experiences. Apple’s App Store has over 2 million available apps—and they’re the second-largest app store. (Mind you, we didn’t say good digital experiences). If you offer a digital product, you have way more competitors than before and that means that a customer has the power to grow with you and shrink with you. The power to stay with you or leave. The power to tell their friends about you or not. You need them more than they need you.

New market = New Product Expectations

Once upon a time, the goal for businesses was simply to sell as much product as possible. Now, it’s become much more complicated. We’ve identified three significant changes in market dynamics that have contributed to the evolution of our product expectations.

Subscription Models Subscription models have changed the metrics we use to determine success. It’s not just about revenue anymore, now we measure customer acquisition, adoption, retention, expansion, and advocacy. Product teams are responsible for playing their part in attributing to these metrics.

Fierce Competition Competition is getting greater and more specialized. There’s a lower barrier to entry, but our B2C experiences have given consumers of today high expectations from the products they use. Fierce competition in the cloud demands that products deliver value with superior experiences.

Access to Data Gut-feel decisions don’t carry as much weight anymore in our connected SaaS world. We had way less customer data to go on before. You were blind because you had no other choice—your product was sold through partners or installed on customer servers. Today’s market requires you to pressure-test ideas before you make big bets. If you’re not making decisions driven by deep insights, you’re falling behind.

Product teams need to adapt… or face the consequences

These new product expectations have fundamentally changed the product role. The power shift to consumers has put the onus of delivering value on the vendor. Before, if you bought a piece of hardware, a car, or a movie, it was up to you whether you used the hardware, drove the car, or watched the movie. Now it’s up to your entire company to lead users and customers to value.

In order to stay competitive, product teams face ever-increasing pressure to deliver winning products and exceptional experiences. When you’re offering a digital experience, so much of the interaction between your customers and your company is happening within the product. As a product leader, you’re expected to drive product usage and feature adoption, but lack control over the channels through which users can be engaged. Meanwhile, executives expect to see the correlation between product investments and business results, but the data is spread across the company. In order to deliver exceptional experiences, product teams must master these three skills:

Make data-driven product decisions by leveraging analytics to make informed, compelling roadmap decisions.

Accelerate onboarding and adoption with the use of in-product engagements that guide each user to have the optimal experience.

Demonstrate the impact of product investments by correlating new feature adoption with retention, trial conversion, and expansion.

A study by Pragmatic Institute found that 52% of users said a bad product experience made them less likely to engage with a company. These bad product experiences have a bigger impact in the Age of the Customer because once a user is unhappy, they will find another solution out there to replace yours—no matter how irreplaceable you think your product is.

“Over the next three to five years, we see the product-management role continuing to evolve toward a deeper focus on data (without losing empathy for users) and a greater influence on non-product decisions” McKinsey & Company

There is no better way to establish trust with your prospective buyer than to let them see your product up close and personal.

2. What is Product Experience

Your product is the vehicle to deliver intrinsic value to customers and increase customer lifetime value (CLTV). Product experience is the perception of a company’s product based on all touchpoints, interactions, and engagements. PX drives differentiation and accelerates growth.

Product Experience as a growth driver

According to a 2018 study by TrustRadius, directly experiencing your product increases a buyer’s trust. When it comes to information sources buyers trust most, having prior firsthand experience in the product ranks number one, followed closely by the opportunity to engage in a free trial/account. There is no better way to establish trust with your prospective buyer than to let them see your product up close and personal. A product-led growth go-to-market strategy is key to unlocking a flywheel of growth across new customers, repeat customers and referrals.

Consistently providing value through your product will open doors for current customers to expand to upgraded features or offerings. A product experience strategy that emphasizes customer needs will create vast opportunities to scale.

Which information sources do buyers most trust?

It might be your first instinct to place ownership of product experience on product teams—after all, it’s in the name. But it’s not that simple.

3. Who owns product experience?

There’s no denying that core product functionality, UX, and design are created and owned by product, engineering, and design teams. But mastering product experience requires you to go beyond functionality and include all types of interactions that happen within your product. To do this effectively, you need a clearly defined ownership and alignment across departments.

PX requires company-wide effort

It might be your first instinct to place ownership of product experience on product teams—after all, it’s in the name. But it’s not that simple. Product experience requires efforts from both product teams and customer-facing teams, which makes sense when you think of how they’re bound by similar goals: incentivize customers to use their new features so they continue to return and get value.

Driving product engagement and adoption shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of one team. Product and customer success (CS) teams each play a vital part.

Your products are in a constant state of change and your support, onboarding, and customer success teams are expected to keep up. You might be shipping and refining new product updates monthly, weekly, or even daily, depending on your product roadmap. If your customer-facing teams aren’t equipped to handle the training and education these new developments require, your users will struggle to realize their full value.

You release a new feature. Product attempts to increase awareness of this capability through feature notes. This has a broad reach but doesn’t target specific users that might find immediate value from this new development. Instead, it goes to people that don’t find it relevant and the announcement falls on deaf ears.

CS teams have a deeper level of insight, on a granular level. They work directly with customers every day and know which ones will directly benefit from your new development. However, it can be harder to get the word out because they need to wait for the next 1:1 conversation with each relevant customer.

Breaking down silos and emphasizing company-wide alignment can help fill each department’s gaps. Working together doesn’t just add internal efficiency, it also creates a smoother product experience for customers. But in order to succeed with this many involved parties, you need to clearly define ownership and accountability.

Defining Product Experience responsibilities 

Marketing, customer success, support, product—each team plays a critical role. However, each department has a different motivation stemming from its own functional responsibilities and resources. While we do adhere to the belief that delivering exceptional experiences is a company-wide initiative, who takes the lead when it comes to product experience?

Saying that product experience is a team effort is one thing, executing on that claim is another. Scalable, effective product experience execution requires alignment across roles with metrics that hold each stakeholder accountable.

The responsibilities and metrics in a holistic PX strategy might look like this:

Product
Manages a product development strategy and vision and creates enticing GTM strategies to drive feature adoption. Success is measured in MAU, DAU, or CLV.

Customer Success
Onboards, trains, upsells, and renews customers while developing workflows that constantly re-engage existing customers. Success is measured in renewal rate, NPS, CLV, or retention rate.

Sales
Conducts demos and qualification calls that help and guide users to move down the funnel. Success is measured in CLV or conversion rates (MQL to SQL, SQL to closed won, etc.).

Marketing
Generates content, campaigns, and ads that drive awareness of product value and supports newsworthy feature releases. Success is measured in CAC, CLV, and trial signups.

Understanding product experiences inside and out will benefit your customers and your career.

4. Creating exceptional product experiences

To facilitate product-led growth and deliver consistent value to your users and company alike, you need analytics, engagement, and feedback. These three components are essential to a complete PX strategy. Here’s how they can be used to optimize your product experience.

Analytics

Without data, you’re at the mercy of your loudest stakeholders and this could mean risking a lot of precious time and resources. With the right data, you’ll be able to confidently deliver a better product experience that’s backed by your insights. Use the following types of analyses you to gain deeper user insights.

Retention Analysis

– Show you how well your product retains its users and establish a baseline to measure overtime

– Uncover the window of time you have to guide users to value

– Validate hypotheses on product features that drive retention and growth

Path Analysis

– Visualize user activity and surface unexpected user flows

– Track user activity to learn how users arrived at new features

– Shed light on the adoption path for new users

Funnel Analysis

– Identify where users fall off from completing critical tasks in your product

Adoption Analysis

– Understand feature adoption and revenue attribution of features

– Identify upsell opportunities based on adoption depth and breath

Engagements

Not every user that visits your product will stay for the long run. This requires reactivation and engagement efforts. Reaching out at the following key touchpoints with the right types of engagements can increase adoption and reduce churn.

User Onboarding
Use in-app guides, messages, and hotspots to lead user through workflows.
Segment your onboarding engagements to provide a personalized experience.

New Feature Activation
Raise awareness of new features/ developments with in-app notifications.
Increase stickiness with guides that show how users can futher develop their skills.

Access to Data
Bring inactive users back to your product with usage-driven email engagements.
Going beyond in-app engagements increase chance of users reengaging.

“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static they go up. It’s human nature.” – Jeff Bezos

Feedback

Targeted Surveys

– Segment your surveys so you can learn what matters most to different types of users

– Triggering based on context (i.e. when they’ve finished using a new feature) can increase response rate

– Use CES and ratings on core features to better plan your roadmap

– Use NPS to gather overall sentiment and user health

Leverage Your Customer-Facing Teams

– Because CS team converse regularly with customers they’re a great source of anecdotal data

– Customer Success platforms have hard data on facets of the customer you might not have access to (i.e. account health scores, renewal dates, overall NPS, etc.)

One of the biggest challenges product leaders face is showing the direct impact of their product on company success.

5. Scaling with Technology

To create exceptional product experiences, you need technology that will empower your team and grow with your company. On a most basic level, you need to capture usage analytics, have engagements inside and out of your product to impact usage, and consistently ask for feedback to iterate your product. The right tool for you should fulfill each of these areas. It also needs to:

Scale with your product

As you roll out new developments and add more features, you’ll need to be able to slice and dice your product with more granularity. Product mapping is a key component to delivering successful product experiences but can be overlooked if you’re in the early stages. A well organized feature hierarchy will give you deeper insights and save a lot of time that could be spent in the backend of your product experience solution.

Promote Product-Led Growth

Your product can drive growth at both ends of the funnel—or helix, as we like to call it. Your chosen technology should help you sell more to your existing customers, develop users into advocates, and drive new growth. According to Marketing Metrics, you’re 80% more likely to sell to an existing customer than a prospective customer. Your chosen solution should not just capture data, but use it in ways to drive upsell, advocacy, or net new customers. For example, Gainsight PX, our product experience platform, impacts growth by measuring product usage that you can then use to target customers with relevant upsell or cross-sell offers directly within your product.

Align your company around the customer

When it comes to the direction of your product, everyone has an opinion. Having the right data to justify your developments helps prioritize developments and get buy-in from stakeholders. One of the biggest challenges product leaders face is showing the direct impact of their product on company success. Robust analytics make it easier to demonstrate the impact of product investments across the board.

Focusing on customer needs is not just a trend, it’s a business imperative.

6. Time to take action

The scary truth? Users are in your product right now, basing their perceptions of your company on their experience. Whether you’re investing in it or not, you’re providing a product experience. It just takes one bad experience to set a user down a path of unhappiness and frustration. The good news is that you can get ahead of it with the processes in this guide and powerful tools like Gainsight PX. Focusing on customer needs is not just a trend, it’s a business imperative. It’s a mindset that makes products, companies, and yourself more competitive and successful.

Think of it this way, you are a user of tons of products at work and at home. You know which ones have experiences that make you want to use the product, and the ones that never fail to frustrate you. Those products might even use some of the processes mentioned in this guide. But the thing that separates the good products from the bad is taking action with analytics, engagements, and feedback.

Start investing in your product experience today. Gainsight PX is a complete platform that doesn’t just collect usage and behavioral data but helps you act on it, so you can build products your customers love.

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How to Have a Successful New Product Adoption for Customers https://www.gainsight.com/blog/successful-new-product-adoption-for-customers/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/successful-new-product-adoption-for-customers/#respond Tue, 28 Jun 2022 20:27:13 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=42956 Whether they eat it in an expensive restaurant, at a lunchtime food court, or in a grocery store parking lot, people love sushi. This Japanese specialty has become standard fare in the United States and many other countries around the globe—but it wasn’t always so. What started off in the 1960s as an exotic novelty in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood turned into a trendy Hollywood phenomenon in the 1970s and then a nationwide craze in the 1980s and 1990s. And along the way, an amazing product portfolio that featured classics like tekka maki and unagi expanded to make room for decidedly nontraditional items like the California Roll and the Philadelphia Roll. This evolution from new kid on the block to mainstream staple is a product adoption journey that any Product team would be thrilled to replicate. So what lessons can product experience enthusiasts learn from the lesson of sushi? Break out the wasabi and soy sauce as we dig in. What is product adoption? Product adoption is the process by which customers discover, purchase, and become users of a new product or service. While many SaaS companies focus on acquiring new customers, profitability in a recurring revenue model is […]

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Whether they eat it in an expensive restaurant, at a lunchtime food court, or in a grocery store parking lot, people love sushi.

This Japanese specialty has become standard fare in the United States and many other countries around the globe—but it wasn’t always so. What started off in the 1960s as an exotic novelty in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo neighborhood turned into a trendy Hollywood phenomenon in the 1970s and then a nationwide craze in the 1980s and 1990s. And along the way, an amazing product portfolio that featured classics like tekka maki and unagi expanded to make room for decidedly nontraditional items like the California Roll and the Philadelphia Roll.

This evolution from new kid on the block to mainstream staple is a product adoption journey that any Product team would be thrilled to replicate. So what lessons can product experience enthusiasts learn from the lesson of sushi? Break out the wasabi and soy sauce as we dig in.

What is product adoption?

Product adoption is the process by which customers discover, purchase, and become users of a new product or service. While many SaaS companies focus on acquiring new customers, profitability in a recurring revenue model is actually driven by customer retention and expansion. Customers who fully adopt a product are much more likely to renew and provide a long-term source of revenue. 

The five stages of product adoption

New product adoption can be divided into five stages. These stages can be thought of as the customer verifying the value proposition of the product. 

Awareness. Potential customers become aware that your product exists. At this stage, they will get a basic sense of the value prop: how the product solves an existing problem, or possibly a problem they didn’t know existed. This stage typically happens through marketing efforts such as advertising or content marketing, but could just as easily happen through word of mouth. 

Interest. Once a product has piqued a customer’s interest, they will be open to receiving more information about it. This is a chance for you to fill in some of the gaps about your product and expand on the benefits in a broad way. 

Evaluation. The customer is now considering the product. At this stage, customers will be engaged in serious research. This includes checking out content on your website, but it also involves reading reviews from other users and professional third-party evaluators.  

Trial/sampling. Customers are ready to try the product via a freemium or free trial model. At this point, Sales may enter the picture, but in-product messaging and other product-based tactics can also help bring the customer along to seeing the value of the product. This stage is a transition from a rational state of mind (evaluation) to an emotional state, where they decide how they feel about the product.

Activation/adoption.  This stage can be defined several different ways. Activation generally means the point of sale, but it could also include the onboarding process, because if a customer purchases but never uses the product, churn becomes almost inevitable. The transition from activation/purchase to regular use, or adoption, will determine the long-term success of the product. 

Measuring product adoption

How will you know if product adoption is happening? Here are some metrics that provide visibility into whether the customer is finding value in your product. 

Adoption rate. The number of active users divided by the total number of subscribers. It can be measured either at the feature or the product level. If the percentage is rising, this could mean waning interest and a pool of users likely to churn.

Time to first action (or key action). The amount of time it takes for a customer to utilize a key feature or function of your product.

Product activation rate. The number of users that completed a core activation action compared to the total pool of available subscribed users—this measures the “aha!” moment.

Product Qualified Leads (PQLs): Measures the number of customers who have activated and are ready to adopt, but need a push. 

Feature adoption rate. The number of features a customer has adopted, compared to the total number of features. The more features adopted, the more likely the customer will renew. 

NPS score. Customers’ overall satisfaction, represented by their willingness to advocate for the product. Good scores represent users who have completed the new product adoption curve.

How to move a product from novel to normal

When a new product enters the consciousness of a potential customer, it is completely unknown. While this can seem like a daunting challenge to overcome, it is actually a huge opportunity for you to define your brand and your value proposition in the minds of customers. 

Differentiate vs competitors. In today’s competitive landscape, there are almost certainly other products doing something similar to yours. While you shouldn’t be too aggressive, there is nothing wrong with pointing out flaws and gaps that only your product can fill. Customers need this information in order to evaluate their options.

Tell your value story. Your product is great—so talk about it! Or better yet, show how the product works with demos, and then back up the results with hard data. Even better, let your biggest fans do the talking, with testimonials, customer stories, and case studies. Customers are looking to understand the outcomes they will achieve from using your product. 

Decrease friction. Dive into your user data to identify friction points and then work to smooth them out. This could be through improved product design, or it could just be a matter of in-product messaging to help customers get over a hump. 

Create trials. Nothing markets a product like actually using the product. An easy, low-stakes trial is the quickest way for customers to understand how the product works and what they can achieve with it. Once they start using it, the product is no longer something mysterious and new—it is now a tangible, familiar thing.

Product education. This includes software documentation and user manuals, but those tactics are just the tip of the iceberg. Look to develop user-centric, interactive tools that teach your customers how to extract value from your product. These could include in-product messaging, product walkthroughs, community forums, and contextual content.

How Gainsight Helps

Gainsight PX offers tools to help you at every stage of the new product adoption process. Our product adoption software helps you surface adoption trends with detailed usage analytics and proactively guide your customers to realize more value from your product at scale. Schedule a demo today

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What Is Product Education? https://www.gainsight.com/blog/what-is-product-education/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/what-is-product-education/#respond Tue, 28 Jun 2022 17:55:54 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=42948 Here’s a statement that may make you spit out your coffee: TikTok is the future of product education. Not because TikTok videos are particularly educational, mind you. But they do combine user-centric content in digestible chunks with an emotional payoff. And that formula has proven irresistibly engaging—in fact, the average session on TikTok is 11 minutes, nearly twice as long as the second most engaging social media app.  What does that have to do with product education? Well, it just so happens that relevant, easily consumable, emotionally satisfying content is the most effective way to educate a product user. Users want to receive only the content they need, only when they need it. And the more quality education they receive, the more motivated they will be to learn more. Product teams, I hope you’re taking notes! Product Education 101 Before we go too deep into today’s lesson, we should define our terms. Many people might consider “product education” to be the user guide or documentation that accompanies a software product. But these “instruction manual” tactics are only a very small part of educating the user. True product education is the practice of ensuring that your users understand how your product […]

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Here’s a statement that may make you spit out your coffee: TikTok is the future of product education.

Not because TikTok videos are particularly educational, mind you. But they do combine user-centric content in digestible chunks with an emotional payoff. And that formula has proven irresistibly engaging—in fact, the average session on TikTok is 11 minutes, nearly twice as long as the second most engaging social media app. 

What does that have to do with product education? Well, it just so happens that relevant, easily consumable, emotionally satisfying content is the most effective way to educate a product user. Users want to receive only the content they need, only when they need it. And the more quality education they receive, the more motivated they will be to learn more. Product teams, I hope you’re taking notes!

Product Education 101

Before we go too deep into today’s lesson, we should define our terms. Many people might consider “product education” to be the user guide or documentation that accompanies a software product. But these “instruction manual” tactics are only a very small part of educating the user.

True product education is the practice of ensuring that your users understand how your product can help them achieve their goals and become wildly successful. It’s not about understanding the ins and outs of every functionality; it’s about what the key benefits are for the user. 

But the problem with the instruction manual approach isn’t just what you are teaching, it is how you are teaching. Giving a customer a thick user guide to read is too passive. It doesn’t meet users where they are when they need it. And it also doesn’t motivate. When product education helps users achieve value while using the product, it generates tremendous confidence and a desire to accomplish even more.  

Effective product education helps your users learn by doing so that they gain a full grasp of how your product benefits them and how to maximize those benefits through further engagement. 

Meeting Product Users Where They Are

To be impactful, product education needs to happen at points within the customer journey where it will actually make a difference. Once you understand where the user is, educational messages should be targeted and tailored to that stage of the journey. 

Customer Journey

Awareness – Product education actually begins long before the user even starts using the product. At this stage, usually part of a marketing effort, you want to educate the potential user on the value proposition and set expectations for the user experience.

Point of Sale – Free trial or freemium users are interested in sampling the product before they are willing to become paid customers. The key here is to educate on a few limited features to show how useful the product can be, while also informing about more advanced features they don’t have access to yet.

Onboarding – The crucial time when a new customer is ready to adopt the product. Onboarding education should focus only on core features so that users are not overwhelmed. These features should show early value and generate quick wins for the user so they begin to feel comfortable using the product on a regular basis. 

Post-adoption – After the user has begun regularly using the product, you have the opportunity to help them go deeper and explore more advanced features and functions. As the user masters more features over time, their perception of value will grow and you will reduce user churn.

Upsell and/or expansion – Based on user feedback and analytics, you will want to identify when users are bumping up against the limits of their current subscription. This could be anything from the number of licenses to the need for entirely new features or even a new product; once you have identified these opportunities, you should educate the user on available options for expansion. 

 

Finding the Right Tools for the Job

Users are more likely to engage with product education tools when they are interactive and intuitive. And different user segments will respond to different tactics. In other words, there is no silver bullet, so it makes sense to deploy multiple tools.

UI design. Gamification, progressive disclosure, empty states, tooltip tours, audio guidance, and first-use/one-time tutorials—if you aren’t familiar with these terms, you (and your product design team) should start learning how these powerful techniques can boost educational engagement. 

Contextual educational content. The content could be anything—demos, webinars, docs, videos, gifs—but the key to success is timing and placement. The trick is finding the right way to deliver it. You don’t want to be intrusive and spammy, but you also don’t want to fall through the cracks. 

In-product messaging. Delivering the right message at the right time will encourage specific actions and help overcome friction at any point along the customer journey. Is a freemium user trying to access a paid feature? Is a user stuck on an onboarding step? A short and simple message while they are using the product can be a gamechanger.

Product walkthrough videos: While somewhat passive, a video or video series that explains your product can be useful for users who are big consumers of video. Gen Z users especially have been raised on YouTube. 

Interactive product tours. Especially great for onboarding, this tactic is an interactive tutorial that teaches users how to use the product by making them complete assisted tasks. Just make sure that the tour is 100% focused on the user’s perspective and that you keep it short—if it is too long or complicated, users will give up. 

Community boards. Peer- to-peer forums are places where users can come together to ask questions and get feedback on your product. Not only does this help with product education, but it is a valuable source of information for your Product team. 

Who Should Be the Product Educators?

The success of your product is the responsibility of the entire company, and product education is no different. Ideally, all of your teams will be aligned around delivering value to users; however, depending on the stage of the customer journey, different teams might take the lead in driving product education. 

Marketing is generally more involved at the Awareness stage by developing content, campaigns, and ads that educate prospects on the product’s value prop. Success is measured in CAC, CLV, and trial signups.

Sales traditionally owns the Point of Sale, but crucially, in a recurring revenue model they must set users up for success post-sale as retention is the true revenue driver. As such, sales efforts can be measured as customer lifetime value (CLV), in addition to conversion rates.

Customer Success typically takes the lead during Onboarding to ensure that new users don’t fall victim to product churn. They also play an important role Post-Adoption and with Upsell/Expansion as they analyze product data to map the customer journey and develop engagement tactics. Renewal rate, NPS, and CLV are all important metrics.

Product teams should be involved at every stage of the customer journey as they develop and implement a strategic GTM vision that drives users along the adoption arc.

Product Education as a Strategy

Product education is more than just a single initiative or campaign, it is an entire strategy that requires your organization to shift its focus. Working together across the different stages of the customer journey will move the user along from awareness all the way to retention and expansion. Even though the individual segments of the strategy will be distinct, they should be working together cohesively.

The product education strategy starts with activation metrics. Activation refers to the point at which a user finds value within a particular stage of the customer journey. The metric measures a behavior that demonstrates to you that a user has hit an activation point. 

The activation metric will differ based on the product. For example, a social media app may measure activation by the number of accounts followed or by the number of posts made. It all depends on what user behaviors are correlated with retention, based on product data. 

While it might seem strange to boil down activation to a single point, it is actually strategically useful to keep it simple. You want a single goal that your whole team can rally around. This less-is-more approach also helps you focus your efforts and also discourages you from confusing your user with education about less important behaviors. 

There is also a timing element to activation metrics: success depends on the activation point that is important right now in a user’s journey. An onboarding activation point won’t be important if the user is still using freemium. And an expansion activation point is irrelevant if the user hasn’t completed onboarding. It seems like common sense, but it is easy to fall into the trap of an educational information dump.

The more the various activation metrics are in sync with one another, the more effective the larger strategy will be. The customer experience should be cohesive and intuitive as the user moves from awareness to interest to onboarding. You don’t want the user to be receiving messages that are inconsistent. 

For example, if Sales describes the product at the Point of Sale in a way that is different from the way Customer Success explains it during Onboarding, there will be a disconnect. A user will likely be confused and may even feel misled by the sales process. Either way, the likelihood of user churn will go up. 

On the other hand, if all teams are communicating and aligned, they should be able to build synergies that help each team reach their activation points. And the results will speak for themselves. If Sales sets up customers for success during onboarding, retention and CLV will go up, which is a win for everyone. 

Product education messaging should be closely tied to activation metrics in terms of both targeting and timing. For example, if you tease a feature during the freemium stage, make sure to pay it off after the customer has gone paid. Don’t underestimate the potential for emotionally satisfying messaging to build confidence and goodwill. 

A big part of messaging is understanding the perspective of the user. Instead of just explaining what a feature does, show the user how they would actually use the feature and how it helps them achieve value. Don’t leave it up to the user to figure it out for themselves.  

By the same token, remember users have limited attention spans. Don’t waste their time with messages on features they are not ready to use yet.

Metrics for Success in Product Education

Effective product education should reap rewards in terms of business success metrics. While it won’t always be easy to correlate these metrics to product education alone, they are good to keep an eye on.

User satisfaction. Achieving their goals with a product can be incredibly satisfying to users, who will gain confidence and start to see the product as an essential part of their lives. 

User engagement. The more value a user gets out of a product, the more they will come to rely on it and make it a routine part of their activity. Eventually, this deeper engagement will lead to retention, expansion, and/or recommendation to friends and colleagues.

Feature usage. A sign of effective product education is that users are engaged with an ever-growing number of features, starting with the core and then expanding outward. 

Lower churn. Churn happens when customers perceive less value than they anticipated when they purchased the product. If you set expectations appropriately early in the customer journey and then make sure customers can find and use features they want, they will be less likely to be disappointed in the product.

Retention. Well-educated customers will be able to satisfy their needs and find value with a product, making them less susceptible to alternatives. 

CLV. Product education should elongate the lifetime of a customer, which will offset customer acquisition cost (CAC) and put customer values in the black, leading to rapid profit growth. 

How Gainsight Can Help With Produce Education

The Gainsight PX platform makes it simple for companies to build a product education strategy. Identify activation metrics based on real product data, develop effective engagement tactics, and create actionable reports that drive collaboration throughout the organization. 

Schedule a demo today. 

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Which Product Experience Metrics Should You Measure? https://www.gainsight.com/blog/product-experience-metrics-to-measure/ https://www.gainsight.com/blog/product-experience-metrics-to-measure/#respond Wed, 08 Jun 2022 22:16:28 +0000 https://www.gainsight.com/?p=42377 Every town or neighborhood has a number one restaurant. Picture a line down the block, ridiculously long wait times to get a table and flustered wait staff who just want to get you in and out as quickly as possible. Doesn’t sound like the best customer experience, does it? But it doesn’t matter, because the food is that good—and you keep coming back for it, no matter what.  That’s the power of a fantastic product experience. Whether it’s food at a restaurant, or a software platform for an SaaS company, delivering an incredible product is the most important part of the customer experience. Not that we’re advocating for a poor customer experience in the other aspects of your business! We are just saying that how you execute the product experience (PX) is going to have the biggest impact on the overall customer experience (CX) for your company.  Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Of all the ways that customers get an impression of your company, product is the only facet they interact with repeatedly, over a long period of time. Sales, marketing, and customer support are all important touchpoints, but they are fleeting. Think about the restaurant […]

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Every town or neighborhood has a number one restaurant.

Picture a line down the block, ridiculously long wait times to get a table and flustered wait staff who just want to get you in and out as quickly as possible. Doesn’t sound like the best customer experience, does it? But it doesn’t matter, because the food is that good—and you keep coming back for it, no matter what. 

That’s the power of a fantastic product experience. Whether it’s food at a restaurant, or a software platform for an SaaS company, delivering an incredible product is the most important part of the customer experience. Not that we’re advocating for a poor customer experience in the other aspects of your business! We are just saying that how you execute the product experience (PX) is going to have the biggest impact on the overall customer experience (CX) for your company. 

Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Of all the ways that customers get an impression of your company, product is the only facet they interact with repeatedly, over a long period of time. Sales, marketing, and customer support are all important touchpoints, but they are fleeting. Think about the restaurant example; if customers love your product, then these other functions almost become a nice to have, rather than deal-making or -breaking.

And not only does a great product experience lead to a better overall customer experience, but it also has a bunch of other benefits. Obviously, it increases the probability of renewals and sustained recurring revenue. But it also makes them more receptive to new features, products, and services—upsells and expansions. If you have delivered value once, your customers will trust you to do it again.

The Difference Between PX and CX Metrics

A good PX strategy includes proactively announcing new features and upgrades, communicating about bugs, fixes, and maintenance, and gathering feedback through surveys, calls, chat, or emails. But perhaps the most important part of PX is gathering usage data from your customers. This customer data will help you understand how they are using the product, perform user mapping, and identify user segments. 

To effectively use this customer data, you have to be able to translate it into meaningful metrics. PX metrics focus on the interaction between the customer and the product. This is somewhat different from more general CX metrics, which capture the relationship between the customer and the company as a whole. PX metrics can be seen as a subset of CX metrics. When trying to distinguish between PX and CX metrics, ask yourself, “Is there anything I can change about the product to improve this metric?” A “yes” would indicate you are dealing with a PX metric. 

What Are Some Key PX Metrics to Measure?

PX data includes usage analytics and product feedback. Tracking the following metrics will help you improve your product experience.

Customer Effort Score (CES) How much effort a customer put in to accomplish a task within your product. This is usually measured using a survey. 

Average Resolution Time How long it takes for a customer to overcome an issue that occurred while using the product. Again, this is usually measured via survey, but usage data can also indicate whether users are getting “stuck” on certain tasks. 

Churn This metric measures how many customers leave your business. It should be measured over a period of time, ie, according to how long they were a customer before they left. 

User Retention The percentage of customers who stay with your business. Usually, this is tracked per cohort, eg, how long all the customers who joined in May 2020 then stayed with the company. 

Monthly or Daily Active Users How many users are active within the product. Changes to this metric over time let you know how popular the product is with customers. 

How to Use Your Product Experience Metrics

Product experience metrics give you visibility into every step along the user journey. The data will be useful across the organization, including Product, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and others. So it is usually useful to analyze the PX metric data as a group.  

PX data should be easy to manage and accessible to laymen, ie, non-data scientists. This enables anyone to make suggestions and requests to the Product team as they test new features and collect new types of data. 

Having said that, Product needs to take the lead in managing the data, because interpreting it often requires a sophisticated knowledge of the product itself.

How Gainsight Can Help

Learn more about how Gainsight PX combines the power of rich PX metrics and contextual user engagements into a single platform. Sign up for a demo today!

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