We’re not trying to sound cliché here, but in today’s era of customer-centricity, the customer is king, queen, and everything in between. You need to put your customers on a pedestal, especially when it comes to driving forward a killer product strategy.
This is the roadmap guiding you towards your business goals, so it only makes sense that you listen and learn from the people capable of making them happen.
There are two major ingredients that you should be cooking with here: customer feedback and customer experience (CX). Getting to know your customers’ wants and needs, alongside their relationship with your product(s), gives you a goldmine of data to work with.
With these insights in hand, you can keep optimising your product strategy to enhance your CX and execute your goals.
Growing your business with a killer CX
Happy customers = a healthy business. It sounds simplistic but creating great CX is crucial for growing your brand and profit, not least because it helps you retain customers, encourage multiple purchases, and receive more positive reviews and referrals.
It’s easy to conflate CX with customer service, but there’s more to consider. The goal is to make sure that your customers get what they need from you seamlessly at every touchpoint and journey stage, whether it’s by ensuring a simple onboarding process or by resolving their complaints quickly.
Great CX also needs to be consistent. With PwC finding that 32% of customers would walk away from a brand they like after just one poor experience, you don’t have many chances to get it right. But with a customer-centric product strategy, you make sure that everyone in your team is unified on what needs to be done and why – from those designing your product features to those pitching them to customers.
Creating a product strategy as agile as the market
Your product strategy shouldn’t be a wishy-washy plan. To define a rock-solid roadmap for your overall go-to-market strategy, you need to understand:
- Your business objectives
- Your desired audience and what they look like
- The ins and outs of your product or service
- Your return on investment (ROI) and how you’ll achieve it
Your product strategy needs to make sense for your business (taking into account your industry position, competitors, and profit goals) while also making sense for your customers (considering price, usability, and relevance).
Of course, your customers’ wants, needs, and circumstances are fluid. They can change day to day, month to month, being reflective of both individual life changes and wider cultural and financial changes.
Remembering this is especially important as we enter a huge period of digital growth, such as with the impending arrival of Web3. In a world where customers are becoming more data savvy and in control of their digital experiences, remaining product-centric just isn’t an option.
That’s why creating a living product strategy that consistently learns from customers’ feedback and experience is crucial. As your customers change, so must your product strategy. You need to be selling for tomorrow, not yesterday.
Driving your product strategy with customer feedback and CX
We’ve talked a lot about why you need to use customer feedback and CX to drive your product strategy – but how do you make sure customer-centricity leads the way?
Learn from your customer feedback
Whether it’s from reviews, focus groups, or social media commentary, your customer feedback will tell you how people feel about your product or service, how it could be improved, and how it’s being used. Analyse your feedback to help you deliver better CX and update your product strategy to reflect the current wants and needs of your audience.
Learn from your sales team’s feedback
You can also learn a lot from listening to your sales team. With an on-the-ground understanding of prospective customers and the market in general, these are the people who spot the pain points and desires of your customers at the beginning of their journey. Use this data to ensure that every stage of your strategy responds to their queries, whether it’s by simplifying your app’s interface or offering new online training courses.
Learn from your customers’ experiences
Forget what you think you know about your product or service and look at what you do know. Is your eBook popular amongst an unexpected customer segment? Do reviews for your online course show that it’s missing a sought-after module? Has the recent cost-of-living crisis affected how many customers have asked for payment plans? Make sure you’re willing to adapt your product strategy at every stage, depending on what you’ve learned from your CX.
Learn from real-time data
Feedback is fantastic, but learning from real-time data lets you personalise your CX on the fly and guide prospective customers over the line. From how long it takes for website visitors to make a purchase, to what marketing messages your most loyal customers respond to, tracking your interactions across every touchpoint and journey stage gives you real clarity into your customers’ contexts, buying behaviours, and preferences.
Plus, with Web3 on its way, knowing how to collect and use customer data securely and with privacy in mind is more important than ever.
Learn from your competitors
Your customers don’t only buy from you. They’re on journeys with lots of other products and brands, and you should be paying attention. Analyse your competitors’ customer experiences, reviews, and products to see what they’re doing well and what could be improved upon, and use this data to optimise your product strategy accordingly.
Let’s wrap this up
We’ve given you a lot of information to work with here, but if you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed, we also have hands-on solutions to help you polish your product strategy (and go-to-market strategy as a whole).
Drop us a line if you want to learn more, and we'd love to roll up our sleeves to fine-tune your product strategy.