Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing how SaaS product teams work by increasing efficiency and productivity, reducing costs, and most importantly, facilitating data-driven decision-making.

In this article, we look at how you can use AI to gain in-depth customer insights and how to leverage them to improve the product. We also share a few tools that can help you harness the power of AI to offer a better customer experience.

Let’s dive right in.

TL;DR

• Customer insights AI are insights generated from user behavior data and feedback by AI and machine learning tools.
• AI technologies power automation which increases team efficiency and productivity.
• Organizations can gain a competitive advantage by leveraging AI to identify new opportunities and ensure new products meet the ever-changing customer needs.
• AI allows SaaS teams to better understand user needs and expectations to personalize their experiences across all touchpoints in the user journey, like their onboarding.
• AI platforms like Persado AI can analyze user interactions to optimize the timing, content, and targeting of marketing campaigns.
• NLP and deep learning models can analyze written text and detect user feelings, which can be used for qualitative feedback analysis and user sentiment tracking.
• AI can analyze user behavior data faster and spot patterns that humans may not, so you can get accurate customer insights in real-time.
• Many platforms use AI for automatic content localization to increase its inclusivity and reach.
• AI excels at identifying patterns so it can predict future steps. AI predictive analytics can help teams identify churn signals and engage users proactively to prevent it.
• Hotjar uses AI to analyze user feedback and extract actionable insights on how to improve user experience.
• Mixpanel’s Spark AI allows users to access data analytics insights by asking questions, which facilitates data democratization across organizations.
• Zendesk uses AI to train their chatbots and summarize user details for support agents so that they can respond to user queries quickly and accurately.
• Userpilot offers a writing assistant and localization powered by AI, and its AI analytics insights will be available soon. If you’d like to learn more about these features, book the demo!

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What are customer insights AI?

Customer insights AI refers to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to analyze customer data and extract actionable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points.

Why is AI for customer insights important?

There are plenty of benefits of using AI to gain customer insights.

Enables companies to create personalized interactions

AI-driven customer insights enable businesses to tailor their interactions with individual customers for better customer experience.

For example, you can use AI insights to tailor in-app messages and identify the best time to trigger them for maximum impact.

Allows task efficiency through AI-driven automation

AI-driven automation streamlines processes, making businesses more efficient and responsive to customer needs.

Example?

The AI chatbots I mentioned above can handle customer queries 24/7 by providing instant responses and escalating complex issues to human agents only when it’s essential. This reduces wait times and the load on support teams.

Drives competitive advantage via AI consumer insights

While more and more companies are implementing generative AI, not all of them use it competently to extract insights from their own data and user feedback. That’s your chance to gain a competitive edge and drive business success.

How exactly can you do it?

With AI’s predictive analytics, you can identify emerging trends before they become mainstream to stay ahead of the curve and ensure your new products and features meet existing and emerging user needs.

How can companies use AI-powered customer insights for product growth?

Now that we’ve covered the general benefits of using AI for customer insights, let’s look at a few specific use cases.

Understand the needs and wants of different customer segments

Thanks to AI technologies, teams better understand the needs and desires of different customer segments.

Let me explain:

You can get a basic understanding of user expectations from welcome surveys or interviews, and the feedback they give your customer-facing colleagues.

However, what your customers say doesn’t always reflect what they do. They may simply not realize their actual behavior or not be able to verbalize it.

You can solve it by supplementing their feedback with analytics.

By analyzing user interactions with your product across all touchpoints, you can find out what they really need. AI, with its capacity to quickly analyze data from diverse data sources, is the perfect tool for this.

Using this information, you can create well-researched personas that can be easily shared with other teams to ensure they’re on the right track.

Create personalized customer experiences

AI customer insights can greatly enhance your ability to personalize the customer experience to help users achieve their objectives.

For example, you can use AI insights about user goals to personalize their onboarding process and reduce time to value.

Currently, most if not all onboarding tools use ‘if’ rules, to trigger onboarding experiences. For example: ‘If a user from segment X completes event Y, trigger flow A’.

This works fairly well but is time-consuming to set up and isn’t practical below the segment level.

However, it’s easy to imagine how AI could be used to personalize the onboarding of individual users based on their past actions without the need for manual set-up.

Improve the performance of marketing strategies

Thanks to AI, generating quality marketing assets is less resource-intensive.

Many companies embed writing assistants in their tools to help their teams write copy. Creating audiovisual resources with AI also takes a fraction of the time needed in the past.

That’s just scratching the surface, though.

AI-powered tools, like the Persado Motivation AI platform used by Michaels stores, can help you analyze user interactions with your marketing messaging and personalize it for higher customer engagement and conversion rates.

Perform sentiment analysis on customer feedback

AI excels in qualitative feedback analysis.

NLP can quickly clean up the qualitative data, analyze the meaning of the text to distinguish between positive, neutral, and negative feedback, and identify patterns in customer responses.

This can save you hours, if not days, and more importantly, allows you to respond to user feedback in real-time, which is often essential when dealing with dissatisfied customers.

Analyze customer data for real-time insights

AI’s ability to process and analyze data in real-time and provide up-to-the-minute insights isn’t limited to qualitative data. You can also use it to analyze quantitative user behavior data.

How can you leverage AI-powered analytics?

By understanding how users navigate through an app, AI can identify friction points in the user journey. Thanks to that, you can streamline user flows and remove obstacles, making the app more intuitive and user-friendly.

AI can also help you identify the most and least engaging elements of an app so that you can make better-informed prioritization decisions.

Provide localized customer experiences in-app

SaaS products are not restricted by physical boundaries because everybody with an internet connection can download them, no matter where they live.

What may limit your growth is the language. Even if most of your users can speak the language in which the app was built (most likely English), their experience may be subpar and they may not be able to realize the full product potential.

Professional localization of your product for multiple markets may not be viable.

The solution?

AI-powered localization.

Such tools can automatically translate your microcopy, survey questions, and support resources without the need to hire a specialist agency.

Predict customer behavior to minimize churn

One area where AI may outperform human analysis is predictive analytics.

By leveraging machine learning models, AI can predict future user behaviors based on their past interactions with the product.

Such insights are priceless when it comes to churn prevention.

They can help you identify users who are at risk of churning and engage them to improve their chances of success, for example, by triggering in-app patterns that prompt them to use a feature or offering contextual help.

The best tools for AI-driven customer insights

There are plenty of B2B solutions leveraging AI to create better product experiences and increase customer satisfaction. Here are 4 that are particularly worth checking out.

Userpilot – recommended for product growth

Userpilot is a product growth platform that enables teams to gather and analyze customer feedback and user behavior data, and engage users at all user journey stages with interactive in-app experiences.

The platform offers an AI writing assistant that allows you to create or refine microcopy. Thanks to that, you can ensure that your copy is informative and engaging.

We also use AI to power the automatic localization features that enable you to translate content, resource center, and survey questions. This makes the product experience more inclusive for speakers of other languages and increases product engagement.

Want to know the real kicker?

AI-powered analytics are coming to Userpilot soon to enhance its already powerful analytics capabilities.

Hotjar – recommended for collecting valuable insights from surveys

Hotjar is a potent UX analytics platform best known for its heatmap and session recordings functionality, which offers granular insights into user interactions with digital products.

However, not everybody knows that Hotjar users have access to excellent feedback features, some of them AI-powered.

For starters, you can let AI generate the survey for you. Just enter your goal, like ‘find the pain points in the checkout flow’ and the tool creates the survey for you. Pretty slick.

The magic happens when you start analyzing the feedback. Instead of going through hundreds or thousands of responses manually, you can generate a report automatically.

The best part?

In addition to summarizing the key findings, the report provides actionable next-step recommendations.

Mixpanel – recommended for AI analytics

Mixpanel is one of the leading analytics platforms used by SaaS teams to analyze the performance of their websites and digital products.

Although Mixpanel is a user-friendly and intuitive tool, its advanced functionality comes with a learning curve. This can be particularly challenging for users with no experience in data analysis and can lead to the creation of data silos.

To democratize data within organizations, Mixpanel has built Spark AI.

Spark is a chat-based report-creation tool. To generate a report, you type in your question, and it produces a chart illustrating the data. You can then save the report or refine it with further prompts.

Zendesk – recommended for AI in customer service

Zendesk is a customer service platform that helps SaaS organizations to offer omnichannel support.

The software uses AI to pre-train chatbots on past conversations and the most common issues so that users get accurate help. And the bots don’t sound like bots at all because you can set the tone to match your brand’s voice.

If the bot can’t solve the issue, Zendesk’s AI sorts and prioritizes the messages for the support agents to give them a complete picture of the situation before they start the conversations.

Brilliant, but it gets even better.

The tool also recommends possible solutions and useful resources to share with customers and helps them write their responses.

Finally, Zendesk leverages AI to enhance your self-support resources. It analyzes existing content to find gaps and suggests new ideas. If you decide to cover a particular topic, all you have to do is enter a few bullet points and watch the tool turn them into a complete article.

And thanks to semantic search, which understands the meaning of customer queries, finding the information they need is easier.

Conclusion

Thanks to its ability to analyze large quantities of data and spot trends that might be difficult to notice otherwise, AI allows SaaS teams to understand their customer needs and problems in greater detail.

Such insights are invaluable for customer experience personalization, user journey optimization, and informed product development.

If you’d like to learn more about Userpilot’s new AI analytics, book the demo!

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The post How to Leverage Customer Insights AI to Grow Your SaaS Product appeared first on ProdSens.live.

What does 2024 have in stock for product managers? And what challenges will they face?

That’s what our article explores!

Let’s check out 11 predictions on product management trends in 2024.

TL;DR

• The integration of AI and ML is likely to increase but not all companies will leverage it successfully.
• More companies will use product-led tactics to lower their costs and streamline the sales cycle.
• The importance of product analytics for decision-making is likely to increase even further. This will include the use of predictive analytics to forecast user behavior trends.
• Product teams will have to use both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback to fully understand customer needs and wants.
• Due to the rise of new technologies, there will be more demand for PMs with specialist expertise.
• More organizations will try to develop the product ops function to streamline the product management process.
• To thrive in 2024, companies will have to prioritize creating excellent customer experiences.
• Ethical considerations about such aspects as AI objectivity or impact on user well-being will occupy more of PMs’ bandwidth.
• Teams will use augmented reality for user onboarding, UI & UX design, testing, and research.
• More customers will expect inclusive product design and companies will have to accommodate it to expand their customer base and reach.
• The main challenges for PMs are going to revolve around the increasingly competitive landscape, data privacy and security concerns, and financial constraints.
• To see how Userpilot can help you tackle the challenges and exploit the opportunities of 2024, book the demo!

11 product management trends and predictions for 2024

What trends should product teams look out for in 2024? Here are a few predictions from industry thought leaders.

1. Greater integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies

Artificial Intelligence has been a part of the product management landscape for at least a couple of years now. It’s not hard to predict that the integration of AI and ML into products and their application to enhance product management processes is only going to accelerate.

This, however, doesn’t mean that all companies will manage to successfully leverage these technologies to better satisfy customer needs and drive product success.

Here’s what Dr. Bart Jaworski, Senior Product Manager at The Stepstone Group, predicts is going to happen in 2024:

2024 will be a year of AI extremes. Some companies will find success with it and double, even triple down, but even more will realize that they have ridden a hype train and created expensive, but meaningless additions to their products for the sake of trying to keep up. For every AI success story, there will be 4 stories of useless features.

2. Companies will work towards becoming product-led

The concept of using the product as the primary driver of growth isn’t new.

Partho Ghosh, the VP of Product at SecurityScorecard, believes that even more companies are going to embrace the PLG mindset:

More companies will start to understand the difference between PLG as a motion and being ‘Product-Led’. More companies will start building better products to simply use human capital in more important areas in an effort to be efficient.

For example, we may expect companies selling complex products to enterprise clients, which have been traditionally sales-led, to incorporate elements of PLG into their processes to shorten the sales cycle and lower their customer acquisition costs.

According to McKinsey, more and more companies are already happy to spend $500k-5M on single purchases via self-service channels, and this trend is likely to accelerate.

It’s also easy to imagine that companies will take advantage of such PLG tactics as self-service support lessens the burden on their support teams.

3. Decision-making will be backed by valuable insights from data analysis

It’s difficult to imagine a SaaS product manager making decisions based on intuition and hunches in 2024. With modern product analytics tools, it’s super-easy to access detailed data on user interactions with the product to make informed decisions.

As these tools are getting more intuitive and user-friendly, even non-technical team members at all levels will be able to make data-driven decisions independently. This is going to accelerate data democratization processes within organizations.

4. Streamlined customer feedback systems will take precedence

Marty Cagan, a product management veteran and the Founder of Silicon Valley Product Group, however, warns against overreliance on quantitative data.

He believes teams will have to leverage both quantitative and qualitative customer data to create products that truly meet customer expectations.

Speaking of qualitative and quantitative decision-making, due to the continued extraordinary growth of the global addressable market, the quantitative side has been getting unprecedented attention with tools and resources, and that is all good.

What’s not good is that too many product teams get so focused on the data, that they stop spending time actually talking to their users and customers, which really is essential if we are to understand why the data is what it is, which is so often the key to achieving the outcomes we need.

5. A rise in product manager specialties

Aakash Gupta, a product growth expert, formerly at Apollo, Affirm, and Google, predicts that there will be less demand for general product managers. Instead, companies are going to look for product leaders with specialist expertise.

He attributes this trend to the growth of advanced technologies such as AI.

The rise of things like AI has made it more clear than ever how important it is for PMs to have functional specialization. Tuning large-scale LLM models is very different than core product for a news feed. In theory, they’re similar. But in practice, the PMs who have direct experience tend to outperform those who don’t.

Examples like these continue to proliferate throughout product management. So we’ll continue to see fewer ‘General PM’ searches at big tech and start to see a shift towards specific PM searches – AI PMs, API PMs, Consumer PMs, etc. Overall, PMs will have to grapple with specialization or see slower career growth when job hopping.

6. The product operations role will become crucial

The role of product operations is to streamline and optimize the product development process. They do it by improving cross-functional collaboration, managing data analysis and sharing, maintaining the tool stack, and creating best practices and standards for teams to follow.

Büşra Coşkuner, a product management coach, believes that the demand for product ops will be on the rise in 2024:

Product Ops is becoming a serious thing. Companies will try to implement the product ops team/role. Some will fail and rant against it, some will be successful and become advocates.

Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles have just published their new book on product ops and given the clout that the two authors have in the product community, it’s likely to popularize this function.

7. Greater emphasis on creating an exceptional user experience

To remain competitive in 2024, focusing on product functionality as the main differentiators won’t cut it. As features are very easy to copy by competitors, to gain a true edge, companies will be forced to prioritize delivering exceptional customer experience to drive growth.

That’s why we can expect SaaS businesses to invest in:

• Intuitive and user-friendly product design
• Self-service 24/7 customer support via captivating resource center resources and in-app guidance
• Personalized user onboarding
• Reliable bug-free performance
• Proactive customer success

8. Reliance on predictive analytics to forecast market trends and user behavior

Predictive analytics uses historical user behavior data to predict their future behavior. For example, behavior patterns of churned users can help you identify users at risk of churning and predict future churn. Thanks to such insights, you can act proactively to prevent it.

The process can be greatly enhanced by AI and machine learning algorithms.

Many analytics platforms are already embedding AI for this purpose, and we can expect product managers to take advantage of the new capabilities to improve their decision-making in 2024.

9. More focus on ethical considerations in product design and development

In 2024, product managers will have to navigate a landscape filled with ethical considerations. Such considerations become more significant as digital products become more closely integrated into people’s daily lives.

What kind of ethical concerns are we likely to face?

Things that come to mind include bias and fairness in AI/ML algorithms, cultural sensitivity, and the social and economic impact of the new technologies.

For example, widespread AI-driven automation can raise concerns about job displacements, while certain products, like social media, may have a detrimental impact on people’s mental well-being.

10. Increased adoption of augmented reality in product management

Augmented reality (AR) can be a game-changer in SaaS product management, offering innovative ways to enhance products, improve user experience, and streamline development and management processes.

How can product managers use this technology in 2024?

The sky’s the limit but some obvious applications include:

• User onboarding and education
• Interactive product demos
• Data visualizations
• UI & UX design
• Prototype testing
• Customer and market research

11. More inclusivity to enhance customer engagement

Inclusive product design will be vital for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones in 2024.

Why so?

First, it has to do with the highly competitive landscape.

As the competition is increasing, companies are forced to seek ways to attract underserved target audiences. This could be by making their products more accessible for users with special needs. Inclusivity, in the form of localization, will also be essential to enter new markets.

Second, there’s simply an expectation for products to be inclusive and accessible to users from a variety of backgrounds and with diverse needs. Hopefully, this becomes the norm.

Challenges for product managers in 2024

What challenges should you expect as a PM in 2024? Here are a few we consider particularly relevant.

Navigating a fiercely competitive landscape

We already mentioned increasing competition above. That’s likely to affect how product managers work and the decisions they make in 2024.

In particular, PMs will face the challenge of differentiation of their products in an increasingly crowded and competitive market.

To succeed in such an environment, PMs will have to be adept at identifying unique value propositions, staying ahead of market trends, and swiftly adapting to changing consumer demands.

Data privacy and security concerns

As data becomes a crucial component of product development and customer experience, PMs in 2024 will need to navigate the complex landscape of data privacy and security.

This includes understanding and complying with evolving data protection regulations, ensuring ethical data usage, and implementing robust security measures to safeguard user data.

Financial constraints and resource allocation

In 2024, product managers are expected to grapple with heightened financial constraints, partly fueled by fears of a looming recession. That’s because such a challenging economic climate makes securing venture capital funding for SaaS companies more difficult.

Consequently, PMs will need to navigate these financial limitations by making more strategic and judicious decisions in resource allocation to drive innovation and growth while not neglecting the needs of the existing users.

How can Userpilot help product managers achieve a successful 2024?

Userpilot is a product growth platform enabling product managers to collect customer data and create frictionless customer experiences.

How can it help your SaaS gain a competitive edge in 2024?

Create bespoke in-app customer experiences

With Userpilot, you can create in-app experiences tailored to the needs of your target audience.

This includes personalized onboarding flows that help users master the product and realize its value in less time.

Contextually triggered UI patterns can also help users discover relevant features and provide guidance when they experience friction.

Trigger surveys to collect customer preferences and feedback

Userpilot offers a feedback functionality that allows the product team to gather quantitative and qualitative customer insights at scale.

Creating the in-app surveys is easy, thanks to the template library and WYSIWYG editor. You can then trigger them at a specific time or contextually – when users complete an event.

Run product experiments for continuous improvement

Userpilot enables product managers to make informed product decisions by running experiments.

In particular, you can use it to run A/B and multivariate tests on your in-app experiences. In this way, you can quickly choose the in-app pattern or microcopy that performs the best.

You can also leverage the UI patterns to conduct fake door tests to validate feature ideas.

Analyze product usage data for a deep understanding of user behavior

Userpilot has been developing its analytics features consistently since its conception.

In 2023, we launched trend analysis, funnel analysis, retention analysis, and custom analytics dashboards. This is going to continue next year, with the path analysis launch planned for Q1 2024, and predictive analysis later in the year.

Such powerful analytics features will allow granular customer behavior analysis so that PMs can develop better-informed product and marketing strategies.

Conclusion

When looking at the product management trend predictions for 2024, we can see that they will be a continuation of what we’ve already seen.

However, this doesn’t mean that we won’t be surprised by new market, economic and technological developments. As the landscape is highly volatile and uncertain, it will be more important for PMs to stay agile and swiftly respond to change.

If you want to learn more about Userpilot and how it can help you take advantage of the opportunities that 2024 brings, book the demo!

The post Product Management Trends 2024: 11 Predictions for a Successful Year appeared first on ProdSens.live.

As a product marketer, you’re expected to be the voice of the customer, and you need to know all the pertinent details about those that your product is targeted towards. 

Understanding the ideal customer’s industry, role, needs, pain points, objectives, and goals enables you to provide accurate and useful insights for your organization as you build and bring products to market.

To truly get an accurate sense of your ideal customers, you need to go and talk to them. There’s just no getting around it, as time-consuming and logistically challenging as it may be. 

To make the best use of these interviews, though, you’ll need to come in with as much up-to-date information as possible in order to be able to ask the most insightful questions and get answers that best reflect the state of your (likely dynamic and rapidly changing) market. 

It can be difficult, however, to find this information, particularly if you’re new to the industry and don’t have existing background knowledge or a trusted network to reach out to.

Fortunately, there are some ways to acquire this information in ways that’re both relatively rapid and more affordable than analyst reports. To put your finger on the pulse of your customers’ market, you’ll need to find out where they spend their time conversing about their roles, industries, and careers, and the places where they source their news and stay up-to-date with industry changes, events, and practices. 

These “watering holes” include social media platforms, industry-specific news sites, and trade organizations and associations such as the Product Marketing Alliance.

Here’s a few ideas for how to find these watering holes:

Leverage the experts in your own organization

Depending on your industry, you may have someone resembling your target customer working within your own organization. If you’re working for a software provider that builds analytics solutions. For example, you work with a data engineer or analyst who’s willing to offer you insights on the trends they’re following and where they go to network and source their news.

I’ve found that colleagues are generally excited to be consulted, and are typically very willing to share their knowledge and contribute to the successful launch of products. Even C-level executives are often more than willing to provide their insights if politely asked, and this can be of considerable value as executive watering holes can be particularly difficult to track down. 

People care deeply about what their counterparts in other organizations are thinking, and this enables you to find those conversations.

If your colleagues have been to recent events or conferences, they’ll have notes or competitor collateral that you can reference as well. When you reach out, be sure to thank them and detail exactly how their knowledge will help you and the company.

This approach has the useful side effect of assisting in building out your internal network within the company. Particularly if you’re talking to senior-level decision-makers, this can make product marketing’s value substantially more visible, which can be a challenging thing to accomplish.

Utilize LinkedIn Sales Navigator

There’s a good chance that your company’s sales team is using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, which, as its title suggests, is a tool that’s designed to make it easy for sales teams to find ideal prospects. 

If it’s possible for you to snag a paid license for a couple of days, there are lots of great ways to find the information you need about your ideal customers and the places to keep up with the evolution of their industry and work.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is its ability to conduct unlimited profile searches without bumping up into the monthly LinkedIn search limit [1]. This means that you can search for a variety of attributes without worry, and gives you space to tweak your searches to accurately find your ideal customers on LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to search by company size, company type, company industry, job function, location, title, seniority level, posted content keyword, recent LinkedIn activity, and group membership [2].

Once you’ve narrowed in on a few profiles that match your ideal customer’s key characteristics, take a close look at the “Interests” section of their profile, where you will see the companies that they follow and the groups that they’re members of. In the “Companies” section, look for industry associations, such as the Product Marketing Alliance, specific to the product you will be working on. 

These associations post research, news, and events to their LinkedIn feeds, and following them is a great way to stay up-to-date with the things that your ideal customers are paying attention to in their work.

The LinkedIn Groups that also show up in this “Interests” section can also be great watering holes to monitor. These groups offer a non-public space for LinkedIn members to communicate about the group’s topic and are an excellent source of intel regarding what your ideal customers are talking about. 

Being private, these groups allow LinkedIn members to be more open in discussion with their peers and are worth joining to stay on top of the conversation and learn more about your target industry.

Further up on the profile page, there’s a section called “Activity.” This section allows you to see what people have posted, commented on others’ posts, or reacted to (liked, etc.). A brief glance through this section on a few profiles will likely drag up some trends regarding the type of content that your ideal customers are reading and reacting to, and who’s posting it. 

I’ve found that there’s typically an influencer for everything on social media, and relevant people can also be great sources to follow as they seek to produce the most ground-breaking content regarding your industry. 

Often, debates will arise in the comments below posts, which can help you advance your understanding of the state of things in your ideal customers’ jobs.

Research industry trade groups and forums

Taking a look at the industry and trade group pages that you’ve found on LinkedIn or through a web search, including trade magazines and news sites, is also a great way to find information and influential people to follow. 

These organizations tend to put out a lot of thought leadership content about their industry, sharing best practices, promoting the interests of their members, or suggesting ways of resolving particular conflicts or challenges that industry participants face. 

Though these publications frequently have distinct points of view that should be considered when analyzing their suggested solutions and opinions, they can be valuable in that they reveal potentially useful underlying tensions and challenges. The authors of these pieces tend to be influential members of their industries and are worth following for their insight on important items and issues impacting the industry.

Often attached to these news and trade group sites, forum boards are a great source of information, but these can be trickier to access. Senior-level participants regularly congregate in places where they can discuss topics discreetly, so these can be hard to find. If you can get in, however, they’re highly useful sources of current information. People care about what their peers are thinking and doing.

Information can also be found on more general messaging board sites such as Reddit, but these are typically more useful for early and mid-career personas due to their popular, public-facing nature. 

It can also be a bit more of a challenge to verify the veracity of the anonymous users than on sites like LinkedIn where people are at least theoretically attached to a referenceable identity and career history. Nevertheless, they can be useful places when taken with a grain of salt.

Learn from sales and customer success

Once you’ve built up a bit of background knowledge and have familiarized yourself with some of the key current trends and voices in your target market, it’s time to check in with the teams in your organization that are actively speaking with your target market. Sales and customer success will have important but slightly different points of view based on the conversations they’re having with their various target groups.

Customer success will be able to tell you about the ways clients are using your product to solve their challenges. They have their ear on the ground regarding how your customers are using your product, how well it’s working, and what could be improved. 

Cross-referencing what you hear about these conversations with the trends and challenges you’ve spotted in prior research will provide you with an excellent starting point for conversations with your target market.

Sales, on the other hand, will be talking with people who aren’t your current customers and will be able to garner key insights on where your products aren’t winning and where prospects and potential users are selecting other solutions. Ask them about where they see potential opportunities and the things that they’re paying attention to as they make the case for your product.

Customer success and sales will have a helpful amount of useful data and insights that you can help use to enhance your knowledge of the market and ideal customers. Plus, everyone likes feeling listened to, and giving them your attention will help you build relationships and trust. 

However, keep in mind their perspectives will be affected by their communications and the types of people they’re working with. For a true understanding, there’s nothing like talking with one of your customers directly.

A trusted group of customers

Once you’ve collected as comprehensive a background as possible, it’s time to talk with your customers! Hopefully, your customer success team has comprised a list of trusted people they’ve built close relationships with. 

Keep in mind that, as there’s an existing well-functioning positive relationship, they’re likely the users that are the happiest with your product. They’re unlikely to be a representative sample of the industry. 

That said, they’re still a valuable source of information and the existing level of trust will make it easier to ask questions without concerns that they’d come off in the wrong manner. Be sure to thank them for their help!

The wider world

You’re finally ready! Once you’ve collected all the information you can from your own organization, LinkedIn, industry sources, and trusted customers, it’s time to reach out and engage in the win/loss conversations you need to build better products and hone your competitive edge. 

With the background you’ve acquired from your ideal customers’ watering holes and insights from your teams and trusted customers, you have everything you need to speak to the people you’d like to have as your customers.

It’s not easy to get up to speed on a new industry, market, or product, let alone all at the same time. However, it’s totally possible. 

Educating yourself on these subjects can be time-consuming, but leveraging simple tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator and harnessing the available knowledge within your organization can make the process much less onerous.

Plus, utilizing these strategies to find key watering holes will set you up to keep your eye focused on the events, trends, and market updates that affect your ideal customers. 

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as finding those vital insights that inspire new solutions to the challenges your customers are facing, and these strategies should help you dig them up. Best of luck on the search!

[1] Frost, Aja. “22 LinkedIn Sales Navigator Secrets All the Best Prospectors Know”. HubSpot, September 7, 2022, https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/hidden-sales-navigator-features.

[2] “Sales Navigator Advanced Search Filters”. LinkedIn Sales Solutions. Accessed August 8, 2023, https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/compare-plans/advanced-search-filters?trk=lss-blog-search-LSN.

The post Getting up to speed for customer interviews as a product marketer appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Customer experience management vs customer relationship management?

Both are important for affecting your customers, but what exactly are they, and how do they differ?

Read on to find out their key differences and how they work together to help grow your product.

TL;DR

• CEM focuses on the entire user journey with a brand, addressing needs and expectations at all touchpoints.
• CRM uses specialized software to manage customer relationships, analyze data, and improve outcomes by personalizing services and expecting customer needs.
• CRM aims to increase sales, retain customers, and enhance satisfaction through managing customer relationships. While CEM focuses on improving customer experience to build loyalty.
• CEM covers the entire customer journey from awareness to post-purchase, ensuring a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints, while CRM optimizes company-customer interactions.
• CRM focuses on immediate, transactional aspects using current data and sales interactions, while CEM adopts a long-term perspective, encompassing the entire user journey from pre-purchase to post-purchase.
• CEM extends to feedback and sentiment analysis for a comprehensive understanding of customer experiences, while CRM uses customer data for personalized interactions and targeted marketing.
• CRM is business-oriented, focusing on organizational goals, while CEM is customer-centric, starting from the customer’s perspective.
• CEM employs a wider range of tools like feedback, analytics, and journey mapping to enhance the customer experience, while CRM systems use software platforms for managing user data and automating marketing and sales.
• CRM data with CEM insights enables a more comprehensive understanding of each customer, facilitating personalization.
• CEM uses journey maps to understand the customer experience, with CRM data aiding in identifying key touchpoints.
• CRM systems use data to personalize interactions, which CEM leverages to align every touchpoint with individual preferences.
• Integrating CEM feedback data into CRM systems offers a comprehensive view of customer sentiment, enabling proactive customer relationship management.
• CRM data tracking customer behavior and preferences over time is used by CEM for iterative improvements in customer retention strategies.
• If you want a CEM that can help tailor your customer experience, collect user feedback, and provide personalized experiences, book a demo with Userpilot now.

What is customer experience management (CEM)?

Customer Experience Management is an approach that focuses on creating and managing a customer’s journey with a brand.

It involves understanding and addressing the customer’s needs, preferences, and expectations at every touchpoint across various channels.

CEM aims to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, customer management, and advocacy by delivering consistently positive experiences through collecting customer feedback, analyzing user interactions, and implementing improvements based on these insights.

What is customer relationship management (CRM)?

Customer Relationship Management focuses on understanding, managing, and enhancing company interactions and customer relationships.

It involves using specialized software that collects, stores and analyzes customer information — from personal details to purchase history and interaction data.

The core aim of CRM software is to improve business relationships, ensure user retention, and drive sales growth. CRM provides a clear view of each customer. It enables businesses to personalize their services and communications, anticipate customer needs, and respond more effectively to customer inquiries, direct feedback, and issues.

Key differences between CRM and CEM

While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) are crucial in shaping a business’s interaction with its customers, they differ significantly in their approach and focus.

This section delves into the distinct characteristics of both CRM and CEM, highlighting how each contributes uniquely to the user journey.

Different objectives

CRM and CEM have distinct goals crucial for business growth and customer satisfaction.

CRM focuses on increasing sales, retaining customers, and enhancing satisfaction through personalized customer relationship management. It uses customer data to customize interactions, marketing, and services to boost loyalty and revenue.

Conversely, CEM seeks to improve the customer experience beyond satisfaction, creating memorable brand interactions. This approach builds brand loyalty, fosters great customer relationships and advocacy, and fuels long-term business growth.

Focus and scope

CRM and CEM offer different approaches to customer interactions.

The CRM software manages and optimizes company-customer interactions, tracking customer information and history to improve future dealings. It focuses on direct interactions like sales, customer service, and marketing to boost relationships, satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

On the other hand, CEM has a broader scope, covering the entire customer journey across all touchpoints, from initial awareness to post-purchase. It aims to create a seamless customer experience, anticipating and fulfilling customer expectations and needs at every stage for a cohesive journey.

Timeframes

CRM and CEM differ in their operational timeframes, reflecting their customer interaction strategies.

CRM is more transactional and immediate, focusing on the present. It deals with current user data, interactions, and sales opportunities, aiming to respond efficiently to customer needs and capitalize on current transactions for immediate sales.

This approach is essential for rapid daily decision-making in customer service, deal closures, and marketing.

Conversely, CEM takes a long-term perspective, considering the customer journey, including pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages. Its goal is to provide a satisfying experience throughout the customer’s entire lifecycle with the brand.

Customer data

CRM and CEM both use customer data but in different ways.

CRM relies on demographics, purchase history, and preferences to personalize interactions. This approach helps businesses tailor communications and offerings to individual needs, increasing sales and repeat business.

CEM also uses customer data but goes beyond transactional information. It includes feedback and sentiment analysis to understand customers’ feelings about their overall experience with a brand. This broader data range covers opinions on service quality, product satisfaction, and website usability.

CEM focuses on the emotional and subjective aspects of the customer journey, aiming to enhance the overall experience.

Different perspectives

CRM and CEM differ in their perspectives on customer interactions and business strategies.

The CRM system is more business-oriented, starting with the organization’s needs and goals, like boosting sales, enhancing efficiency, and refining marketing strategies. It analyzes user data and interactions, focusing on how they can advance the business’s objectives.

Conversely, CEM is customer-centric, beginning with the customer’s perspective. It involves empathizing with customers, recognizing their expectations and customizing experiences to their needs. The goal is to create a memorable journey that improves customer loyalty.

Tools and technology

CRM and CEM use different technologies to meet their goals, expressing their distinct focuses.

CRM systems, primarily software platforms, manage user data, track and analyze customer interactions, and automate marketing and sales processes, organizing data and streamlining communications to aid sales.

In contrast, CEM employs a broader range of tools like user feedback platforms, analytics tools, and journey mapping software. These technologies understand and improve the customer experience.

For example, feedback platforms analyze customer opinions, analytics tools track behaviors and trends, and journey mapping software visualizes the customer journey. Userpilot, a CEM tool, personalizes user experiences based on behavior, collecting feedback to enhance satisfaction.

How CRM and CEM work together

Understanding how Customer Relationship Management and Customer Experience Management complement and strengthen each other is crucial.

This section delves into the relationship between CRM and CEM, exploring how their integration can create a more complete and practical approach to managing customer interactions and experiences.

Customer data integration

Integrating Customer Relationship Management and Customer Experience Management strategies through user data is key to enhancing customer experiences. CRM systems excel in collecting and storing user data, optimizing interactions, and enhancing marketing and sales efforts.

By incorporating CRM data into CEM analysis, businesses gain a more comprehensive view of the customer journey. This integration provides insights into customers’ histories and preferences, allowing CEM to contextualize experiences and exceed customer expectations based on past brand interactions.

Combining CRM data with CEM insights results in more personalized and contextually relevant customer experiences. Understanding the ‘what’ and ‘when’ from CRM and the ‘why’ and ‘how’ through CEM enables businesses to create deeper, more resonant customer engagements.

Customer journey mapping

Creating customer journey maps is a key part of Customer Experience Management, enabling a better understanding of the end-to-end customer experience. Integrating Customer Relationship Management data into this process enhances effectiveness.

With insights into customer interactions, preferences, and behaviors, CRM data helps to identify specific touchpoints where customers engage with the company. This integration allows businesses to highlight successful interactions and areas needing improvement in the customer journey.

Personalization of customer interactions

The synergy between Customer Relationship Management and Customer Experience Management enhances customer interaction personalization.

CRM systems use customer data to personalize interactions, segmenting customers by behavior, preferences, and purchase history for relevant, personalized messaging. This data helps understand customer values and interaction preferences.

CEM then extends this personalization to every customer touchpoint, aligning them with individual needs and preferences.

This approach covers the entire customer journey, from browsing to purchasing to post-purchase support, ensuring a response to individual customer profiles. Such personalized experiences increase customer engagement and satisfaction, making them feel understood by the brand.

Maximizing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty

Aligning CRM and CEM strategies with broader business goals is essential for maximizing customer satisfaction and loyalty. CRM focuses on customer relationships and retention, and CEM aims to create positive experiences.

They work together to retain customers through efficient service and foster deep satisfaction and loyal customers through memorable brand interactions.

Customer feedback and sentiment analysis

Integrating CEM feedback into CRM systems improves understanding of customer sentiments and relationship management.

CEM collects feedback through surveys, reviews, and direct responses for insight into customer perceptions.

CRM systems automate processes and then manage and track this feedback for analysis and action, enabling timely responses to customer concerns and showing their opinions are valued.

Adding CEM feedback to CRM data provides a full view of customer sentiment, merging transactional and feedback data. This allows for anticipating customer needs, customizing communication, and deciding to enhance overall customer satisfaction.

Improving customer retention

The collaboration between CRM and CEM enhances customer engagement and loyalty.

CRM systems effectively monitor customer behavior and preferences changes, including purchase patterns and marketing responses. This data provides insights into customer values, needs, and potential dissatisfaction.

CEM uses CRM data to improve customer retention strategies and identify areas to enhance experiences. Integrating CRM’s detailed data with CEM’s customer journey focus enables more targeted and effective retention strategies. These include personalized offers, better customer service, or product and service adjustments based on user feedback and behavior trends.

Conclusion

Your first thought could be customer experience management vs. customer relationship management. But both are pivotal concepts for your SaaS.

Separately, they bring power advantages; CEM focuses on enhancing a customer’s overall journey with a brand. CRM is more about managing and optimizing direct customer interactions, using detailed data to personalize engagements and drive sales.

Together, they enhance individual customer interactions and contribute significantly to long-term business growth and customer loyalty.

Want to get started with a CEM? Book a demo with Userpilot now and see how to collect customer feedback, monitor customer behavior, and personalize the user experience.

The post Customer Experience Management vs Customer Relationship Management appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Dogfooding means eating your own dog food.

Wait! What?

What does it have to do with product management or product design?

That’s what you’ll find out from this article.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• Product dogfooding is a testing practice. It involves teams using their own product internally to identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
• The term comes from a commercial and was first used in the software context by a Microsoft manager in 1988.
• It’s a widely accepted practice in many organizations. Well-known companies that use dogfooding include Google, Facebook, Lyft and Wix. And Userpilot, of course.
• Product dogfooding enables organizations to shorten the feedback loop by testing their products for bugs and usability issues before releasing them to the users.
• Using the product to solve real-world problems also helps them to better empathize with their customers and understand their needs and pain points.
• Thanks to dogfooding, companies increase their chances of delivering a positive user experience right off the bat.
• Start implementing a dogfooding program by recruiting users from across the organization, especially those not involved in the product development.
• Before you start testing, provide testers with adequate user onboarding so that they know how to use the product.
• Use surveys, interviews, session recordings, and product analytics to gather insights.
• Implement changes and fixes as you go and keep testing their impact.
• Your dogfooding program will be more effective if you make it an ongoing process and a part of the organizational culture.
• For more comprehensive insights, combine it with other testing methods, like beta testing.
• Ideally, don’t let your staff use alternative products if yours can do the job.
• Userpilot is a product growth platform that you can use to collect feedback, analyze user behavior in-app, and design onboarding experiences. Book the demo to see how you can use it for dogfooding in your SaaS.

What is product dogfooding?

Product dogfooding is using your own product or service to solve real-life problems, just like your customers would.

The goal of this practice is to test the product design thoroughly for bugs and usability issues before launching it to the public.

What is the origin of the term dogfooding?

Nobody is entirely sure.

It may have been the 1970s TV commercial in which the actor claimed Alpo dog food was so good that he fed it to his own dogs. Or perhaps the president of Kel Kan Pet Food who anecdotally used to eat a can of their dog food at meetings.

The first known use of the term in the management context was in 1988, when Paul Maritz, a Microsoft manager, sent an email titled “Eat your own Dogfood” to increase internal usage of Microsoft products.

What are examples of dogfooding?

Dogfooding is a common practice in tech, and lots of companies use it to improve their products:

• Userpilot uses its own tools to onboard and guide users.
• Google uses it to test new versions of its own products, including new operating systems and popular office apps.
• Facebook refined its Android app by forcing employees to switch to this operating system.
• Lyft requires its staff to spend at least 4 hours as a driver to better empathize with users and enhance the user experience. This includes their CEO, Logan Green.
• Wix has built its website using their own product.

Why should companies eat their own dog food?

If you’ve got a task to complete, say send an email, design a visual, or create an onboarding flow, and your product does exactly that, it makes perfect sense to use it instead of competing tools.

However, there are other reasons why your teams should use the products that they build.

Identifies bugs and issues with the product early on

Tech giants, like Garmin or Microsoft, have very robust quality assurance processes. And yet, there’ve been numerous cases when they released half-baked products riddled with bugs.

That’s because no testing regime can replicate the real-life conditions in which real customers use the product.

Dogfooding can help you reduce the risk of releasing buggy products and avoid usability issues.

If your teams have to use the product to solve their own daily problems, they’re more likely to identify issues that may sneak through quality control in a lab environment.

Builds customer empathy

What’s the best way to understand your customer needs, pain points, and motivations?

Put yourself in their shoes by using the product to complete the tasks that they have to tackle in their everyday lives.

So it’s safe to say that dog food helps organizations develop their customer empathy and gain a deeper understanding of the ‘why’ behind their behaviors.

Improves the customer experience with a company’s product

Ultimately, dogfooding helps teams build better products and deliver a better customer experience.

Think about it:

If you can understand your customers, their needs, and daily struggles, you’re in a position to build a product that addresses their issues. For example, this may mean developing the features that they desperately need to achieve their goals.

There’s more to that.

Lack of functionality isn’t always the main user frustration. Not being able to use the existing features because they crash constantly or they’re difficult to find in the cluttered UI is, though.

Dogfooding helps you prevent such issues because they have a chance to spoil the experience for your users.

How to implement a product dogfooding program in your company?

If you want to give dogfooding a shot, here’s how to set up an employee product testing program at your company.

In a nutshell, it follows the same process as any other type of testing or experimentation.

Recruit employees for the internal beta testing

To start with, recruit testers from across the organization.

You want to have participants from different departments involved in the product development process: product management, customer success, marketing, and sales. This will allow you to gain different perspectives on the product.

Don’t stop there.

Involve employees who have absolutely nothing to do with your product. That’s necessary to avoid the product team‘s biases affecting the results. You want to learn how the product really works and not how your testers believe it works or should work.

Decide how the feedback will be collected

How are you going to collect the feedback on the product?

There are plenty of options for SaaS products:

• Surveys – delivered in-app or by email
• A feedback widget or a dedicated email address to collect passive feedback
• Interviews and focus groups to gain in-depth qualitative insights
• Session recordings to optimize the UI
• In-app user behavior tracking to find patterns and trends in user interactions

Provide onboarding to the participants

To emulate real-world product experience, provide your testers with the same onboarding as your customers.

This kills two birds with one stone.

First, you teach them how to use the product so that they can test it thoroughly without relying on the customer support team or software developers for guidance.

Second, you also test how good your onboarding is at activating users and driving feature adoption.

Analyze the feedback and iterate on the product

Feedback analysis is the next step.

Depending on your research methods this could be by:

• Tagging and grouping similar survey responses.
• Using AI tools to identify patterns in qualitative user feedback and following up with respondents for further insights.
• Analyzing session recordings and heatmaps for usability issues.
• Inspecting support tickets and bug reports.
• Applying different analytics tools to obtain specific insights from product usage data, like funnel and paths analysis to identify friction points.

Keep testing as you’re implementing improvements to assess the impact of the changes.

What if you’re not getting any valuable insights? Review and adjust your testing protocols.

Best practices when eating your own dogfood

To wrap it up, let’s look at some of the best dogfooding practices and tips:

• Make using your company’s products a part of the organizational culture.
• Don’t rely on dogfooding as the only testing method. Combine it with other testing types, like beta testing and testing by the quality assurance department.
• Turn it into an ongoing process, not a once-and-done activity.
• Frustrating as it might be for your staff, don’t let them use alternative products. If they have an option, they may prefer a solution from a competing company that they’re familiar with.

Conclusion

‘Product dogfooding’ may sound entertaining but it’s actually a serious testing process that can help you better understand your users and spot issues with the product before you launch it.

Would you like to see how Userpilot can help you implement a dogfooding program in your SaaS?
Book the demo to find out more about our feedback, analytics, and user onboarding features.

The post Product Dogfooding in Software Development: A Quick Guide (+Best Practices) appeared first on ProdSens.live.

In this episode of Product Marketing Life, Mark Assini is joined by experienced marketing consultant at Broadridge, Katharine Hibson.

Katharine shares her expert insights on conducting effective customer interviews, stressing that customer conversations require strategy and planning, not a casual approach. She outlines her process for preparing an interview guide, including motivational topics to cover and open-ended questions that draw out insights.

What’s the purpose of customer interviews?

Customer interviews serve as a powerhouse for product marketers, unraveling crucial insights that drive strategic decisions. Beyond raw data, these conversations unearth the genuine pulse of your audience – granting you nuanced perspectives that analytics alone can’t often uncover. 

Wanna eliminate guesswork? Ensure you’re aligned with customers’ desires? Decode the unwritten cues that reveal the intricacies of customers’ needs? 

Effectively wielded, these interactions can become your blueprint for crafting campaigns that authentically resonate with your audience. 

Join Katharine and Mark as they discuss what success looks like, common mistakes you can make, templates she’s created to guide customer interviews, and everything in between! 

‎Product Marketing Life: Casual chats won’t cut it: How to plan productive customer interviews with Katharine Hibson on Apple Podcasts

‎Show Product Marketing Life, Ep Casual chats won’t cut it: How to plan productive customer interviews with Katharine Hibson – Nov 10, 2023

Apple Podcasts

About our guest

Katharine Hibson brings over a decade of multifaceted marketing experience to her passion for product marketing. With past roles spanning agencies, consulting, and startups, she’s launched products, built competitive intel teams, and driven millions in revenue. 

Currently finishing her MBA, Katharine is dedicated to tying product marketing to the bottom line. She’s created her own research framework to extract powerful customer insights that persuade stakeholders and impact strategy. With contagious enthusiasm, Katharine helps fellow product marketers master the art of customer conversations.

Key takeaways

• How proper planning and strategy, not a casual approach, lead to productive customer conversations.
• The benefits of letting customers speak openly and without interruption. 
• How asking ‘why’ can help you dig deeper and gauge pain points.
• Why having a consistent interview structure is fundamental.

And more.

Get involved

Keen to join the conversation?

Why not take a look at our Slack channel? Not to boast, but our Slack community’s the biggest gathering of product marketing enthusiasts on the planet (okay, that was a bit of a boast).

We discuss everything from sales engagement to messaging strategies, and there’s a constant flow of templates, resources, and even the odd ‘roast’.And it’s completely free to join!

Don’t miss a beat – you can catch all of your favorite product marketing episodes right here: Product Marketing Life.

The post Casual chats won’t cut it: How to plan productive customer interviews with Katharine Hibson appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Are you tired of shouting from the rooftops about how great your local business is, but still struggling to attract new customers?

Well, what if I told you that there’s a simple solution that’s been hiding right under your nose? Yes, I’m talking about customer ratings and reviews! More and more, people are turning to online reviews to decide where to shop, dine, and spend their hard-earned cash.

In this article, we’re going to discuss seven powerful strategies for maximizing your local business’s reputation with customer ratings and reviews.

From claiming your business listings to responding to negative feedback, we’ll cover everything you need to know to build a stellar reputation and bring in more business.

Why are customer ratings and reviews important?

Customer ratings and reviews provide valuable insights into the quality of a product or service, and have the power to affect the reputation and influence of the business itself. Reading reviews allows you to gain an understanding of the customer experience and learn about how your product or service is received.

Positive reviews help you stand out from the competition and draw in new customers, which is particularly crucial for small businesses. And it’s no secret that the majority of customers trust internet reviews as much as personal recommendations – digital word of mouth can be what ignores your brand or crushes it.

Not only that, customer reviews can enhance your search engine results. How? Because search engines like businesses with more reviews and higher ratings. Ultimately, prioritizing your customer ratings and reviews can have a great influence on your business’s reputation, authority, and bottom line.

How to maximize your local business’s reputation

Your reputation as a local business owner is critical to attracting new customers and maintaining existing ones. In today’s digital age, customer ratings and reviews go hand-in-hand with business success. They give useful information on the quality of your products or services as well as the overall customer experience.

Here are a few tips for improving your local business’s reputation via online ratings and reviews:

1. Claim and optimize your business listings

This involves submitting your company to prominent directories such as Google My Business and Facebook. By claiming your listings, you can ensure that your business information is accurate and up-to-date.

This is essential when it comes to prospective customers finding your brand. It’s also good to provide your customers and prospects with business information and photos after you’ve claimed your listings. This includes entering all of the required info, such as your business hours, website, and phone number or contact details.

If you’re including images, you should make sure they’re high-quality. You can even use tools like Brush Galaxy, which has extensive color palettes, to create these images. 

Improved listings will make it easier for people to find and learn about your business, resulting in more positive reviews and greater influence.

2. Encourage customers to leave reviews

Encouraging customers to leave reviews is a powerful way to boost your local business’s reputation. The first step in increasing your review count is to deliver exceptional customer service. Customers who had a positive experience are more likely to share a review.

There are also plenty of tools out there that enable you to request reviews, making it super streamlined for customers to share their experiences. If you’re not keen on utilizing these tools, you could always pop a direct link in an email, sending your customer to your Google My Business or Facebook business page, or include instructions on how to leave a review on your website. 

Streamlining the review process is key  – customers will typically only leave a review if doing so is relatively straightforward and takes minimal steps.

The quest to gain positive customer reviews will not only improve your retention but will help you acquire that all-important feedback that works to improve your marketing efforts.

3. Respond to customer reviews

Responding to customer reviews shows that you value your customers’ feedback and are committed to providing excellent service. It’s important to monitor and respond to both positive and negative reviews.

Thanking customers for positive feedback demonstrates that you value their support, whilst responding to negative feedback indicates that you take customer concerns seriously and are willing to improve your service. You should use personalized and professional language when responding to show that you care about the customer’s experience and your promises to improve are sincere.

It’s also a good idea to reply to negative comments with solutions. We’re not mind readers, but by addressing any issues flagged and offering to make things right – by providing a discount or free service, for example – you can improve customer experience and work on forging meaningful customer relationships. 

4. Showcase and promote positive reviews

A great way to promote your positive reviews is to share them on social media and your website. This helps potential customers see the great experiences others have had with your business.

Looking at more traditional means of increasing your influence, if your brand has a brick-and-mortar store, you can showcase your positive reviews by displaying them on your business premises in the form of a poster. This can aid in the development of trust and credibility among customers who visit your physical store. 

A great way to boost exposure is by showcasing positive reviews on your site as testimonials or using them in digital ads.

5. Address negative reviews

Negative reviews can have a significant impact on your local business’s reputation and go on to diminish your credibility. But it’s important to remember that negative reviews can also provide valuable insights that can help you improve your business.

When handling negative feedback, respond in a timely manner. Instead of becoming defensive or argumentative, use a customer-centric attitude. Understand the customer’s viewpoint and respond to their problems in a courteous, empathic, and solutions-focused manner.

You may need to take particular measures to fix the situation, such as issuing a refund, replacement, or discount. If you’re not too sure about how to phrase your response, don’t be shy about using AI writing tools to help you construct your reply. Just make sure you proofread your response before sending it out, and ensure it’s relevant and addresses the issue at hand.

Once you’ve resolved the problem, follow up with your customer to ensure they’re satisfied with the resolution. This’ll help to establish trust and will demonstrate that you value their feedback.

Proactively responding to negative feedback has the potential to convert a poor experience into a positive one and help you forge more meaningful relationships with your customers.

6. Monitor and manage your online reputation

Monitoring and managing your online reputation is essential for maximizing your local business’s influence. 

Monitoring social media and other online mentions, such as blog postings or news stories, is a must. It’ll keep you up to date on what people are saying about your business and allow you to handle any negative comments or suggestions. 

A good way to monitor your online presence is by utilizing social media management tools.

7. Track your reputation and adjust your strategies

Tracking your reputation and adjusting your strategy to acquire new customers can really boost your brand’s impact, and sentiment analysis tools can help you keep an eye on your online reputation. 

You should also examine your review data for trends and patterns. This’ll assist you in identifying areas for development and adapting your approach accordingly. For example, if you receive a lot of negative feedback about the quality of your customer service, this is a surefire sign that you need to invest more in employee training or make policy changes.

Key takeaways for customer ratings and reviews

Customer ratings and reviews can make or break a local business’s reputation. 

Claiming and optimizing your business listings is essential, as is encouraging customers to leave reviews. But it’s not enough to just get the reviews, you need to respond to them (both the “good” ones and the “bad” ones) to demonstrate trust and empathy. 

Keep in mind that customer service is key. Use review request tools and software, create a simple and clear review process, and create personalized, professional responses. 

You’ve earned those positive reviews, so shout it from the rooftops! Don’t forget to promote those kind words of your customers, and regularly monitor and manage their commentaries so you can track your reputation, adjust your strategies, and maximize your influence.

By following these seven strategies, you can optimize your local business’s reputation and build strong, sustainable relationships with your customers.

The post Customer ratings & reviews: 7 Strategies to maximize your business’s influence appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Product teams move fast – often keeping their heads down, chasing goals, and, unfortunately, overlooking customers’ emotional needs, which is essential to creating positive user experiences.

In this episode of Product Marketing Life host, Mark Assini, is joined by design expert Bryan Zmijewski, President and Owner of ZURB, to unpack how companies lose touch with users and provides proven tactics to close the disconnect and get closer to your customers. 

We’re all human, which means when we look for products or services, we tend to favor those brands that understand our genuine needs. 

Using design-thinking principles like empathy can help you better understand your customers’ needs, wants, and pain points, so you can craft positive user experiences, offer products they love, and achieve sustainable success.

‎Product Marketing Life: Emotional intelligence in product development: Why design thinking is the key to success | Bryan Zmijewski, President and Owner of ZURB on Apple Podcasts

‎Show Product Marketing Life, Ep Emotional intelligence in product development: Why design thinking is the key to success | Bryan Zmijewski, President and Owner of ZURB – Oct 13, 2023

Apple Podcasts

A bit about the speaker

From selling toy concepts to advising CEOs, Bryan Zmijewski has always explored the intersection of design and business. This unconventional career path gives him rare insights into building great customer experiences.

While at Stanford, his passion for human-centered design was ignited. Now as a design transformation leader, Bryan studies creative routines and helps organizations become design-driven. 

He’s advised over 1,000 executives on leading with empathy and believes that companies who listen to their customers, not just their business needs, will win big. Bryan’s currently distilling his approach in a new book on creative decision-making, is a competitive runner, and, at his core, Bryan’s an explorer – of design, business, and pushing human capabilities further

Key takeaways

• Why adopting design thinking principles can create positive customer experiences.
• How losing touch with your users creates a disconnect between the product and customer needs.
• Why you need to facilitate an open dialogue between sales and product.
• How negative feedback presents invaluable opportunities for improvement. 
• Why diverse opinions – united behind customer insights – produce better outcomes than isolated decisions by one specialized team.

Get involved

Keen to join the conversation?

Why not take a look at our Slack channel? Not to boast, but our Slack community’s the biggest gathering of product marketing enthusiasts on the planet (okay, that was a bit of a boast).

We discuss everything from sales engagement to messaging strategies, and there’s a constant flow of templates, resources, and even the odd ‘roast’.And it’s completely free to join!

Don’t miss a beat – you can catch all of your favorite product marketing episodes right here: Product Marketing Life.

The post Emotional intelligence in product development: Why design thinking is the key to success | Bryan Zmijewski, President and Owner of ZURB appeared first on ProdSens.live.