Following customer lifecycle management best practices can lead your company to retain more users and increase customer lifetime value.

But what are these best practices and how can you implement them?

Let’s explore customer lifecycle management (CLM), its phases, and the best practices you can apply in SaaS without coding!

TL;DR

• Customer lifecycle management (CLM) is a strategic approach for tracking, analyzing, and optimizing customer interactions throughout their entire relationship with your company.
• The different stages of CLM include:

1. Acquisition: The stage where prospects become new users.
2. Activation: When new users become active users through onboarding processes or live demos.
3. Adoption: The phase where customers start using your product regularly.
4. Retention: This is when customers stay engaged and satisfied over the long term.
5. Expansion and Advocacy: When customers purchase additional products through upsells, and share their positive experiences.

• Let’s go over 8 best practices and see how you can apply them in your CLM strategy:

1. Personalize customer experience: Design different product experiences to cater to the individual needs and roles of each customer segment.
2. Enhance onboarding with interactive guidance: Use interactive in-app guidance during the onboarding process to improve engagement with the product.
3. Segment customers for better relationship management: Segment customers based on various criteria to open the door for more personalized and effective customer lifecycle management.
4. Offer self-service options: Implementing self-service support through in-app resources enhances the customer experience by allowing them to solve issues independently.
5. Collect feedback across the journey: Gather feedback at different stages of the customer journey to help refine services and meet customer expectations more effectively.
6. Leverage customer data for proactive service: Analyze customer data to anticipate and address potential issues before they impact the user experience.
7. Use product analytics for retention: Track and analyze customer data (behavioral, survey responses, in-app interactions, etc.) to iterate retention strategies and reduce churn.
8. Incentivize loyal customers for advocacy: Rewarding loyal customers for referrals and positive reviews helps expand brand awareness and customer advocacy.

• Interested in optimizing your customer lifecycle management? Book a Userpilot demo to see how you can follow these customer lifecycle best practices!

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What is customer lifecycle management?

Customer lifecycle management (CLM) is a strategic approach for tracking, analyzing, and optimizing customer interactions throughout their entire relationship with your company.

This involves tracking and optimizing every stage of the customer journey—from acquisition to post-sale support and retention—to enhance customer satisfaction, increase customer loyalty, and maximize lifetime value.

Stages of the customer lifecycle management process

The customer lifecycle management process has a structure that starts with understanding each part of the cycle. Each stage focuses on different aspects of the customer experience, and they include:

• Acquisition: This is the stage where potential customers become new users. It involves marketing campaigns, promotions, and outreach efforts to create awareness and generate leads.
• Activation: When new users become active users through onboarding processes or live demos. The goal is to make users realize the value of your product.
• Adoption: Where customers start using your product regularly. The focus here is on enhancing the customer experience and providing proactive support.
• Retention: This is when customers stay engaged and satisfied over the long term. This involves continuous customer support, updates, and secondary onboarding.
• Expansion and Advocacy: Here, customers are encouraged to purchase additional products through upsells, and share their positive experiences with others with referral programs and communities

8 Best practices when creating a customer lifecycle management strategy

That said, let’s go over 8 best practices and see how you can apply them in your customer lifecycle management strategies:

Personalize customer experience from the start

Personalization opens the door to driving more customer success and increasing customer retention—leading to a smoother lifecycle.

In fact, according to a McKinsey study, 76 to 78% of consumers are more likely to purchase, recommend, and make repeat purchases from companies that personalize the customer experience.

In SaaS, this could mean presenting features that a CMO would find valuable, or automatically skipping others that an engineer might not need.

How to implement it?

The best way to personalize CX is by segmenting your user base and designing a relevant product experience for each.

For instance, you can use a welcome survey to gather information such as the user’s industry, their role within their organization, or their main motivation for using your product. Then craft an onboarding path that addresses their specific jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) and responsibilities.

Enhance customer onboarding with interactive guidance

In-app guidance is a very engaging way to onboard users effectively. It helps users understand your product better and enhances their experience by encouraging exploration.

So instead of showing a generic product tour that users are likely to skip, you can implement an interactive walkthrough to guide users step-by-step with progressive onboarding.

How to implement it?

To do this, identify the features that are core to your product and align with your user’s jobs to be done. Then use a no-code builder (like Userpilot) to create UI patterns (tooltips, modals, hotspots, etc) to educate customers about each of these features. And finally, set them up to pop out when a customer starts engaging with said feature.

For example, Groupize used Userpilot to gamify their onboarding by creating a Groupize Interactive Assistant—G.G.—ready to help Groupize users through the app’s interactive elements.

This assistant offers help through onboarding tours, step-by-step checklists, as well as live chat, LinkedIn page, and email—getting users through the onboarding in an interactive way.

Segment existing customers for better customer relationship management

Customer segmentation is not only key for personalization, it’s also a medium for monitoring, analyzing, and managing your user’s lifecycle.

These segments can be created based on different criteria, this can include:

• Demographics.
• Survey responses.
• In-app behavior and activity.
• JTBDs.
• Journey stage.

How to implement it?

There are many ways to segment users. First of all, you need a tool like Userpilot to segment users, then decide what criteria (NPS responses, in-app behavior, etc) you need to perform your strategy. This can involve:

• Defining detractors who replied negatively to an NPS survey, and then create targeted campaigns for them.
• Segmenting users who skipped the onboarding process and are now stuck, then design an in-app flow to try to guide them again and re-engage them.
• Track behavioral data of active free trial users, then set up an in-app upgrade message to trigger when they reach the usage limit.

Offer self-service options to enhance customer experience

Self-service support allows users to learn at their own pace, access relevant resources, and troubleshoot issues independently.

It prevents users from leaving your app to solve their issues and experiencing friction, and as a result, it ends up elevating the customer experience.

How to implement it?

A great way to offer self-service support is through an in-app resource center, as it serves as a comprehensive repository of help content for new customers.

To create an effective knowledge base:

1. Identify common issues that make customers drop off and disengage.
2. Survey your users, review your support tickets, and examine your usage data to see what’s causing friction and pushing customers away.
3. Create help resources in different formats to directly tackle these challenges. It can include FAQs, tutorial videos, step-by-step guides, or help articles.
4. Organize your resources in content modules so users can find resources that are relevant to them.

Collect feedback across the customer journey

The best way to manage the customer lifecycle is by communicating with users throughout their journey and getting customer feedback.

This involves segmenting your users and targeting in-app surveys such as CES (customer effort score), CSAT, and NPS surveys to understand their points of view.

As a result, you can understand their problems, what they’re expecting to achieve with your product, and where your service excels or falls short.

How to implement it?

In order to collect feedback that’s the most accurate and honest, it’s important to trigger the right survey at the right time and with the right user.

One way is to trigger these surveys after every customer interaction/touchpoint to understand their experience. For example:

• CES survey when a user first interacts with a new feature.
• Satisfaction survey for rating the onboarding experience after a user has completed it.
• CSAT survey after a customer service interaction.

This lets you collect feedback that’s relevant to their specific needs, iterate your customer lifecycle management strategy, and close the feedback loop.

Leverage customer data to offer proactive customer service

Customer data is not only a great way to understand your audience’s pain points, needs, and desires. It’s also a useful way to provide proactive customer service.

This is because you can analyze what’s causing friction, address it, and prevent users from having to search online or reach out to your customer support team or sales team.

As a result, you can solve problems before they happen so users don’t need to experience friction.

How to implement it?

You can offer proactive help depending on your feedback collection method, for instance:

• Using funnel analysis to see if there’s a substantial drop in engagement during the onboarding process, and then make it more user-friendly or interactive.
• Sending CES surveys to understand what features are more challenging to use, then trigger in-app guidance so users won’t feel the need to look for help.
• Measuring feature usage to see if there’s a core feature with low engagement, then work on introducing it to users through hotspots, checklists, or an enhanced UI.

Use product analytics to drive customer retention

Measuring your product performance is fundamental for customer lifecycle management.

This process involves using product analytics to track user behavior, visualize the customer lifecycle map, and pay attention to key engagement metrics like churn rate, session length, and user activity.

With proper analytics, you can identify friction points in the user journey, understand their patterns, and design a product experience that focuses on retaining customers.

How to implement it?

For CLM, you can perform a customer lifecycle analysis to get a wide view of your user’s journey and find actionable insights.

For this, you need to install an analytics tool like Amplitude or Userpilot that can support different types of reports and dashboards, including:

• Funnel analysis. A report that illustrates how users advance through the conversion funnel.
• Path analysis. Which creates a visual on how users navigate through your product, showing their “path”.
• Trend analysis. Analyzes the trends in product usage and conversions in the last months.
• Retention cohorts. Tracks how multiple user cohorts have stayed with your product over the months.

With these reports you can, for example, figure out the specific path that your loyal customers took (i.e. the happy path) and design the product experience to replicate the same path for other users.

Incentivize loyal customers to encourage product advocacy

To expand brand awareness and word-of-mouth, you can set up a loyalty program where customers are awarded points each time they take a desired action, and those points can be exchanged for credits, free months, etc.

These desired actions can involve:

• Following you on socials.
• Making a purchase.
• Writing a review.
• Completing surveys.
• Bringing referrals.

How to implement it?

One way to implement this is to reward your existing users for writing reviews or bringing in referrals through word-of-mouth.

For this, you can trigger an in-app message to promoters (i.e. users who responded to NPS surveys with a score of 9 or more) asking them to write a G2 review in exchange for an Amazon gift card.

As a result, you’ll be able to gather more reviews and expand your brand awareness automatically.

Conclusion

When implemented well, these customer lifecycle management best practices will go a long way to retain users and support your business’s bottom line.

From personalizing the product experience, creating an in-app resource center, and providing proactive customer service, all you need is the right tools to implement them without coding.

Interested in improving your customer lifecycle management? Book a Userpilot demo to see how you can streamline the whole customer lifecycle!

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What are the 10 Dysfunctions of Product Management?

In short, these are the 10 common problems that most product teams face, originally identified by Ben Foster and Rajesh Nerlikar in their best-seller Build What Matters.

Our article explores each of these dysfunctions and shows you how you can leverage Userpilot to overcome them.

Let’s get right to it!

TL;DR

1. The Hamster Wheel: teams often chase one feature after another without linking them to user needs, resembling a hamster wheel. Solution: create an outcome-based roadmap by identifying customer needs and wants.
2. The Counting House: an obsession with internal metrics, like customer retention, can make teams lose sight of delivering customer value. Solution: use in-app surveys to collect qualitative customer feedback, focusing on customer satisfaction and UX improvement.
3. The Ivory Tower: teams that stop consulting customers build products that don’t meet market needs. Solution: interview customers regularly.
4. The Science Lab: overemphasis on minor optimizations to existing solutions can result in missing out on innovative ideas. Solution: create a balanced product development roadmap focusing on optimization and innovation.
5. The Feature Factory: prioritizing feature delivery over problem-solving leads to an endless cycle of unimpactful features. Solution: reflect on the underlying problems behind feature requests and focus on innovative solutions.
6. The Business School: excessive reliance on data can lead to analysis paralysis. Solution: visualize data and run quick experiments to facilitate decision-making.
7. The Roller Coaster: rapid, frequent changes in direction can lead to wasted resources and a lack of product focus. Solution: align product initiatives with the vision and strategy and validate ideas.
8. The Bridge to Nowhere: over-engineering for hypothetical future needs creates complex and costly products. Solution: focus on current needs using customer feedback and user behavior tracking for guidance.
9. The Negotiating Table: trying to please all stakeholders leads to conflicting priorities and neglecting customer needs. Solution: prioritize requests that deliver customer value using feedback and product data.
10. The Throne Room: centralized decision-making by a single leader slows down processes and undermines team competence. Solution: promote a data-driven decision culture through data democratization initiatives.

Want to learn how Userpilot can help you overcome the 10 dysfunctions of product management? Book the demo!

Dysfunction #1: The Hamster Wheel – a focus on output over outcomes

The first dysfunction, The Hamster Wheel, is about excessive focus on outputs and not outcomes.

What’s the difference?

Outputs are the specific product features, while outcomes are customer problems that need to be solved. There’s nothing wrong with shipping features if they solve genuine problems and add value to the product.

However, many product teams fall into the trap of chasing one feature after another without reflecting on how they link to customer needs. As there are countless features you could build, this never stops. Hence, the name ‘hamster wheel.’

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

Userpilot offers analytics and feedback features that can help you identify customer pain points inside the product and unsatisfied needs. This will help you create an outcome-based roadmap.

Once you identify the problems to solve and develop the solutions, you can then use Userpilot to track the key customer success metrics to see if they’ve made the desired impact.

Such an approach takes away the pressure to hit shipment deadlines and fosters a customer-centric approach where delivering valuable products matters above all.

Dysfunction #2: The Counting House – an obsession with internal metrics

It’s easy to get carried away with metrics, just like it is with shipping more and more features. That’s because they’re easy to track and can be used to objectively measure progress.

However, if you’re too focused on internal metrics, like monthly active users, you risk becoming the Counting House. Such metrics are a lagging indicator and prioritizing them makes teams lose sight of their ultimate goal, which is delivering value to customers.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

To overcome the Counting House dysfunction, look for ways to add more value to the product.

Userpilot’s in-app surveys can help with that.

They are easy to create and customize as there’s a template library and visual editor, and you can use them to collect qualitative customer feedback at scale.

That’s how you can track customer satisfaction with the product and identify ways to improve the customer experience.

Dysfunction #3: The Ivory Tower – a lack of customer research

The Ivory Tower dysfunction refers to a situation when the product team makes decisions without talking to customers.

This happens when they get too detached from the user base and assume they know the product so well that they don’t need customer research anymore.

As a result, they end up building a product that nobody needs or wants.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

To overcome the Ivory Tower dysfunction, make a habit of speaking to your customers regularly. This will help you keep track of their changing needs and ensure that your product strategy reflects it.

With Userpilot, you can easily recruit interview participants.

First, use the segmentation functionality to identify the right users. For example, these could be customers holding a particular role or working in a specific niche.

Next, target them with a modal inviting them to take part in the test. Make sure to offer them an incentive, like a voucher.

Dysfunction #4: The Science Lab – optimization to the exclusion of all else

Science lab product teams focus too much on the optimization of metrics.

Unfortunately, many product teams tend to focus on improving metrics that don’t contribute to product growth. Even if they focus on the right metrics, marginal optimizations will only bring marginal gains. That’s not enough to deliver truly innovative and disruptive solutions.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

Userpilot allows product managers to track all metrics from its dashboards so that you have a clear view of your product performance. You can also run the retention analysis report to measure how product changes affect it over time. In this way, you can easily track the impact of optimizations.

Once you notice, that the impact starts getting less significant, you can divert your attention to other aspects of the product development, like expanding product functionality to increase customer value.

Dysfunction #5: The Feature Factory – an assembly line of features

Just like in the hamster wheel, feature factories prioritize delivering features over solving customer problems and adding value.

The main reason why it happens is the belief that you need to keep adding features to stay competitive and retain customers. Companies are afraid that if they don’t have feature parity with competitors or don’t satisfy every feature request, the product will fail.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

There’s nothing wrong with collecting feature requests.

What matters is how you act on them. Instead of accommodating every single one, take time to reflect on why customers are requesting the features.

If it turns out your product doesn’t solve a relevant user problem, don’t rush to build the feature just yet. Take time to look for more innovative solutions that will differentiate you from competitors. Otherwise, you will always be playing a catch-up game.

Once you build the solution, collect user feedback and use product analytics to assess their success. Iterate on the feedback before moving on to build the next one.

Dysfunction #6: The Business School – the overuse of science and data

The Business School dysfunction is characterized by excessive reliance on data.

Data is essential to make informed product decisions in SaaS.

However, it’s not practical to make all decisions based on data.

First, some things are obvious. For example, you don’t have to analyze terabytes of data to decide if you need a CTA button.

Secondly, there are tons of data to track, and trying to analyze and make sense of it all may result in an inability to make any decision. As a product manager, you must be able to use your experience and intuition, not just data.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

Userpilot can help product managers overcome analysis paralysis in a couple of ways.

The most obvious one is through visualizations.

The platform allows you to visualize key metrics in graphs and charts. This includes trend graphs, funnel charts, retention tables, and feature usage heatmaps.

Thanks to them, it’s very easy to spot trends and patterns without having to pore over the raw data for hours.

Dysfunction #7: The Roller Coaster – fast-paced twists and turns

Life’s a roller coaster but product management shouldn’t be.

When you make too many sudden course changes, consistent product development isn’t possible. That’s because there isn’t enough time to test and refine ideas.

Such whiplash pivots usually result from the lack of patience of the key stakeholders who want to see immediate results.

However, the outcome is just the opposite: a lot of wasted resources and not much to show for it.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

To overcome the dysfunction, go back to the product vision and strategy, and work your way down, ensuring alignment between high-level goals and specific product initiatives.

Before you commit to a feature, take time to validate the idea. For example, use Userpilot to run fake door tests.

Once you start developing features, launch it sooner rather than later to collect real-life data. Track their adoption and collect feedback on how well it satisfies user needs.

If the initial response is not as you’d hoped for, don’t pull the plug too soon. Iterate on the data to improve it.

Dysfunction #8: The Bridge to Nowhere – over-engineering for future unknowns

We talk about building the bridge to nowhere when the team over-engineers the product to accommodate potential future needs.

The catch is that those future needs may never materialize. This means you end up building a product that’s complex and expensive to maintain for no good reason.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

Instead of guessing what your product might need in the future, use data to decide what it needs now and make it your focus.

With Userpilot, you can collect customer feedback and track user behavior inside the product to determine how well it satisfies user needs and what functionality is missing.

Moreover, conduct tests and experiments to validate ideas and assumptions to ensure you’re developing solutions to real user problems, not hypothetical ones.

Dysfunction #9: The Negotiating Table – trying to keep everyone happy

The negotiating table malfunction stems from the false idea that product managers should keep everybody happy.

Such thinking is dangerous because you can never deliver everything that everyone wants.

If you let this fallacy reign over the development process, you will end up constantly negotiating with stakeholders to accommodate their often conflicting requests and not looking after the customers’ needs.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

The solution to this dysfunction is collecting customer feedback to determine what they need. Such data will help you not only to prioritize your efforts but also secure the buy-in from the key decision-makers.

With Userpilot, you can tag qualitative responses to NPS surveys to easily identify patterns to inform product decisions.

Dysfunction #10: The Throne Room – whipsaw decision-making from the person in charge

The final dysfunction takes place when all decisions are made by the senior person in charge, like the CEO in the throne room.

This is a common occurrence in the startup space when the founders simply can’t let go.

This is suboptimal because it slows down the decision-making process. The sole leader isn’t capable of dealing with the increasing demands to make competent decisions, especially as the product is getting more complex.

It also undermines the people hired to make the decisions, like the product manager.

Overcoming this dysfunction with Userpilot

Data is again the biggest ally when it comes to combating this dysfunction.

By promoting a culture where decisions are based on empirical evidence and people feel comfortable enough to question assumptions openly.

As a no-code platform with an intuitive UI and a flat learning curve, Userpilot can help you democratize data in your organization. By providing teams at all levels with access to data-driven insights, you will give them tools to push back against questionable decisions from the top.

Conclusion

The 10 dysfunctions of product management negatively harm organizations by diverting focus from customer value and strategic goals to short-term outputs and internal metrics. The consequence is products that don’t meet market needs or drive sustainable growth.

If you want to learn more about how Userpilot can help you overcome the dysfunctions, get the demo!

The post The 10 Dysfunctions of Product Management and How to Overcome Them 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.

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Requests for feedback on everything we do online have become a dreary consequence of, well, doing everything online.

We see it constantly on websites from the moment we first arrive – pop-ups asking for feedback when we haven’t even looked around yet. We see it after support sessions in the form of messages asking, “How well did we do?”

On the surface, these appear to be harmless requests to determine if you’re happy with the level of service or support you’ve received. What’s wrong with that?

Well, the question is rarely asked in a balanced or neutral way. It’s frequently asked with a positive bias, much like the waiter who asks, “Did you enjoy your meal?” and not, “How was your meal?”

However, lurking beneath the surface of this seemingly innocuous query is a deeper, far stronger desire to find out how likely you are to buy from them again. Why? Because repeat customers are bankable and those figures look great on monthly management reports.

And the feedback is generically and inaccurately referred to as ‘loyalty’.

Why is the word ‘loyalty’ a misdirection?

‘Loyalty’ encompasses multiple meanings and interpretations. For example, is the type of loyalty we experience from our canine friends the same as the loyalty supermarkets refer to, or the loyalty seen on a battlefield?

The dictionary defines ‘loyal’ as:

“Giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution.”

Loyalty is our natural tendency to show constant support which, in business, translates into customers coming back for more – more services, more products, more entertainment, more time — and all because they want to.

Of course, in reality, loyalty isn’t quite that simple.

Companies design loyalty schemes to bring in more business, but they can be expensive to devise, implement, market, and maintain. And, if the resulting uplift in revenue doesn’t cover the running costs, they may end the scheme. The point at which that happens is precisely when the company finds out how loyal its customers really are.

The birth of the loyalty scheme as we know it today

In the UK, it wasn’t until Sainsbury’s introduced its Homebase Spend & Save program at the peak of the country’s DIY frenzy in 1982, that the loyalty scheme concept captured the public’s imagination, speaking to their desire to get ‘something for nothing’. 

Homebase was possibly the first company to use a plastic card the size of a credit card for this purpose, and it would have had enormous novelty factor back then, adding to its widespread adoption. Simply take your shopping to the checkout, swipe your loyalty card, pay, and leave. Job done.

But there was (and still is) way more to the loyalty card scheme than they led us to believe.

Despite the warm and cuddly impression these companies give, explaining that the scheme is full of benefits for you to enjoy, it’s actually all a tad sinister.

These schemes take full advantage of technological trickery and data mining, in true Big Brother style.

For huge high-street retail chains and superstores, loyalty schemes are the primary mechanism used to capture people’s personal data.

It’s all in the data

Supermarkets in particular know who you are, where you live who, else is in your household, and where you shop. They also know precisely what you buy, when you buy it, and every detail about your personal food choice combinations – including the relationship between the times and days you shop.

Despite what you may believe, the range of products on supermarket shelves is anything but random. Each store knows what its customers are likely to want to buy, and this data is used to predict demand and shape the very products the shops sell. 

Companies collect an immense amount of personal data (so-called ‘big data’) from millions of customers’ shopping habits. Introducing the GDPR in May 2018 was a palpitation-causing moment for many data managers, but the big players quickly cleaned up their act and continued, regardless.

The fact is, customer benefits are genuine and loyalty schemes continue to boost sales revenue, thus creating a band of truly loyal customers.

Or do they?

We all love something for nothing

In the right environment and where demand is high, a loyalty scheme can be highly effective at driving sales, even for small businesses. 

For example, in 2018 a long-established and highly successful fish & chip restaurant near Croydon, Surrey began running its own loyalty card scheme with spectacular results. A typical week saw them give away over 200 free meals, yet turnover and profits continued to rise because to get one free meal, customers would have to pay for five.

It is a win-win, but is that really loyalty, or is that just playing to our natural weakness for getting something for nothing (or even just appearing to)?

If they stopped the scheme, would customers continue to go there, especially if they had to go out of their way to get to the restaurant? Maybe, maybe not – but the business is unlikely to want to find out. Once a loyalty scheme becomes successful, it effectively becomes a hostage to fortune too.

For over 30 years, every type of business from credit card companies to coffee shops to supermarket giants has been running a card-based loyalty scheme in one form or another, and they work well for those businesses with massive high street footfall. 

But what about the faceless companies in sectors such as insurance or finance, and all the independent online businesses? How can they measure loyalty without a physical card being swiped or stamped, or a mobile app being scanned?

Believe it or not, it can be done. Take the insurance comparison website Compare the Market – their Meerkat Meals and Meerkat Movies rewards schemes are as close as it gets to paying customers, indirectly, for their loyalty.

Measuring loyalty on a scale of 1 to 10

In 2003, Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix gave birth to the Net Promoter System as a new and simple way to measure (mainly consumer) customer loyalty.

The system, which is primarily online, is said to “measure the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer” by asking one simple, key question of the consumer in order to elicit a score.

That question is:

“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”

The consumer simply gives their answer by clicking a number on a scale from one to ten. That’s it.

Customers like it because it’s quick and simple, requires no justification or explanation, and is 100% anonymous. (At least it’s intended to be anonymous, but not every company exercises the restraint required to not ask for contact details!)

Business owners like it because, according to Reichheld et al, a lot can be deduced from the score given.

How the scores are interpreted

• Those who score between one and six are known as Detractors. They’re described as “unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.” In plain language, you’d better fear these people because they will bad-mouth your business and actively advise against using you.
• Those who score seven or eight are known as Passives. They’re described as “satisfied, but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.” To put it another way, these people don’t care too much about your business one way or the other. You made no noticeable impact on them.
• Those who score nine or ten are Promoters. They’re described as “loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fuelling growth.” In other words, these people are the Holy Grail. They will actively tell others about their positive experiences and recommend they use you too.

What’s interesting is the assumption that there’s a direct correlation between those who would recommend your company, product, or service and loyalty. It’s taken for granted that these happy customers will come back and buy again and again. 

It begs the question: is there really a direct correlation, or is this just hyperbole developed by Reichheld and his cronies to sell the NPS concept to corporates?

The success of NPS

The Net Promoter System remains massively successful and is widely accepted as the de facto global standard in measuring customer loyalty (as an interpretation of expressed customer satisfaction). 

Yet, despite this success, there are many criticisms of NPS, based primarily on the complete lack of evidence to support the claims that it is a clear and true representation of customer loyalty.

The response from NPS proponents is quite amusing. They say:

“…the practical benefits of the approach (short survey, simple concept to communicate) outweigh any statistical inferiority of the approach.”

It appears they agree that the so-called “facts” are, potentially, nonsense and open to both speculation and interpretation.

As for “statistical inferiority”? Well, we all know what they say about statistics. Okay, for those who don’t know, we should use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination.

Accepting the belief that NPS is a true representation of customer loyalty is no less ridiculous than how we accept a small piece of paper printed with a currency symbol and a value as being money, and will gladly take it in return for the products, services, or time we provide for others.

Neither actually exists. We just choose to believe they do.

At the push of a button

An interesting development in creating an offline version of the Net Promoter System is push-button devices seen in bigger stores, at large public events, exhibitions, and in huge transport hubs, such as airports.

These can be counter-top, tablet-style screens, or floor-standing podiums, each with a set of four or five buttons with symbols ranging from sad (red) to happy (green) that invite visitors to rate their experience with nothing more than a single push of a button.

Back to the original question

“Is it really possible to measure customer loyalty?”

In the same way that a company’s turnover is vanity (much like lots of stamped or swiped loyalty cards), and profit is sanity (much like identifiable, confirmed returning customers), the short answer is: no.

Of course, in eCommerce, “identifiable, confirmed returning customers” are easy to quantify because most online sales require the customer to create or log into an account. Returning customers are therefore easy to identify and might be seen as demonstrating loyalty. So the answer is most likely: yes.

Blind faith

NPS is simple and cost-effective to implement. It’s also way more likely to be used by your customers than any other system or survey you can devise. 

All that’s required is for you, the business owner, to interpret the results in the same way every other NPS adopter has: by agreeing that customers selecting a score from one to ten (or button from sad to happy) are actively demonstrating their level of loyalty to your business, product, service. 

This way, NPS is an effective feedback mechanism that could transform your business – should you choose to act on the results.

What can you do to measure customer loyalty in your business?

Think about your own business, the way it transacts with customers, and the experience it creates in doing so.

How important it is for you to know how satisfied your customers were with their last experience, and whether or not they would recommend you to someone else?

It should be vitally important to you, and you should want to know. Why? Because a recommendation not only builds credibility and brand value, but the resulting customer is free — they cost you nothing to acquire. Ask anyone who has high customer acquisition costs and you’ll appreciate how valuable free customers are.

Using NPS, or your own version of it, isn’t a bad way to begin measuring the reactions of your customers. However, I’d recommend taking a somewhat philosophical view of what the results are telling you, rather than blindly choosing to believe the positive responses accurately represent how loyal your customers will be.

Love this post as much as we do?

Check out more of Clive’s articles on LinkedIn.

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Before you develop your customer acquisition strategy, there are a couple of things you need to roll out across your team and organization.

For example, you need to validate your personas, implement a strong positioning strategy, and find the correct channels for improved customer communication.

But that’s not what you’re here for, because you’ve likely already done this.

If you haven’t and you need more of that, we’ve already gone through the importance of customer acquisition, the customer acquisition funnel, how to refine your current customer acquisition strategy, how to calculate customer acquisition cost (CAC), and more, in our beginners’ guide.

What you’re here for is the next step: finding and leveraging new customer acquisition strategies for your 2023 plan.

After all, this is going to be the natural next step to growing your business, giving your product the recognition it deserves, and increasing your sales.

The seven strategies for new customer acquisition are:

• Improve your user experience,
• Use targeted ads and cart abandonment/email recovery campaigns,
• Provide incentives,
• Develop brand partnerships,
• Build and develop a blog,
• Make use of video content, and
• Improve your site’s SEO practices.

So, let’s stop wasting time, and dive straight into them in more detail.

Improve your user experience

79% of people who don’t like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site. So, if your users have a negative experience, the chances are you’re driving your potential customer straight into the arms of a competitor.

What are some ways you can improve your user experience to acquire new customers?

We’ve put together a few pointers that’ll help you whether you’re a B2B, B2C, physical, or online company.

Make everything nice and easy to look at

How many times have you gone into a store, and gotten frustrated that you can’t find what you’re looking for because there’s no particular layout, the sales items are all thrown together with no rhyme or reason, and the prices aren’t laid out neatly for each product?

Or, how many times have you gone onto a website, only to find the search bar isn’t showing what you need, even though you know they have it, there’s too much text that doesn’t even give you the correct information, and there’s a whole bunch of ads popping up on the screen making it significantly harder to find what you’re looking for?

In both situations, simplifying what a customer is looking at – or reducing their cognitive load – is significantly going to improve their user experience. This’ll enhance the likelihood of a purchase and boost the chances of customer retention.

So, if you have a website:

• Improve your user interface by making your site more image-heavy, text light.
• Make your content skimmable with easy-to-read headings.
• Reduce the number of ads you have so you’re not overwhelming the user. On a single page, give them one product they’ll like to focus on and one call-to-action (CTA).
• Be more purposeful in your layout and where you want the eye to be drawn. Strategically using color can direct the eye in certain directions.

If you have a physical store:

• Modernize the experience by using QR codes to give your customer more information about your products without cluttering the shelves. With this, keep in mind who your customers are – this won’t be for everyone.
• Change locations to make your store more accessible.
• Choose the right music for the store, and at the right volume.
• Make them feel welcome by greeting them at the door, and making sure there are enough employees on the floor that they can find someone for help at any given time.

Simplify the purchasing process

The buying cycle differs depending on whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, and whether you’re online or in-store. But when it comes to actually purchasing the product,  you want to make this as smooth a process as possible, regardless of what it looks like.

Why?

Because this is the final hurdle. They’ve gone through the whole cycle and have made a decision to buy from you.

But, if actually purchasing the product is a convoluted process whereby your sales guy is taking too long to send them the contract, or your employee on the till is asking them 100s of questions on whether they want to sign up for different store cards or giving their email address at checkout, they could easily back out last minute.

And this doesn’t work for acquiring the new customer but for keeping them a customer as well. The next time they’re thinking about buying a product, the purchasing process is going to factor into their decision on who they go to.

Provide rapid customer service

Regardless of your company and your product, you want your customers to feel supported along the customer journey. This accounts for before they’ve bought your product, and after.

So, ensuring your customer service is streamlined for maximum support is going to ensure a bigger return on your investment.

Targeted ads and cart abandonment/email recovery campaigns

What are targeted ads?

Targeted ads are an online marketing technique that is extremely effective and popular. You know when you’re absolutely convinced that your phone is listening to you? Well… it’s not far off the truth.

Marketers and advertisers collect their target audience’s information through cookies – a term you’re very likely familiar with, given the number of websites that now ask you to accept or decline its usage before continuing on with your experience.

Cookies are small online files that get sent from the individual’s browser to the server. So, if you’ve accepted cookies on a site, a company might be able to remember you, your preferences, and your purchasing habits. Then, they might use this information to follow up with you through email or specifically targeted social media ads.

Though relatively creepy if you’re not familiar with it, it’s actually a super handy marketing trick to understand what your potential customers are looking for on your site, giving you the opportunity to retarget them with email campaigns or specific ads to motivate them to finalize their purchases.

What are cart abandonment and email recovery?

Cart abandonment is a term that refers to when your potential customer puts a product in their online shopping cart, and then ends up leaving it there and not finalizing the purchase. This is a relatively common experience, which you’ve likely done yourself.

There are quite a few ways you can reduce cart abandonment, and one of these is through email recovery.

Online clothing stores do this regularly, and it can be an effective way of reminding your potential customer they have something that’d caught their interest and reignites their motivation to purchase.

Below is an email example from the online fashion store Boohoo. Their copy hints at urgency and provides the customer with options to help them complete their purchase (speaking to customer service), or complete their order outright.

Provide incentives

Customer incentives are rewards given to new or existing customers to build the brand and are effective in developing customer loyalty and increasing overall sales.

There are many different types of incentives you can use, and which one will work best depends on factors within your own organization, such as budget, resources, company type, target market, etc.

These customer incentives could be things like:

• Reward loyalty schemes,
• Discounts, deals, and promotions,
• Offering free upgrades or shipping, or
• Early or exclusive access to sales.

Customer incentives aren’t always linked to direct sales. Sometimes, incentives can also be given out for things like maintaining a continued relationship for repeat purchases, having your current customers refer other potential customers, upgrading your current customers to a more expensive plan, and getting case studies to include in your marketing.

So, think about what you want from your potential and existing customers, and then think about what incentives they will get the most out of. This is where your customer research techniques will come in handy.

Develop brand partnerships

Developing brand partnerships is a great way to attract new customers to your business for many different reasons. For example, it gives you the opportunity to reach a new audience of potential customers via a different channel, and at a lower customer acquisition cost.

While you might feel apprehensive about partnering with a company, especially if they’re within the same industry as you, you’re opening up your company to more avenues for recognition and adding more value to your product.

After all, your competitor is a competitor for a reason – they have something within their brand that you don’t! Adding this value to your own brand via a partnership is only going to help your sales.  

Brand partnerships can occur in different ways. For example, integrating your platforms to streamline the process, collaborating and co-branding to create a new feature or product, or even going through the route of sponsorships and affiliate marketing.

Each of these methods is going to have a different impact on your business, but each one is going to help you reach a new audience, in a unique way that’ll bring in more sales and more profits.

Build and develop a blog

70% of consumers learn about a company through its blog rather than ads. So, it’s in your best interest to create a blog that’s going to capture and maintain interest to help lead them through the customer journey.

• Write a blog on a relevant topic
• Highlight how your product or service relates to this and can help them
• Capture their interest in becoming a customer
• Lead them through the sales cycle
• Profit

If your blog is relevant to the industry you’re in, it’s more likely that your company will become a thought leader in the field.

As you continue to establish yourself as an authority figure, your customers will begin to see you as that as well, and will be more motivated to purchase from you, as you’ve developed that trust over time.

You’ll be proving to them that:

1) You know what you’re talking about,

2) You understand their customer needs and pain points because you’re actively writing about how to solve them, and

3) Your product is the real deal, and buying it will help them succeed. going to help them succeed.

Make use of video content

In this day and age, making use of video content is pivotal to business success. In fact, video helps persuade 73% of people to buy a product or a service.

We won’t go into this one in too much detail because we already have a guide written by Michael Prione, Co-founder and Account Director at Vidico that takes a deep dive into:

• How to keep your audience engaged,
• How to map out a video marketing strategy by use case,
• How to use product video marketing for customer retention, and
• A video content checklist that’ll help you succeed.

How to ace your product video marketing

Find out how to create effective video content within your product marketing team. Here we share strategies for B2B or B2C marketers. Learn more.

Product Marketing AllianceMichael Pirone

While video content supports the marketing of your product, it’s also a tried and tested technique for onboarding customers. After all, a video is always going to be more digestible than a long list of instructions.

Improve your site’s SEO practices

While SEO won’t directly affect your customer’s purchasing decisions, it does play a part in ensuring your customers actually see your site.

Our very own Chief Marketing Officer, Bryony Pearce, wrote an article on how to improve your product’s organic visibility. Have a read and begin thinking about how you can start implementing this into your own approach to increase site traffic, increase your potential customers, and work toward converting them into actual customers.

Streamline your customer research process

Understanding who your customers are, what their pain points are, and how to connect with them are three fundamental parts of customer acquisition.

You can’t afford to overlook what your customers are saying, thinking, and asking for. If you ignore these things, chances are they’re going to look elsewhere for a company and product that actually answers and compliments their needs.

Our Customer Research Certified: Masters course is taught by one of the leading experts in understanding your customer: Lauren Culbertson, Co-founder, and CEO of LoopVOC.

It covers the essential knowledge and audience research tools needed to gather, synthesize, and analyze customer research, and transform those insights into actionable outputs that drive revenue, explaining the key steps on how to conduct market research for a business plan.

Get certified, gain fundamental skills, and get to the heart of what your customers really want.

Grow your customer acquisition

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It can be quite a challenge to find and address the points of friction that are chasing your customers away. In our latest webinar, we’ve shared a three-pronged approach to help you drive retention and reduce churn.

It’s probably fair to say we’re all a bit obsessed with growth. We create our business strategies around driving growth, and look to growth as the key indicator of the health and viability of our companies. But while acquiring new customers is obviously a critical part of having a business, it’s hardly sustainable if they only ever stick around for a few months.

“Are you attracting and engaging the right customers? Are you providing the right support and delivering ongoing value? And where should you start?”

A 1% increase in customer acquisition affects your bottom line by just over 3%, while a 1% decrease in churn can boost it by 7%, which means, in the end, retention can be more than twice as powerful as customer acquisition. Are you attracting and engaging the right customers? Are you providing the right support and delivering ongoing value? And where should you start?

We recently hosted a webinar where Japna Sethi, Group Product Manager at Productboard, and Chip Lay, Director of Product Strategy at Fullstory, joined me to chat about strategies for identifying your customers’ pain points, uncovering valuable insights from customer’s feedback and data, and creating proactive support measures that drive value across the entire customer cycle.

“It can be intimidating starting with a blank chart and not knowing exactly where to go first … You see a data point that looks bad, but why? Why are the people dropping out at step three?” Chip Lay, Director of Product Strategy at Fullstory

Retention is about more than onboarding

Spoiler alert: this isn’t about onboarding campaigns. Don’t get us wrong – they’re really important when it comes to customer retention, and we’ve covered them extensively in blog articles, podcast episodes, and even in our recently refreshed guide, The Onboarding Starter Kit.

But they’re not the whole picture. To increase retention and reduce churn consistently, you need a system that continuously drives value for your customers across their entire lifecycle. And that’s why, today, we’re sharing a tried and tested three-step approach to help you achieve it. Read on for the highlights and, if you want to dive into the specifics, watch the full recording here.

1. Understanding where – and why – your customers are getting stuck

• Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, such as session replays and A/B testing, provides a better context of what’s happening and can uncover new areas of research.
• Not all friction is created equal. Quantify the impact of each point of friction and prioritize the ones that are having the most impact on your business.

“The idea is to use qualitative and quantitative together in a flywheel to help you ask better questions and move faster. You can use product analytics to discover new areas for research. You can use qualitative inputs to spark ideas for experiments to run.” Chip Lay, Director of Product Strategy at Fullstory

2. Organizing customer feedback

• After identifying the what and the why, the next step is collecting and centralizing all customer feedback – direct and indirect – so you can turn it into actionable insights.
• Segmenting feedback by company attributes or characteristics allows you to identify patterns and make prioritization decisions in a dynamic way.
• Use those insights to provide clarity and transparency on decisions to stakeholders.

“This gives a lot of context, not only to help you make decisions, but also for your team to understand why you made certain prioritization decisions. It really helps align the entire organization on one strategy.” Japna Sethi, Group Product Manager, Growth, at ProductBoard

3. Proactively engaging and supporting your customers

• While product announcements are important, they should be just one of many tactics.
• Use the Swiss Cheese Method to “stack” proactive support measures in different formats and channels, such as Product Tours and Tooltips, to ensure the message gets across and customers get value from your updates.
• Proactive support tactics can showcase the value of product changes at the moment the customer needs it the most and drive adoption long after the initial product announcement.

“The more tactics you use, the less likely you’re going to have people slipping through the cracks and the more customers are going to learn about what was released and how they’re able to get value from what you just shipped.” Mark Iafrate, Product Marketing Manager at Intercom

For a further look into these strategies to improve retention and reduce churn, register to watch the full webinar here

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This article derives from a Q+A at the Product Marketing Summit, Seattle in 2022. For more exclusive content, visit your member dashboard.

“The customer knows best.”

A well-established expression for many companies – and for good reason. Ultimately, your customer is going to buy your product based on what they want and are looking for – not what you think will sell well.

Gathering these consumer insights is your opportunity to tailor your products – and how you market them – to their personalized needs, hopefully then bringing in those coveted sales.

But how can you do this successfully?

In this article, Aileen McGraw, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoFundMe outlines the guiding principles of gathering consumer insights, focusing specifically on:

• What are consumer insights?
• B2B vs B2C consumer insights
• Quantitative vs qualitative data in consumer insights
• How to gather consumer insights
• The most valuable tools for gathering consumer insights

What are consumer insights?

Q: How would you describe consumer insights, and what role do you play in that practice?

A: I think consumer insights is deceptively simple. It’s all about understanding your (and I’m stressing that word for a reason) customer and using that information to drive greater business impact. I think of the product marketer’s role within that as making a path to understanding our customers.

An insight is a combination of a few things. First of all, there are facts. Many of us have access in our roles to a lot of quantitative data, behavioral data, facts on the ground, market data, and data about our competitors.

Those are facts, and they can hint at decisions, but you’ll be left wondering what all those numbers mean unless you can combine them with recommendations.

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No one needs to be reminded of how turbulent the past few years have been – and how much more turbulent the world seems to become with each passing day.

But for marketers, there’s no ignoring the need to find better ways to understand and connect with customers and prospects in a world where nothing is constant and vague notions about your customers and prospective customers will dismantle even the most compelling campaigns.

Today, more than ever before, consumers are shopping with their hearts and their wallets. They support brands whose values align with their own.

Look no further than Goya taking heat for its CEO’s support of Trump or investors who are diverting assets to companies that show long-term ESG (environmental, social, and governance) commitments at record rates.

For marketers, the real question then becomes this: How can you proactively align with consumer values and adopt them authentically in your messaging?

Let’s take a look at why personal values are exceptionally reliable drivers of buying decisions today and how marketers can use personal values to deliver messaging that resonates with target audiences, strengthens brand loyalty, and grows revenue.

Bridging the customer-centricity disconnect

Not every brand can (or necessarily should) build a reputation for activism like Ben & Jerry’s, which recently put itself at the forefront of the ongoing push for gun control in the U.S. But that doesn’t mean every brand shouldn’t be putting in the work to align its brand values with its consumers’ personal values.

These days, a tremendous delta exists between marketers’ and consumers’ opinions on how well today’s companies are putting people at the center of their decision-making.

While 84% of global decision-makers from enterprise-level companies say they “put the customer first,” only 26% of U.S. online adults agree that “companies do a good job of understanding me as a person.”

So where’s the disconnect? The answer lies in a deeper understanding of human values. Often, marketing conversations around “values” can feel fuzzy and imprecise, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

There are frameworks, including Professor Shalom Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values, that provide concrete, cross-culturally stable ways in which to understand and quantify the values and motivations that underpin people’s attitudes and behaviors.

By applying such frameworks, marketers can unlock the consumer understanding – the real human element – that is required to establish deeper connections in a purpose-driven world.

As an example, let’s take a specific human value identified in Schwartz’s framework: authority. Audiences who are characterized by this value – the drive to be in charge and direct people – are more likely to be drawn to marketing messages that are succinct and accentuate results.

Themes such as confidence and assertiveness are often applicable to this audience, and marketers might want to consider emphasizing how their products or services can assist a consumer in becoming more socially powerful and influential, and “in control” of a situation.

The same translation of values into concrete messaging strategies can be applied across the spectrum of human values, from dependability to creativity.

When things look similar, go deeper

OK, so why are human values so powerful when it comes to honing marketing strategies? Let’s illustrate the point by delving into profiles of customers within a specific product category: smart speakers.

When looking at audience profiles, marketers instinctively think about demographics. And indeed, when you look at the demographics of people who buy Sonos speakers vs. those who buy Amazon speakers, the audiences look fairly similar.

But when audiences look similar, you need to look deeper. For example, when you look at these audiences according to what they look for in a product, we see that Sonos owners want products that are fun and exciting, as well as high quality. Meanwhile, Amazon owners want popular products that are family-friendly, yet luxurious.

Furthermore, Sonos owners are far more likely than Amazon speaker owners to shop based on issues that are important to them and to follow or like brands and products on social media.

Already marketers can start to see how messaging to these audiences can become more targeted. But they shouldn’t stop there. This is where personal values become essential to honing messaging and creativity.

In this case, when layering on personal values insights, we find that Sonos speaker owners tend to place the most value on conformity, dependability, and humility, while Amazon speaker owners value achievement, influence, and creativity.

By going deeper in this way, marketers are able to get a look at the real human element—that dynamic, holistic 360-degree view of a person that combines core attributes like demographics and psychographics with values and motivations to reveal why people choose, buy, advocate or abandon a brand.

Leveraging AI-powered consumer data that illuminates consumers’ values, and provides a continuously updated view of consumer sentiments, companies are able to craft and deploy marketing programs that resonate—even in a chaotic and turbulent world.

In doing so, they can cut through the clutter and successfully reinforce their brands in the minds and hearts (and wallets) of the consumer—in a way that would be difficult for a competitor to duplicate.

The post How brands can align with consumer values in times of turmoil appeared first on ProdSens.live.

A few years ago, we published The Customer Retention Starter Kit which helped thousands of businesses retain more customers over the long term. Today, we’re launching a completely refreshed guide to help you engage, nurture, and retain more customers in the modern age.

In today’s digital era, engaging and retaining the customers you have is easier and more efficient than winning new ones. Plus, turbulent economic times like these have shown us just how hard it is to win customer loyalty. In order to survive and thrive, businesses need to provide ongoing value that’s worth customers sticking around for.

“Modern customers want immediate value, convenient communications, personalized interactions, and proactive engagement”

Modern customers have high expectations when it comes to the online experience. They want immediate value, convenient communications, personalized interactions, and proactive engagement. That means automatically sending the right message to the right person at the right time – while they’re using your product, app, or website. And, if your customer can’t find that in your business, they may begin to search elsewhere.

That’s where our refreshed starter kit comes in! We’ll show you how to create a truly targeted customer retention messaging campaign that turns struggling signups into a series of churn-resistant power users.

How our refreshed guide will help you retain more customers

In this guide, you’ll learn how to create effective, personalized retention campaigns that set your customers up for success, help them find value faster, encourage repeat visits, and entice them to stick around for the long term.

You’ll walk away with key insights into:

• What a good customer retention campaign looks like.
• Best practices for creating a deeply personalized retention campaign.
• Examples of impactful messages to send and when to send them.
• How to measure the success of your campaign.
• A checklist for getting your campaign started.

Retain more customers for long-term success

Customer retention is the new conversion – and it’s never been more critical to long-term business success than it is today. Businesses need to optimize their customer experience to ensure it’s compelling enough to keep customers returning again and again. Download the guide to start creating personalized, timely retention campaigns that build long-lasting relationships with your customers.

The post Announcing our refreshed guide ‘The Customer Retention Starter Kit’ appeared first on ProdSens.live.