8 underutilized tools to identify customer negative experiences
Product Excellence: Continuously improving your product by reducing friction
Congratulations! You launched your product. After the celebrations calm down, do you spend time ensuring your products are not creating friction or negative experiences?
Typically, Product teams might fall into three categories
Feature-focused: You are being asked by your leadership team to build another “important” feature or product. You have very limited or no bandwidth to continue to improve what you have already built.
Revenue Focused: You and your team are able to continuously add new features to your product to improve acquisition, retention, and revenue. However, this takes up so much of your team’s time that there is limited bandwidth to fix any customer issues beyond P0, and P1 bugs.
Customer-focused: You are on an empowered product team. You are a true customer evangelist. Your team obsesses over continuing to build value to customers AND reducing negative experiences. You get to focus on continuously improving your products post-launch through
Continuous Discovery - Continuous Discovery will help product managers learn how to create more value from your products. I share a bit about how to learn from customers in a previous post.
Reducing negative experiences -In this post, I will focus on our responsibility of learning about the friction we might be causing our customers as they interact with our products. Sometimes teams think this is hard but it actually is not. There are easy ways to learn about what your customers are experiencing and saying about your product without going through complex dashboards or research studies.
Here are some easy ways to learn about how your
App Store - For products that are apps, app reviews on all app stores are an important source to gather insights. While customers might leave feedback about the entire app, there will be reviews about individual products or features that you own.
Google - Interestingly, google reviews don’t just work for small businesses and restaurants but also for large products and companies. Look up your company name on google maps and you will find reviews. Especially customers who have any negative feedback will find a way to let their voices be heard.
Community Forums - There are some community forums that are relevant for some products and it is a great place to receive feedback as well as engage with customers
Social Media - Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook are all places where you can search and find input. Especially on your product pages or accounts.
Experts/Influencers - Follow experts or influencers who might be writing reviews about products in your industry and you might find interesting input about their reviews of your product.
Customer Service - Your customer service teammates should be your best friends. Listening to calls when possible, getting their insights, leveraging tools they might provide you, and following their data will help us identify friction and problems we need to solve to improve your experiences.
Employees - Our employees often dogfood our products and are also often the voices of their friends and family members who might experience issues. Pay attention to them. Create mechanisms to collect their input.
Data and Analytics - This is the most common medium. Every PM has access to data and dashboards. However, it is important to look past the metrics and generate insights about how the product might or might not be working for the customer. Paying attention to product surveys or comments customers might leave on your help center or other tools is a rich source of data.
“The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.” - Brian Herbert.
I hope you are taking advantage of these media to learn and improve.
💬 Are there other such media or tools that you leverage to understand customer negative experiences? Please share below in the comments
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