Getting the attention of any customer is hard enough, but getting deep engagement with your product is the lifeblood of any product or customer experience team. Even leading companies with great web and mobile app experiences struggle to isolate which factors specifically drive engagement, increase retention, and delight customers. Understanding which product features, or digital touchpoints create noise, frustration, or confusion — demands fingertip access to high-quality data across all departments.
Yet, surprisingly few product and CX teams actually have this ability today.
The most successful product and CX organizations enable their teams to deeply study each customer journey in order to understand the most granular drivers of engagement. These companies remove barriers between teams and their ability to ask complex questions from all their customer event data quickly and iteratively. To enable this fluidity of analysis, they remove the drag created by data dependencies between product, service, marketing, and data science teams in order to put the right data at the fingertips of CX teams.
Equipped with the right data and the right tools, product and CX teams have the opportunity to fully understand the customer experience. This doesn’t just mean graphs of aggregates and averages. The right data includes every single individual interaction from a single user click through the entire customer journey. Product and CX teams need to very closely explore and observe which customer interactions are correlated with success and which ones lost interest. With this understanding, product and CX teams can understand more about why customers do what they do, discover opportunities to serve them better, and quickly tailor their products and service to do so.
Read on to find out how product and CX teams can easily accomplish this with a robust, unified customer experience analytics platform.
Productizing success with flows and segmentation
We’ve seen firsthand how some of the most innovative product and CX teams leverage CX analytics—including segmentation, user flows, and cohort analysis to drive product enhancements. For example, a product or CX team can use segmentation capabilities to pinpoint their most successful users. They then can utilize flow engines to deeply examine differences in the patterns of behavior between power users and those who engaged less.
After tailoring their own definition of engagement–not a canned, inflexible one–these teams can discover that a successful and specific action most associated with an engaged customer was that they followed a specific news feed on their mobile app. With this insight, a product and service teams can double down to find out more about how power users remained engaged if they followed one, two, or three specific feeds on their first day.
Using A/B testing analysis, teams can also deduce whether a user following three feeds, and sharing content with at least one friend, would almost certainly be a long-term, engaged power user. Product and CX teams can leverage this information to optimize their sharing capabilities and redesign the onboarding experience to make these features more prominent. In doing so, a brand can design its product to encourage users to engage in content, select feeds that interest them, and share the news with at least one friend.
You don’t know what you don’t know
The magic in self-service behavioral analysis is that all teams have the ability to freely think of new questions and answer them without being encumbered by different teams or limited systems.
Data science team and developers can’t continually instrument your platform with new frameworks and tools to collect data for the questions you haven’t yet formed. And yet domain experts–product managers, designers, developers–are the ones who need to ask questions.
To get to the most interesting answers–the most valuable insights–you need to let specific customer actions guide your questions. You want to continue getting more detail and get closer to the root cause until you have actionable answers and information. You don’t want to trust your gut or opinion. You don’t want developers to have to change data pipelines to find answers. You don’t want engineering to have to re-instrument the entire application. You want to remove all the obstacles and be able to answer your own questions and get answers fast.
It’s simple, in theory
Viewing CX as a product means understanding fundamental concepts of corporate strategies–products should be customer-driven, built specifically to address needs that have yet to be met, and continuing to enhance the features that provide value.
This is where the theoretical becomes more complex–creating a data-driven, high-value customer experience means championing a dramatic shift in culture. First, as with any new directive, a passionate executive is needed to position the core elements of adopting a new product or service: infrastructure, resources, and the charter to deliver. These requirements apply directly to the product as well; though the immediate differentiator becomes the size of the company using the product. If the product is, say, the ocean, then the size of the company determines the type of sailing vessels populating that ocean–it’s far more difficult and time-consuming to steer a cruise ship (like a Fortune 100 company), than it is to steer a jet ski (like a new startup). In fact, digitally native startups often consider designing CX before the company is even launched! Both boats are en route to their destination, but at different speeds, using different methods to get there safely, and in style.
Asking the right questions, and building a seamless CX
Small and large companies alike are both vying for customer attention and loyalty, but have to go about earning it in vastly different ways. Some of the world’s top companies are riding the crest of the CX wave–integrating and utilizing detailed analytics to change how enterprises collaborate. The effectiveness is apparent, as businesses are combining daily, easy-to-use analytics while simultaneously keeping a watchful eye on customer interactions. All in a quest to discover, simply, what works, and why.
To determine this, businesses must be able to ask the right questions in order to quickly locate and deal with inefficiencies. There’s simply no faster way to get things done. Once a company or business jumps down the CX rabbit hole, results are shared among employees, and momentum, as well as adoption rates, spread like wildfire through each and every department.
In today’s digital economy, seamlessness is a keyword that drives businesses forward. Think about it. How often have you added items to your digital cart, only to abandon the purchase? How many times have you abandoned an app because of glitches or imperfections, in search of a new one? The customer experience must be seamless–the smallest misstep or source of confusion on the customer end is enough to end the experience altogether.
To illustrate the importance of this concept, think about your favorite mobile application. There’s got to be a myriad of factors that make you return and engage with it repeatedly–familiarity, ease of use, intuitive interface, trust in secure payments–the list goes on and on. What’s great about software in this new digital age is that all applications are iterative–developers are working on improving the product as you continue to use it.
This is why, in 2022, CX is everyone’s job. From design to development, from marketing to sales, from support to finance–it’s vital that everyone understands what their customers do, how they act, what they buy, engage in, and share. This has never been more critical.
Leveraging CXA platforms, like Scuba
When businesses can simply focus on knowing more, they can then transition that focus to solving problems, fixing inefficiencies, improving experiences, and making the CX intent crystal clear to customers. Scuba Analytics helps brands and their team accomplish exactly that.
Scuba Analytics is a self-service CXA continuous intelligence platform that gives every team the agency to run no-code queries, drill into customer journeys, and track a brand’s most important KPIs.
Industry leaders are transforming their businesses for better and for always–it just takes the right mindset, a commitment to cultural change, a team of focused individuals, and, arguably most importantly, the right platform.
If you’re attending the Customer Response Summit on March 29th, check out Scuba CEO Tony Ayaz’s presentation — Transform Data Insights into Powerful Customer Experiences—where he’ll dive into some of these topics in more detail.
Guest post written by: Scuba Analytics. To learn more about this and other critical CX topics, register for Execs In The Know’s Customer Response Summit Clearwater .
