How Product Analytics Can Transform Product/User Experience?

For a firm offering any type of service to a wide range of people, analytics can be a catalyst to enhance its operations and reach. In the age of data and analysis, companies can avail of the benefits of such technology to understand the ever-changing trends of the market and its demands as well. As the number of challenges grows owing to globalization, all the market-players are up in the race to be innovative and best with improved services at competitive prices. Amid this, the technological advents of big data and analytics can assist them through this market shift.

Companies of all sizes, today, are realizing the value of technology and moving towards providing a personalized and customized user experience to their customers. Following the globalization trends, the values and expectations of consumers are transforming from traditional attributes to more convenient and connected products. As advancement is pacing, companies should focus more on creating unique and sustainable experiences that can generate accelerated customer engagements.

To drive such an impact, the services catered by a company should interact well with the customers to enhance the product as well as customer experience. Although, it is a smaller entity enveloped in the concept of customer experience that happens between a brand and the customer, yet product experience serves with a greater role in attracting and interacting with customers on an ethical, aesthetical and emotional basis.

Therefore, considering it a crucial element of product marketing, companies should adopt product analytics in its mainstream marketing strategies. It will help understand what exactly the customer needs. The product leaders, designers, and developers across the companies use analytical data to guide their decisions and study the customer behavior pattern.

Gartner describes product analytics as, “a specialized application of business intelligence (BI) and analytical software that consumes service reports, product returns, warranties, customer feedback and data from embedded sensors to help manufacturers evaluate product defects, identify opportunities for product improvements, detect patterns in usage or capacity of products, and link all these factors to customers.”

According to the research firm, product analytics can also incorporate feeds from social platforms to track complaints about products. By analyzing product data feeds in real-time, this software can proactively alert manufacturers to service and replacement needs in reactive as well as preventive maintenance scenarios, and help route service requests to the proper individuals or, with the help of machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, perform service remotely.

Additionally, product analytics is based on two core functions to answer the most important question about users – tracking data and analyzing data. Through these, they can improve product retention, segment the most profitable users, decide the next investment, understand how customers are using their services and reduce churn rates.

The features of the product analytics tools used by companies to uncover insights from various platforms are:

• Automatically tracking events inside the site or app

• Discovering the users and segment them on the basis of device, time, region and behavior

• Sending notifications to customers to communicate with them and send alerts to the product team

• Viewing and analyzing customer journey and conversion with respect to the brand and product

• Testing variations and messaging or features

• Visualizing data with templated or custom reports through dashboard displays

• Measuring customer engagement by feature

However, users are not quite proficient at predicting their own futures but having analytics predicting for them and digging deep through surveys and user interviews to gain hyper-detailed data can lead to more profitable and informed decisions. According to management consulting company McKinsey, “Companies that use customer analytics comprehensively report outstripping their competition in terms of profit almost twice as often as companies that do not.”