The Ultimate Guide to Improve Product Experience (PX)
June 24, 2022 Edwin Kooistra
Understanding product experience, especially from a customer’s eyes, is critical to your business success and relevant to your overall business strategy and value proposition. Organizations sometimes fail to emphasize the human part, that is, the psychographics of the overall customer experience, and therefore, they neglect the importance that product experience carries.
Once you’re able to reflect on the essence of product experience for the customer as well as for yourself, especially in terms of internal stakeholders, you will not only be able to identify opportunities for improvements and growth, but you will also realize the actual issue that the product or service targets in clear terms.
Providing a good product experience (PX) to your customer adds to the customer’s satisfaction level and impacts their self-esteem and positive attitude.
This guide will look at what product experience is and how you can improve the same to deliver the best results for your business and your customers.
What is Product Experience (PX)?
Product Experience (PX) refers to the feelings, sentiments, and impulses that a user or customer has when using a product. It is the portion of customer or consumer experience that occurs within or with the product. Every second a customer interacts with the product should be considered a product experience.
It is essentially a subset of the overall user experience. It focuses on the complete customer journey that occurs within the item itself. It lasts from the first time a consumer starts using a product to the last time they use a service or product.
What is the difference between PX & CX
Product experience (PX) is often confused with customer experience (CX). Product experience is a subcategory of customer experience. It is based on product interactions. Customers care the most about the goods while they are onboard.
The product is the critical flagship in B2B firms since it contributes significantly to the customer experience. Customers’ perceptions of your product, its features, and more are dependent on their interactions with it.
In simpler words, Customer Experience (CX) is the total impression of a firm formed through interactions across many touch points. Product Experience (PX) is the impression consumers have of your product based on their interactions with it.
Why is Product Experience Important?
Good product experience that is instinctive is more critical than ever. A bad product experience will drive people away or make them avoid using a product to cater to a pain point. Meanwhile, positive product experiences boost usage, loyalty, and customer retention.
We shall now look at the main reasons that will help us understand why product experience is essential and should be treated as a separate entity in the overall customer journey rather than as a minute portion of the overall customer experience.
Aids Smoother On-Boarding
When you understand the product experience, you can investigate the customer’s mind and strategies accordingly to make the attraction process smoother for potential customers. Not only is that easier for the organization but the customer as well.
The psychological insights that you receive from the analysis of product experience help you pinpoint the significant areas that impact customer onboarding. Thus, you can develop a smoother onboarding mechanism.
Keep Existing Customers Happy
Knowledge and understanding of product experience ensure that you can keep your current customers happy. You know the features and value-added things that make the customer pleased through the insights saved in the product experience. Therefore, you’re able to maintain your current portfolio of clients.
Create Opportunities for Expansion & Growth
Good product experience is not only helpful in analyzing the positives of your product and how well it caters to the customer’s psychological needs, but it also helps you identify areas where you can improve the product experience and, as a result, create different opportunities.
This improvement of product experience can help you identify opportunities for expansion and growth into different market segments and other areas of improvement in your product or service.
Identify Pain Points and Areas for Improvement
Actual product experience management comes when you can identify different pain points in areas for improvement within your product or service and during the whole product journey for your customer.
Product experience helps you identify the issues that your customer is facing in the use of the product and makes it easy for you to highlight these areas that need attention and improvement in the longer run.
Help In Mapping the Customer’s Journey
Product experience is also essential because it helps a business map out its customer’s journey. It is not only a critical component of the customer journey but also a very insightful one.
This is because product experience incorporates the customer psyche and psychographic dimensions. We know that at the end of the day is about how a business appeals to the customer’s mind.
Improve Customer Retention and Loyalty
Another primary reason product experience is significant is that it helps improve customer retention ratio and customer loyalty. When you analyze the product experience and highlight the areas that concern and impact the customer the most, especially their psyche, you can utilize the same areas to your benefit.
If those areas need improvement, you can work on them to improve customer retention. If they’re already one of the best in the industry, you can ensure that you maintain the standards and keep adding to them in terms of technology or new features to improve customer loyalty.
Understand the Product Experience
Understanding and managing product experience is not as easy as it seems. It comprises multiple facets and layers that must be understood and analyzed in concurrence to make proper sense of the product experience and how it can be improved to enhance the overall customer success journey.
Let’s look at the different factors in product experience management and understand the various layers involved in this process:
- Product Managing Team
- Customer Feedback
- Data Analytics
- Product Development Cycle
- User Engagement
Product Managing Team
Like any other experience journey, the product experience relies heavily on the product management team and how well they can integrate all the facets of the overall customer journey and the product experience to deliver tangible results.
Unless the firm has a professional product designer or lead, product management teams take the lead in defining the product experience.
Consumer interface/graphic design personnel are also essential. They share responsibility for experiential marketing and knowledge to improve things from a consumer standpoint. Product development is involved in creating the product and the designs of the UX team.
Customer Feedback
To understand the product experience in detail with psychographic insights, customer feedback is one of the most significant sources you can utilize. Business owners can collect this feedback through a multitude of methods and tools.
Customer feedback comes from various sources, including customer service, account management, and sales. They communicate with clients and prospects more regularly and can give consumer feedback. This raises the standing of requests and complaints received through them. They can also quantify support inquiries and detect trouble regions and friction spots.
Data Analytics
Businesses no longer need to rely on personal observations and “intuitions” to understand how their goods are being used by their consumers. Analytics collects, aggregates, and analyses user behavior in various ways.
Product teams may use analytics to determine the cause. Which conduct leads to the use of a particular feature? What factors contribute to the higher frequency and extended usage? Which encounters lead to cancellation or abandonment? It ultimately comes down to data-driven decision-making, which will moderate the expectations and desires of relevant stakeholders.
Product Development Cycle (Prioritization)
Prioritization is required to identify what to produce and when in any product development cycle. Prioritization is driven by analytics and feedback in the product experience framework.
This contrasts with prioritizing and planning based only on what the organization hopes to accomplish. Many aspirations and desires of real users may not contribute significantly to attaining the company’s strategic goals and KPIs. But they still must be catered to.
User Engagement
New users require onboarding, which combines basic product instruction with urging to accomplish early actions that contribute to more significant usage. Furthermore, as the product introduces a new feature, you must notify consumers about its advantages and how to utilize it best. This is when engagement techniques come into play.
But if usage falls or ceases entirely, encourage lost users to re-engage. This might include highlighting added features, new functionality, or pertinent success stories.
10 Tips to Improve Product Experience (PX)
We shall now look at the top-rated product experience tips that can help you improve the product experience for your offering to increase customer satisfaction levels and find more significant and better opportunities for effectiveness, business growth, and expansion.
- Data-Driven Decision
- Product Positioning
- Optimize Product Development Processes
- Be Consistent and Creative with Your Product User Guides
- Assign Roles and Responsibilities to Team
- Prioritize Fixes Affecting User Journey & Experience
- Focus On Building Trust
- A/B Testing
- Use A Holistic Approach
- Prioritize Customer’s Feedback
1 – Data-Driven Decision
Use different analytic tools to analyze product experience data to make relevant decisions for improving product experience.
2 – Product Positioning
When your product is positioned right in the market, it also reflects very well on the product experience. Therefore, ensure that for all your products and services, the positioning has been done right to begin with.
3 – Optimize Product Development Processes
The product development process takes a considerable amount of time. Therefore, work on removing redundant steps and optimizing and making the process more efficient.
4 – Be Consistent and Creative with Your Product User Guides
Product guides and information are handy for customers. It helps them make the most out of a product and its proposition. Consequently, keep updating them and approach the material with a creative and exciting angle.
5 – Assign Roles and Responsibilities to Team
As discussed above, the product management team is not solely based on one specialized function but has inputs from all over the organization. Therefore, clear assignment of roles and job duties must be ensured.
6 – Prioritize Fixes Affecting User Journey & Experience
Whenever feedback is received or via issues recognized by internal stakeholders, you should work on fixing those issues on priority, which directly affects the product experience and the user journey.
7 – Focus On Building Trust
Developing a relationship based on trust between internal and external stakeholders and your customers improves the product experience.
8 – A/B Testing
It is always time-efficient and the right approach to test two possible options simultaneously via A/B testing to identify the best features and characteristics suited to your customer.
9 – Use A Holistic Approach
When developing the customer experience or improving the product experience, always take on an approach in which all internal and external stakeholders and even third party individuals are involved, and their input is taken and given importance.
10 – Prioritize Customer’s Feedback and Pain Points
Always give importance to and prioritize the customer feedback, especially the areas that focus mainly on their pain points and issues.
Conclusion
So, how can you improve product experience?
For starters, make sure that the products you design are visually pleasing and intuitive to navigate. Second, always test your designs with real users to get feedback. And finally, keep track of how users interact with your product and use that data to continue to refine the user experience.
Applying these principles should help you create a product people love and one that stands out in today’s competitive market.
We hope you found our tips helpful. If you don’t have the expertise to deliver a great product experience, get in touch with us. Chasm offers sales effectiveness and strategy consulting to help businesses with product launches, persona research, product messaging and go-to-market strategies.
We assist firms in making data-driven decisions rather than relying on gut emotion as a sales consulting service. Our sales effectiveness experts mine your internal data, procedures, reporting, KPIs, results, and tech stacks to analyze performance versus your goals.