How to build a customer-centric product strategy using real-time product insights

From marketing to product development, customer feedback about your products is the lifeblood of your brand. But, the way customers give that feedback has shifted dramatically to digital channels like review sites, social media, and chat apps. Meanwhile, new channels are popping up all the time, and the volume of unstructured data from these sources continues to grow and grow. This is also increasingly how other consumers learn about your products. According to Pew Research, 82% of consumers check reviews before making a purchase. So, that 1-star review for your product doesn’t mean one unhappy customer, it’s also potentially costing you the next one. And the next one. And so on.

Despite living in this age of real-time feedback and viral product complaints, many brands continue to rely heavily on customer surveys and focus groups to get insights about their products. While these methods have value, they also have some serious shortcomings, including an 18-24 day delay between deployment and results. In a digital world, the damage may already be done.

How can product insights help your brand?

Moving your product insight capabilities from basic data collection and traditional market research methods to real-time, aggregated, and actionable feedback about your products can have wide-ranging benefits to your business. Here are just some of the questions you’ll be able to answer:

• Which are my top and low performing products or brands, and why?
• Which are the most liked and disliked product/service attributes by my customers?
• What are the top reasons for customer churn for the offered products or services?
• Why do certain customers prefer competitor products or services over mine?
• How are customers reacting to new product/service launches?
• Identify new product ideas based on customer suggestions

What are the challenges to collecting product insights?

However, even for brands that are incorporating omni-channel listening strategies across social platforms, review sites, and other digital channels, there are a number of challenges. Which of these challenges look familiar to you?

• Point solution chaos: Different point solutions for different customer touchpoints create siloed feedback, disjointed insights, and less synergy between teams.
• Disparate digital channels: Customers provide feedback on their preferred channels, not yours. And that feedback must be gathered and analyzed from a wide range of sources.
• Manual processes: Creating insights from vast volumes of raw data takes time and is prone to error.
• Low accuracy: If an insight isn’t accurate, it can do more harm than good and lead to suboptimal business decisions.
• Lag time: If you can’t generate and act on insights in real time, it puts your business at risk.
• Poor competitive intel: If you can’t tell what customers like or dislike about your competitors’ products or features, you are at a considerable disadvantage.
• Increased expectations: Customers want a personalized experience, in real time, on their preferred channels.

How do I build a customer-centric product strategy?

In order to eliminate these challenges and create a truly proactive, responsive, and customer-centric product strategy that, ultimately, contributes to the bottom line, you need a multilayered strategy. Here are the foundational steps:

Step 1: Listen to customer feedback about your products in real time. To do this, you’ll need to capture product-level feedback from review sites, social media, and other digital channels; integrate first-party data for a 360-degree view of the customer; and unify your data to create the groundwork for AI-powered insights.

Step 2: Understand intent to create quick and actionable insights. Your brand will need to leverage industry-specific advanced artificial intelligence and natural language processing models to distill vast amounts of unstructured data into clear and actionable insights to quickly understand what features and attributes customers like or don’t like. Use that feedback to improve your products, create superior brand value, and gain a competitive edge over rival brands.

Step 3: Take action seamlessly across your organization to delight customers. Inform and empower your internal teams with customized on-brand reports, alerts, and dashboards featuring real-time, actionable insights. Then, surprise, delight, and strategically engage your customers at any and every point in the customer experience by democratizing insights and key content across your organization, from marketing to care to operations.

It may sound daunting, but, with the right technology, you have the opportunity to bring customer feedback about your products right into the heart of your enterprise.

Learn how you can achieve these goals in our new Product Insights Playbook. We’ll show you exactly how Sprinklr Insights, part of Sprinklr’s industry-leading unified customer experience management platform, can ensure that you’re building a customer-centric product strategy that delights customers, improves products, and contributes to the bottom line.