This is an announcement-style article about an upcoming talk.
I am pleased to announce that I will present at Userpilot’s upcoming Product Drive Summit on October 4, 2022, at the invitation of Emilia Korczynska, Head of Marketing at Userpilot. Titled “4 Tips to Measure and Improve Customer Experience, Using Real Product Examples,” my presentation is tailored to the needs of present-day product management and product analytics practitioners.
The talk borrows from my product experience, including recently at Twilio, where, as a Staff Product Manager, I discovered then-uncommon tips and tricks on how to measure customer experiences (CXs) and subsequently improve them. And as I tell Emilia in an interview, customer experience is extremely crucial for companies regardless of whether they are in the business of selling hardware or software products.
An excerpt from the interview:
“Companies are increasingly realizing they are selling to humans, and as humans, we primarily make our decisions based on our emotions… So, this really drives home the importance of how you make someone feel when they are using your product at different stages of product usage (cycle). And that emphasizes the importance of providing good CX to your customers… The better CX you provide, the better word-of-mouth marketing, references, and long-term value (you get from your customers).”
Indeed, the benefits of good CX are known. But what may not be immediately apparent to product managers is how to measure and improve CX for their unique product. Informing on that is the goal of my presentation.
Presentation Talking Points
As part of my presentation, I will share four tips on how to measure and improve CX, complete with case studies (real product examples). The tips cover the entire product life cycle and can be written arithmetically (nerd speak) as:
Data + Empathy
Metrics + Signals
Product + Process
Launch + Checklist
Tip 1: Data + Empathy
First, you need to understand your customers' needs. This requires you to mix data and empathy. You need to gather qualitative data from support requests and surveys and quantitative data from product and web analytics. You also have to interview customers to empathize with their needs.
To enable you to understand how to combine anecdotes and data in pursuit of customer understanding, I will explore Part 1 of a series of case study articles I have prepared. You can also review a how-to article here.
Tip 2: Metrics + Signals
Over the years, I have learned the importance of using input metrics and signals as leading measures of CX apart from output metrics and vanity metrics. As I explain in the interview with Emilia, input metrics are a saving grace. This is because output metrics such as revenue and NPS are generated after the fact. So they would not be a real-time reflection of how your customers are experiencing your products. Using input metrics, however, you can easily arrest a situation before it spirals out of control.
As a guide, I will discuss the examples in this Part 2 article.
Tip 3: Product + Process
Bottlenecks are common but are not always restricted to product features. They can arise from processes. For instance, customers may not be receiving responses to their emails, a problem that may arise because the support function is being handled by members who are busy with product development. To solve such an issue, you would need to execute process changes that assign the right roles to the appropriate parties. This might not be typical Product Management work, but if it improves your customers’ experiences and increases your product’s revenue, will you ignore it?
In this regard, you can improve CX by improving both the product and the process. To help you better understand this tip, I will delve into a different case study from this article.
Tip 4: Launch + Checklist
The final tip focuses on using a checklist to boost your launch success. At the same time, it is essential to prepare for a crisis or unexpected events. And again, a checklist that guides how you communicate with your customers, i.e., one that outlines your step-by-step crisis management plan, comes in handy in such a case.
A checklist outlines the communication approach in a way that ensures your updates are well received by the customers. It drives the desired customer behavior and results, as I extensively discuss here.
Event Details
Date
The Userpilot Product Drive Summit is scheduled for October 4-5, 2022, with my presentation slated for October 4 at 11.00 am Pacific Time. You can convert the time based on your time zone.
Registration
Book your place today via this link.
My Background for the Talk
I run Spark Creative Technologies, a company that provides product management coaching and business consultancy services. Having worked with Twilio, Cisco, and Qualcomm, where I gained foundational experiences in product development and management, I have identified different ways of measuring and improving CX, which form the basis of my upcoming presentation.
For more information and to access additional resources and how-to articles as and when they become available, visit you can subscribe to my newsletter page.
Will the Talk have Q&A?
Although the talk will not have Q&A, I’ll post a follow-up article here. I’ll also share additional resources and how-to articles to gain more value from the talk. If you haven’t, please subscribe to not miss the details.
Is this Topic Related to Earlier Articles or Presentations?
Yes, I have written at length about improving customer experience in a 9-part series here and have spoken on these 4 tips before here.
Originally published at https://harshalpatil.substack.com on Aug 31 2022
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