The digital landscape has transformed so much that there are reasonably a lot of theories and strategies around what is best for customers and their experiences. But there is no one size that fits all in this case. Hence, creating a product with a customer-centric mindset will lead to a great product experience.

Understanding your customer’s mindset and thought process while using your product will help you give your customer a better experience.

What is product experience? 

Several products lack formal training or onboarding as part of their sales and adoption cycle. Product Experience spans the complete lifecycle, starting from onboarding, engagement, retention, and advocacy. Good product experiences not only increase product usage but also build loyalty and improve your product’s NPS.

Why is product experience important?

If the product experience is lousy and fails to satisfy the customer, then it will be replaced in no time by some other product that is more competent. Adapting to what a customer needs and coming up with a personalized and intuitive solution will not only make the product stand out but will also serve the product’s purpose by giving a better user experience.

Most of them do not understand that and create undesired features. According to Pendo’s 2019 Feature Adoption Report, this means that as much as 80% of SaaS features go virtually unused, costing an estimated $30 billion in wasted R&D, which is a clear sign of a sub-optimal product experience.

How to establish a great product experience in the customer journey?

Create an optimal product experience for the customers by understanding what they want, how they feel about the product, and what they are up to. Enhance and add values based on the inputs given and the interest shown by the customers.

SaaS users in the 2020s want to know they’re being monitored and truly listened to in the context of maintaining an optimal experience.

Below are a few elements to improve your product experience

1. Effortless Onboarding

Keep the onboarding process simple but interactive. Users should not feel frustrated and leave the application due to the complexity of the steps, so make it fun, interactive, and interesting by giving them short product tours, tutorials, screen tips, and instructive guides that will lead to meaningful usage.

Panini, with the onset of the digital revolution, figured out that they could create digital versions of the sports cards, thus building a new line of business as well as a following for their sports card products among today’s mobile-first audience. 

Upshot.ai created onboarding and engagement campaigns for the first 7 days of app usage. Based on different user behaviors, the aim was to increase user awareness about app features, highlight the fun experiences, and rewards users could win to stay motivated. To reverse the slump in revenue growth, a feature called “personalized deals” was introduced. Under this feature, every user was served fully personalized deal bundles based on their purchase history and content preferences.  

2. Monitor and engage

Strike a balance between human touch and automation. Remember that your user is a human being; know your user’s needs and create emotional responses. Use tooltips to highlight features where and when they’re needed. Discover the challenges faced by the user with the help of product & user analytics such as reports, funnels, and predictions. Engage through in-app messages, push notifications, email notifications, etc. 

According to Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that knows their name, their purchase history, and/or recommends items based on their purchase history.

Netflix monitors its users and their preferences with the help of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Machine Learning for better engagement.

By analyzing the watching history of other users with similar tastes, it offers content that you might be interested in watching next so you can continue being engaged with the platform. 

On top of that, Netflix uses thousands of video frames as thumbnails to evaluate their performance and places personalized thumbnails for each particular user based on what they are more likely to click on.

Based on research from PWC, 86% of customers are willing to pay a premium for a better experience.

3. Gamify their experience

Give users an indulgent experience with gamification. Include elements such as mini-games, trivia, point-based rewards, badges, etc. which will create a sense of competition that will lead to high user engagement and a superior experience.

The Starbucks application features a great user experience known as a gamified loyalty system. They use an innovative gamification approach that lets you collect stars while purchasing your favorite drink and also lets you get exciting rewards in return.

To drive better engagement, Starbucks also gives you the chance to get stars faster with additional challenges and Double Star Days. Isn’t that fantastic?                       

These approaches not only give your customers a joyful experience but also drive more traffic, brand visibility, and loyalty.

4. Conversion and Retention

Use creative ways to learn and retain your users by asking them questions and taking their feedback through surveys and ratings. Create different cohorts and identify what and where your product is lacking in terms of customer experience. 

Puma and Virat Kohli, an Indian cricket player, collaborated to launch Virat’s clothing brand One8. To boost brand engagement, Puma built an One8 branded mobile app on iOS and Android.

During Cricket World Cup 2019, Upshot.ai designed a user engagement plan for the entire tournament. At the start of the World Cup, users could opt into a five-day quiz contest and would receive a push notification about the quiz. Further, using in-app messages, the previous day’s winner would be announced to motivate every participant. This increased app feature adoption by 44%, daily active users by 28%, and monthly active users by 22%.

About Upshot.ai

Upshot.ai is an omnichannel, user engagement, and gamification platform that helps digital product owners and marketers improve their product adoption and conversions. Fortune 1000 companies such as GE, UHG, Puma, Sony, ITC, and Tenet Healthcare are using Upshot.ai and observed a massive increase in product adoption and YoY increment in revenues.

Book a demo of the most comprehensive user engagement and gamification platform to achieve your digital product goals.

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