How to build a customer-centric product strategy?

Who are the real decision-makers of your business? CEO? CTO? CPO? Investors? Not any one of them. It’s your customers! Companies set out to offer the best customer experience. But often deviate due to priorities or the inability to interpret customer insights. This often leads to a negative customer experience. That’s why customer-centricity becomes vital for creating an unbeatable product strategy. Customer centricity aims to achieve only one thing - keep the customer top of mind. Read further to understand how to build a customer-centric product strategy. Also, learn how interactive product demo acts as a catalyst in customers’ decision-making.

Why is customer-centricity important?

Customer centricity puts the customer at the core of every business decision made by a product-led company. It nudges you to ask, 'Will this product decision impact the customer positively or hurtfully?' By doing this, product-led companies can increase or preserve customer value. In the absence of customer-centricity, the decisions taken might benefit the company. But you leave behind the most important of the lot – your customer base. 

The simple logic is happy customers tend to be more loyal. Customers feel motivated to work with companies that put their needs and concerns first. Deloitte's research reveals that customer-centric companies enjoy 60% more profits than companies that ignore customers' problems. Don't bite your lips if you have missed out on creating a customer-centric product strategy. We'll help you get started!

Build your customer-centricity in 4 easy steps:

1) Get your customers onboarded quickly

Customer centricity cannot happen in a single day. There are no shortcuts either to get there. The best way to achieve it is to offer the perfect onboarding experience to your customers. 

Customer Success teams interact almost every day with existing customers and onboard many new customers. How can you empower them with the right resources? With Storylane, you can empower your Customer Success team to support customers with pre-created interactive product walkthroughs that will help them get onboarded quickly. 

You can also train your Customer Success team with product learning. There is no need for your customer-facing teams to learn how your product works with detailed 1-1 meetings or lengthy documents, and all they need is your product walkthroughs created with Storylane.

2) Show your new releases visually

You release new updates, enhancements, and features daily as a product company. How do you share it with your customers or leads, or prospects? Are you still dropping an email or sending them a poster that announces the same? Then, you are missing out on gaining some new customers or customers who want to upgrade to the feature. The best way to show them the feature is through an Interactive product walkthrough. By doing this, you show them the feature in action and also can let your customers or leads, or prospects experience the feature. 

Here is a feature on zapier integration explained visually:

3) Get customer feedback at every step

Customer interactions cannot be ignored any longer. There are numerous touchpoints where you can involve your customers directly in the product-led strategy. When you build a new product or make some changes to the product, the best critics are your customers, and you must get feedback from them. Share your product guides with your customers and get feedback with interaction. 

You can include additional customer input in essential milestones such as, 

- Include customers in the pre-testing phase

- Include customers in the live testing phase

- Offer in-depth product demos to your unique customers

You can also use different versions of your product demo for A/B testing and then compare their analytics to understand better which demo drives more conversions than the other.  

Just remember this, who else could evaluate if your product is working correctly or not better than your customers?

4) CS team and PM team should go hand-in-hand

Just like how Iron Man and Captain America join hands to save the world, it is the responsibility of the Customer Success team and Product Management team to join hands to save the business world. 

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If your PM team does not address your customers' pain points by creating valuable solutions, your customers will start looking for your competitors. Similarly, if your Customer Success team does not effectively communicate the requirements to product management, it will remain unknown. s

Besides that, it is essential to create different channels and processes to collect feedback from customers. And also document it, and this will ensure the feedback collected doesn't get lost, ignored, or forgotten.

So, both teams should work closely together, from collecting feedback, addressing it, and closing the loop with customers once it's fixed. Besides, it's even more important to communicate the timeline to fix the issues if it takes more time. 

Storylane empowers your product-led team with customer-centric interactive product demos. Sign up for free to give it a try.