Customer experience optimization

Identifying your most engaged users through behavioral data will help you gain a more well- rounded understanding of how your power users engage in unique ways with your brand and product.

The primary purpose of instrumenting an analytics tool in your product should be to build emotional connections and customer empathy. This customer empathy empowers deeper customer obsession. By democratizing data within your organization, you are empowering those at every level to deliver a more customer-centric experience, inside and outside of your digital product. It’s a strategy we call Customer Experience Optimization (CXO).

At its core, CXO seeks to capture, measure, and analyze customer engagement data in order to drive insights and paint the full picture of your customers. This 360-degree view of your customer will allow you to continually optimize their digital experiences to meet their unique desires, needs and preferences. Through engagement data, you can also more easily identify the characteristics of your power users and more quickly drive new users to exhibit these same behaviors.

Truly impactful experiences that stand the test of time combine this intelligence of the user and product teams use this intelligence to iteratively drive business outcomes. Without a holistic approach it can be easy to steer your product in a direction that does not align with business objectives (and will not end up making you money) or does not focus on generating long term value for your customer.

Without that long term value, you will see greater attrition and will struggle to retain your users. By focusing on generating this long term customer value through digital experiences, you are able to scale more efficiently than traditional analog product service offerings.

One of the biggest challenges for any organization is to create an environment where people feel as though they can influence and make change happen. That's where CXO principles offer inherent advantages. The quickest path to success in adopting this methodology is creating clear and measurable wins within your individual product team. As product teams adopt the principles of CXO, the rest of the organization will take notice inherently because this team is operating more efficiently and delivering on outcomes more rapidly.

The quickest path to success does not mean the quickest path to organizational buy-in. Just because you can demonstrate success on a single product team does not mean you will achieve organizational success.

As other product teams come on board to this process, concerted efforts need to be put in place to democratize data across your organization and optimize experiences at scale, leveraging data from sources from every customer touch point to create truly differentiated and personalized experiences for your users.

As you make a shift in strategy, keep in mind that great customer experiences are based on the entire relationship you have with your customer, not just that initial moment or relationship. If you only focus on the initial relationship, the long term relationship will suffer.

Far too often, at product launch there is already a laundry list of items that are critical to get into the next release. Take a breath. Take a step back. Use the tools at your disposal to monitor engagement. What behaviors are your power users exhibiting? Where is the biggest leak in your acquisition or conversion funnel?