Is creating a user-friendly and helpful product enough to attract and retain paying customers? Does it guarantee customer loyalty and give you an edge over your competitors? Is it all you need to grow and sustain a successful mobile app business? 

Here’s the thing – today’s consumers are spoilt for choice. Irrespective of whether they’re looking to purchase a water purifier or build an e-commerce app, they’ll find a plethora of options. In such a scenario, how can you tempt your target audience to choose your products/services over your competitors’? 

It’s no longer enough to woo consumers using innovative marketing tactics before they purchase your product. Instead, you must nurture them and make them feel valued after they become your customers. The solution is to sweep them off their feet by creating an excellent product experience. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss why product experience is important and how you can implement it. But let’s first take a closer look at the concept. 

Decoding Product Experience 

Simply put, product experience is the overall value a customer derives from your product or service. It’s a subset of customer experience and encompasses all the touchpoints, interactions, and engagement between a customer and your product. It focuses on a customer’s entire journey with your product, from the time they first log in until they stop using it. It’s all about providing customers with what they need, right when they need it. 

Product experience goes beyond traditional user experience and customer support. It requires your product development and customer-facing teams to work in tandem to build a product that meets your customer’s expectations. Additionally, you should monitor app and website analytics to understand how you can improve your product and deliver more value to your customers. Likewise, it’s crucial to onboard and guide new customers as well as handhold existing customers through new features. 

Let’s say you run a subscription-based mobile app business. You roll out a new set of pricing plans for bootstrapped startups and small businesses. In the absence of product experience, you’ll likely promote these plans to all your existing and potential customers. However, this will dilute your marketing efforts and prevent you from reaching your target audience. Instead, if your marketing, product development, and customer success teams should work together, you can reach out to specific consumers. 

The Importance of Product Experience 

The rise of the internet and digital marketing has significantly minimized the barriers to entry for today’s businesses. Almost anyone with a computer and a stable internet connection can start an online business. It’s relatively easy to create a WordPress website and start promoting your business on social media. You can even start a blog and generate inbound leads without spending a fortune. In the meantime, don’t forget to do a deep WordPress hosting comparison and find out the one that works best for your website.

This, in turn, has resulted in cut-throat competition in an already consumer-driven market. Whether you’re launching an online store or a mobile app business, you’ll likely have to compete with a plethora of similar businesses. Moreover, many of your competitors might be offering free trials and freemium plans to lure potential customers. Thus, consumers have the power to try different products and discard the ones that don’t impress them. 

That’s why it is becoming increasingly crucial to use product experience to stand apart from the crowd. Here are a few more reasons why your business needs to prioritize product experience: 

Greater Customer Satisfaction 

Focusing on product experience ensures that the product meets your customers’ expectations instead of merely fulfilling their needs. This, in turn, helps them derive maximum value from your product and accomplish their goals. It creates a positive customer experience and ultimately, strengthens your customer success strategy. 

Improved Customer Retention 

In today’s competitive market, it isn’t enough to sell your product. Instead, you should focus on building a strong relationship with customers to retain them. Creating a positive product experience helps you achieve this. 

It’s particularly crucial if your mobile app business runs on a subscription model. In such cases, your business heavily relies on recurring revenue from existing subscribers. Focusing on product experience helps reduce the churn rate and encourages your customers to renew their subscriptions. 

Enhanced Trust & Loyalty 

A positive product experience makes your customers feel valued and special. They perceive your brand as one that cares for its customers. This, in turn, reinforces your reputation and helps you win their trust. 

When you manage to retain their trust for a long period, it boosts customer loyalty. They become active proponents of your brand and recommend it to their contacts. This, in turn, gives increased visibility to your brand and helps attract more paying customers. 

Seamless Updates & Upgrades 

Leveraging product experience lets you introduce new features and product upgrades according to your customers’ needs and preferences. This, in turn, improves the overall value of your product even further. Moreover, you can roll out targeted upgrades for specific customer segments. It also simplifies onboarding and helps customers get the hang of new features. 

Revive Lapsed Users 

Irrespective of the scale and nature of your business, you likely have a significant fraction of customers who never return after their first purchase. However, if you improve the product experience, you’ll also have a plethora of happy customers. You can re-engage inactive customers by sharing customer testimonials and success stories with them. You can even impress them with new products and features, thereby generating more revenue. 

Product Experience Best Practices 

Creating a positive product experience isn’t a standalone job. It requires active cooperation and communication between various departments. Moreover, you must have a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and expectations. It’s also essential to seek their feedback while developing new features and upgrades. 

Here are a few tips to harness the potential of product experience for your mobile app business: 

Create a Spirit of Collaboration 

If your business can afford a dedicated product experience team, nothing like it. However, many bootstrapped startups and online businesses don’t have adequate resources. An effective alternative is to assign specific responsibilities to different departments and ensure that they collaborate with each other. 

For instance, your product development and customer success teams can work together to develop new features that your customers want. They can also create helpful training modules and guides to handhold customers through these features. Likewise, your marketing, design, and UX teams can create various in-app messages, push notifications, etc. to onboard new customers. 

Leverage analytics 

It’s crucial to monitor how your customers are interacting with your product and the events that trigger them to take specific actions. This can give you an insight into their response and understand why certain customers abandon your product. Likewise, you can use analytics to identify features that drive longer session durations. The key is to use data-driven decision-making instead of relying on anecdotal evidence to build your product. 

Utilize Feedback 

You can’t create an impressive product experience without finding out how your customers feel about your product. That’s why it’s crucial to take feedback from your existing customers. Ask them about their opinion of your current product experience and how they would want it to be improved. You can use various channels such as online surveys, in-app polls, interviews, etc. for this purpose. 

It’s also crucial to involve your customer-facing teams. Your customer support executives and customer success managers regularly interact with real-life customers and potential buyers. They can give you access to a goldmine of customer feedback, grievances, and complaints. 

Prioritize Customer Needs 

Gone are the days when achieving a sales target indicated how successful your business was. Today’s businesses must focus on fulfilling their customers’ needs and expectations. This means you might have to ditch certain revenue-generating functionalities to accommodate features that your customers actually want. While it may not directly contribute to your company goals, it’ll create a top-notch product experience and ultimately, grow your business. 

Final Thoughts 

Every business wants to develop products and services that address consumers’ pain points and resolve their problems. Product experience takes this one step further and ensures that your products/services impress a customer and exceed their expectations. It requires extensive collaboration between your design, UX, research, and customer-facing teams. 

How is your mobile app business implementing product experience? Share your views in the comments section below. 

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