In this data-rich age, companies aren’t hurting for insights, but turning that information into meaningful product innovation requires intentional, careful analysis. It also demands thorough planning and, finally, action. What follows is a quick look at how to competently transform CX intelligence into effective product innovation.
Isolating the Signal
Fueling product innovation with CX intelligence begins with both taking a hard look at information that is already available and collecting new data as necessary. After companies gather that data via structured survey responses, employee feedback, or by braving the comments section the next step is figuring out what all this information has in common. No small task, of course, but companies can tackle it with the help of either an eagle-eyed CX practitioner or a data-ingesting experience intelligence platform (or, ideally, both).
With this data and a means of scrutinizing it at hand, companies can identify problem areas and room for improvement. This analysis makes it simple to, say, pinpoint whether multiple customers are frustrated with a product’s design or find the help page’s layout patently unhelpful.
I’ve seen this analysis’s efficacy firsthand. While designing and implementing CX programs for a major cellular carrier, my team noticed that more and more customers were dissatisfied with how the claim processing website was designed. Our listening tools enabled us to pinpoint the primary stumbling blocks for customers who were attempting to complete a claim—in greater detail and with greater speed than any other means of identification could have provided. As we’ll soon see, CX intelligence’s expediency simplifies the next step: taking action.
What is the Plan?
Knowing a problem is one thing—knowing how to fix it (and convincing stakeholders across the business that you do, too) is another. Though this process is almost never straightforward, properly packaged CX intelligence gives product teams specific goals to work toward. “Fixing product defect A” is much more tangible than “reducing customer dissatisfaction.” That specificity, context, and level of detail are all unique to CX intelligence and can save time, costs, and cut to the core of any product issue.
The Coffee Club, Australia’s largest homegrown café group, was able to devise an improvement strategy fueled by CX intelligence. The company used this intel to quickly learn that its customers weren’t thrilled with its eco-friendly paper straws (because any cup of joe made them soggy). The Coffee Club promptly switched to a new, better straw provider, innovating a solution and letting its customers know that it was listening to their concerns. In this case, the customers also helped drive the product improvement directly.
In another instance of CX data-driven innovation, a major pizza chain used these same intelligence tools to act upon customer feedback about order speed and quality. These tools enabled the chain to learn that some of its locations’ pizzas didn’t meet the quality standards, and to quickly retrain employees at these locations. Because some of these issues stemmed from order speed, the chain created a new pizza app and pickup options to quash those problem areas as well. Pretty powerful stuff.
Sustaining Innovation
Fixing a problem is a good start, but how do companies sustain CX intelligence=driven product innovation? Proactivity is the key. To create a culture of CX-driven innovation, companies must be willing to not only collect data (relatively simple) but to act on it in a transformative way (not as simple).
Experience intelligence makes transformative success achievable. Customer feedback is often an overwhelming tsunami of white noise, but tools like a data-ingesting experience platform allow organizations to identify problem areas and develop specific improvement initiatives must more efficiently than ever before.
Organizations that wield experience intelligence can spend the time they may have otherwise used searching for problems to actually innovate solutions. CX practitioners who constantly stay on top of innovative opportunities will have a much easier time turning hard-won insights into meaningful innovation. Once CX practitioners achieve that first win, they can establish enough credibility to drive even more success or their organization.
