Product improvement is the practice of enhancing existing products which are already being marketed and sold to customers. Product improvement becomes a necessity as customer needs, market, competitor products and strategies keep on changing. As a company, if you are unable to improve your product according to the changing landscape, then you will start losing money. But the right changes must be made to the product. The best way to know what to do is to look into customer feedback. There is no better place to get first-hand criticism of your products than from your customer service team. In this article, we will explore how you can use the data collected from your customer support for product improvement which will ultimately increase your revenue.
How Are You Losing Money By Not Doing Product Improvement regularly?
- Customers who were initially interested in your product might not be interested anymore because
- Their needs or requirements might have changed or evolved which the current product is not solving
- A new competitor product might be more appealing
- You might see a dip in demands suddenly and might have to sell your existing stock at a discounted rate in a stock clearance sale.
- Your existing marketing activities will churn out lesser ROIs
- Your loyal customer base will shift their focus elsewhere.
- Your brand image, reputation, word-of-mouth marketing everything will dip
- By the time you realize what went wrong, you have already incurred losses, and will continue to do so till you develop version 2.0 which will take a lot of time.
So the right problem is not being identified at the right time because the data from various apps and tools used for multiple verticals like marketing, customer service, and inventory is not being collected in real-time. And there is a huge time gap in collecting the data manually, creating reports, analyzing the data, and then figuring out what to do and then taking action. This entire process takes a lot of time during which the business mostly bleeds out.
How Do Top Brands Utilize Customer Support Platforms For Product Improvement?
Top companies usually start collecting feedback from the product launch itself, user engagement feedback from marketing campaigns, and behavioral patterns of users on the website like wishlists, cart addition, and cart abandonment data. This might come from your CRM like Salesforce, Leadsquared, Google Analytics, and eCommerce platforms like Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. E-mail marketing tools like MailChimp, Google Adwords, or social media marketing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and eCommerce websites like Flipkart, and Amazon. Most importantly customer feedback data was collected from cloud telephony services being used such as Exotel, Knowlarity, and chat services Tawk.to, Zendesk.
Automated chatbots solve a fundamental problem. They enable businesses to cater to a large number of concurrent users, thereby reducing the waiting time and increasing customer engagement, thus collecting a lot of data. All this at a fraction of the cost of having appropriate human resources for the same amount of chat volumes. Chatbots or customer service executives directly interact with the users and get to know their tastes, preference, budget, and many more key indices. Tickets raised from each customer regarding several issues, speak volumes about different products used by them and their feedback. This data is continuously mined and analyzed and helps a business gain insights into their products & services enabling them to come up with a better version of the product which would ideally sell more, cost less to produce, and have features that the users want. This real-time data mining and regular analysis help companies launch the next-gen products before the previous-gen product starts to lose traction, thereby minimizing loss and maximizing revenue.
Using Daton for Product Improvement
Daton: an exclusive product of Saras Analytics is a highly automated data pipeline. It can easily and automatically extract all the relevant information from a multitude of apps and tools, including Chat interfaces and other customer service tools and consolidate this data into your data warehouse. This helps reduce the time and effort required to create reports and analyze the data, thus reducing the time taken to identify key areas of product improvement so that the improved product can be launched in time to minimize losses and maximize revenue.
Click here to get a free demo of daton and explore how it will add positive value to your product improvement process.
