If you are a part of product startup team, whether you are an area developer or a founder, you find yourselves pulled into a biggest concern and that is finding ways to add good number of users. There is always this constant struggle to choose between investing on the product engineering or branding/marketing. If you are a funded company it gets even worse as we have eyes on quick revenue to justify the cost.

So how do we come about the effective way to grow substantially?

Well, the answer is simple; one has to be a stand out in the market, leading the way amongst all comptetitors in their particular product or service stream.

Customer Experience for the big Launch of your Product

One of the big mistakes we often make is we plan this big launch and we invest in an event where we invite the best of best in industry only realising later it only landed you in this initial hype of congratulatory messages. The business return is probably miniscule or none atall. So what went wrong?

That's where understanding of customer experience comes handy!

Putting in simple words two most important steps to take:

1. Identify your market

Identify your target market and consider it in stages. Find out the early adopters for your product line and engage them from the beginning.

If your business will be successful with the masses, it must be successful with the early adopters… In order to be successful with the early adopters, you must sell them the why not the what – Simon Sinek

Can be further elaborated through law of diffusion of innovation wherein there are different sections of consumers, and is identified and can be co-related with product life cycle stages to establish your customer engagement model.

15-20% of your consumers are innovators / adopters – This is a very important section that one need to engage with, especially in product engineering, beta and soft launch. These are the consumers who are always ready to try new things once they are convinced on the fact that what need the product serves and why they should be using it. These are the influencers!

70-80% is the mass of the market who are Majority and followers. They wait for the outcomes and performance of new products. These are the ones who do not stand in line for first day first buy of a new apple phone. But the good thing is if we manage a good word with influencers in the market this segment is not that difficult to buy. This is the section of our market that we plan to target in our growth stage, that is the full blown launch!

30-20% remianing is the laggards who we need not worry about. Any strategy could not work with them because these would be the late comers who would probably not be very keen to invest in new ideas and are comfortable in their current state. They don't take risks.

Bottom line is mainstream customer is not ready for your product in the initial stages of life cycle and you need influencers to prepare them to try your offering. 

Use Customer Experience tools to discover your passion for your customers and with a clear messaging strategy find your early adopters and stand out!

2. Be obsessed with Customer Feedback

There is no method to madness they say and when it comes to knowing the fate of your product in every stage of its usage there is no passive approach. Here is the customer journey and find a means to know direct from your customer what he thinks about your product/portal.

Customer Life cycle for Customer Journey Mapping

At every stage of customer journey you would need different mechanisms to attaining consumer insights.

Make sure you gather some form of insight and consumer perspective at every stage of customer interaction.

In the initial stages of Need/Evaluation/Buy stages where consumer is exploring and researching to evaluate your product against his or her needs one could use basic online poll or chatbots or simple survey to understand

·        if they could find what they needed,

·        where did they hear about your offering,

·        why didn't they complete the purchase cycle.

In the Purchase/after sales engagement stages when customer has taken a decision to use/buy your product and is a customer now we could use more elaborate strategies like surveys that are online or customer service logs or customer interviews to understand what could you do differently to make their experience better?

It is very important that we ask right questions.

Customer Panel for Growth Strategy

One of the very strong strategy that comes into play in pre-launch or design and development stage of product life cycle is to form a customer panel, preferably these are the influencers in your target market, and moderate a discussion on the problem that your product is trying to solve and how far you have managed it. It is always better to invest both time and money at this stage in gathering insights to ensure that you have an offering that serves the right purpose and sets the right road map for your product.

It is only becoming more and more important with time that we integrate customer experience from the beginning and not wait until you onboard certain number of customers. Understand that customer journey begins the moment you generate an idea and hence the customer experience needs to be catered right from start.