Unlocking Customer Value: 3 Proven Techniques to Identify Low-Hanging Fruit
In the pursuit of building customer-centric software, delivering features that drive real value is crucial. But, finding the right place to start can be daunting. To overcome this hurdle, I recommend focusing on low-hanging fruit – changes that are likely to have a significant positive impact on customer experience without breaking the bank. But how do you identify these opportunities?
What is Low-Hanging Fruit?
Low-hanging fruit refers to ideas that are likely to have a strong positive impact on customer experience and are relatively easy to implement. These ideas are backed by sufficient proof to instill confidence in their potential.
3 Techniques to Generate Ideas
1. Eat Your Own Dog Food (and Have New Joiners Eat It Too!)
Becoming a user of your own product is an excellent way to gain insight into the customer experience. Even if you can’t use your product daily, make it a habit to regularly go through your end-to-end customer journey. This will help you identify areas of improvement. However, it’s essential to recognize that your familiarity with the product can lead to biases. To counter this, ask new joiners to go through the same process and provide feedback. Their fresh perspective can be invaluable.
2. Tap into Customer Success and Sales Knowledge
Your customer success and sales teams are treasure troves of information about your customers and prospects. By setting up a simple process for idea submission, you can tap into their knowledge and capture key information about customer needs and pain points. Be proactive in involving these teams in discovery and validation processes to gather answers to your burning product questions.
3. Digging into Data to Find Customer Success Gaps
Analyzing data using AARRR metrics (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral) can help you identify customer success gaps. By measuring how many users or accounts reach each stage, you can pinpoint areas where customers are struggling. This information can guide your focus on the most critical areas to improve.
Assessing Ideas and Measuring Success
Once you’ve generated ideas, it’s essential to assess them using a framework like ICE (Impact, Confidence, and Effort). Score your ideas based on their potential impact, confidence in their success, and the effort required to implement them. Remember, even with thorough planning, it’s crucial to measure feature adoption to ensure that your efforts are truly valuable to your target customer.
By implementing these techniques, you’ll be well on your way to identifying low-hanging fruit and delivering customer value that drives real results.