Unlocking Customer Value: A Guide to Building Features That Matter
As a customer-centric company, your ultimate goal is to create value for your target customer. But how do you achieve this? The answer lies in understanding common customer outcomes and tracking the right metrics to see if you’re achieving those outcomes.
Signed Up: The First Step Towards Value
When a user signs up for your product, it means they’ve become dissatisfied with their current solution and are looking for something better. They’ve found your solution through word of mouth, online research, or because your value proposition resonated with them. To track this outcome, you can monitor events such as clicking on a “Start free trial” button or submitting a free trial sign-up form.
Setting Up Account: The Next Step
Once a user has signed up, they need to set up their account. This involves confirming their email address, adding billing information, and completing the onboarding journey. You can track these events to see how many users are successfully setting up their accounts.
The Aha Moment: When Value Clicks
The aha moment is when a user realizes how your product can add value to their life. This is where things get tricky, as what constitutes value depends entirely on the customer and their specific challenges. To track this outcome, you can monitor events such as creating a new communication, sending a new communication, or receiving feedback on communication.
Continued Value: The Eureka Moment
The eureka moment is when a user continues to enjoy the product, reusing features and discovering new value. You can track this outcome by monitoring events such as sending a certain number of messages, opening read/click reports, or inviting other users.
Creating a Habit: The Ultimate Goal
The ultimate goal is to create a habit, where users incorporate your product into their daily lives. For some products, this may not be necessary, but for others, it’s crucial. You can track this outcome by monitoring events such as sending a certain number of communications, viewing read/click reports, or receiving feedback every month.
Correlating Aha and Eureka with Retention
The usage of your aha and eureka events should strongly correlate with retention. If this isn’t the case, you may need to reassess which events indicate aha or eureka moments. You can segment your audience based on whether they’ve taken the aha or eureka paths and compare the retention graph of these audiences to the control group.
Other Customer Outcomes
There are other important customer value metrics to track, such as expanded or upgraded, NPS score, referrals, and reviews. The key is to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business and customers.
Picking the Right Value Metric
To pick the right value metric, you need to understand what customer value means to your business. It’s about the customer experiencing value within your product, not about revenue growth. You can use customer interviews, surveys, CS/sales knowledge, and data to inform your decision.
Moving Customer Value Metrics
Once you’ve identified your key customer value metrics, you need to focus on moving them. This involves onboarding, detecting friction, ex-ante experimentation, and ex-post product analytics. Onboarding is about showing users initial, retained, and expansive value. Detecting friction is about identifying areas where users are struggling. Ex-ante experimentation is about testing ideas cheaply and quickly. Ex-post product analytics is about monitoring whether new features are living up to expectations.
By following these principles, you can unlock customer value and build features that truly matter to your users.