Product Led Growth (PLG) companies are leveraging customer experience (CX) strategies to unlock unprecedented success. Let's explore how these businesses can benefit from creating an effective CX program, and why having Product and CS teams winging it isn't the best way forward. Let's dive in.
Product managers have plenty of responsibilities throughout the product lifecycle. From creating business cases, to conducting market research, to helping design the actual product, product managers are responsible for ensuring a product succeeds in the marketplace. However, one area where product managers should not be involved is Voice of the Customer (VoC) work.
VoC is the practice of gathering customer feedback to better understand their needs and preferences. While this information is invaluable to product managers, they should not be the ones directly collecting it. Creating surveys, gathering customer feedback, and analyzing customer responses should all be done by a separate team of professionals.
One of the most important reasons why product managers should stay away from VoC is that they are often too close to the product itself. Product managers are passionate about the products they are responsible for, so they may not be able to objectively gather customer feedback. Instead, they may only be hearing what they want to hear, and not getting the full picture.
Additionally, VoC requires a great deal of time and energy, and product managers are already busy with a variety of other tasks. By outsourcing this work to a separate team, product managers can focus on the other important responsibilities that come with their job.
Product managers need to understand their customer's needs and preferences in order to create successful products. But instead of doing the actual VoC work, product managers should rely on a separate team to gather this information for them. By doing so, product managers can be sure that they are getting the unbiased, comprehensive feedback needed to make the right product decisions.
Customer success and customer experience are two terms that are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Customer success is a strategy for delivering value to customers; it focuses on building long-term relationships with customers and helping them maximize the value of their investments. On the other hand, customer experience (CX) is focused on the end-to-end customer journey, from initial contact to purchase, delivery, and support.
To illustrate the differences between customer success and CX, consider a hypothetical customer, John, who buys a piece of software from a tech company. The customer success team at this company will work to ensure that John is getting the most out of the software, proactively reaching out to him to check in and answer any questions he might have. They might also recommend additional features and services that would help him better leverage the software.
The CX team, on the other hand, is focused on ensuring that the customer journey itself is smooth and enjoyable. This could involve things like ensuring that John has a pleasant checkout experience, that he is notified of his order status, and that he can get in touch with customer service quickly and easily if he runs into any issues.
Ultimately, customer success and CX are two sides of the same coin; both are important for delivering a great experience for customers. They both focus on different aspects of the customer experience, so it’s important to have both teams working together to make sure that customers are having a great experience from beginning to end.
PLG companies should hire for deep CX expertise in order to capitalize on the power of customer experience to increase customer loyalty and engagement. This means hiring employees with deep CX knowledge in order to build positive relationships with customers, drive innovation, and increase their bottom line. With the right CX expertise, PLG companies can create a customer-centric culture that will provide an edge over competitors and help them meet their strategic goals.
