What are the key steps for aligning your product strategy with your company's customer retention goals?

The first step is to clearly define your customer retention goals and connect them to your company's vision and mission. You need a straightforward and measurable understanding of what customer retention means for your product and how it fits with your business strategy and the people you're targeting. For example, you might aim to increase subscription renewals, reduce customer losses, or boost each customer's long-term value. Also, pinpoint the key factors indicating retention, like how often customers use your product, how happy they are, or how likely they are to recommend it to others. Understanding and mastering these aspects make your product and business more appealing to customers and investors alike.

At Gypser, our next strategic move involves smartly categorizing our customers based on their unique traits, desires, behaviors, and preferences. We delve deep to understand who our customers truly are, the challenges they wish to overcome, how they engage with our travel solutions. Employing a mix of surveys, interviews, and advanced analytics, we create detailed customer profiles and journey maps. This meticulous segmentation allows us to fine-tune our travel experiences, addressing specific pain points and aspirations. By tailoring our offerings to match individual customer needs, we not only enhance their travel adventures but also foster enduring connections with our brand, elevating Gypser's reputation in the travel industry.

To keep people using your app, make getting started super simple and as fun as possible. Make sure your onboarding process quickly highlights the app's core value, making it easier for users to achieve what they want. Get your team to help users make using your app a daily habit. When users suggest sensible features or changes, act fast—this not only improves their experience but also shows you're tuned in and fosters a stronger community. Be open about how things work and provide a place where users can celebrate their successes and swap advice. If they love videos, give them more. And when you update the app based on their feedback, make sure they know; it shows you appreciate them and helps them feel a part of your app's journey.

The first and the foremost thing that makes a good product strategy is "Listening to the customer." The customers have always got a common set of problems that can be solved by making some good innovations in the features that are not so expensive to implement but solve the biggest of the problems. Take for an example the implementation of CSFP, that actually doubles the fanout for the customer in a smaller form factor. Solves so many problems for the customer and enhances network economics. This innovation could not have come without listening to the customer. Another thing that needs to be done is interacting with the people on ground.

Always start with the customer. Full stop. Rather than focus on the company’s customer retention goals, I think the Product Manager should focus on what’s important to the customer. If you delight customers with the products/features you build, the company will retain them. As you gather feedback from customers through research/surveys or customer insights and start to develop features for your roadmap - also set customer acquisition and retention objectives & key results(OKRs). This unlocks a customer centric approach as your develop and measure your product.