Keep Talking to Your Users. Data Doesn’t Tell Everything

Data is the new oil. It has tremendous value when captured quickly, refined, and used correctly. Users generate data at every step of their digital journey, and every company today uses new and innovative ways to capture this data.

How data helps

You must be seeing ads in your social media feed. These ads are customized based on your activity, your interests, your presence on different platforms, etc. – basically the digital data generated by you (generally called your digital fingerprint).

Data helps us in the following ways:

• Helps make key decisions on business strategy like deciding your target market, which product features to keep, sunset, etc.
• Provides insights to improve your product, build your roadmap (products, company), and increase adoption of your products.
• Helps personalize your product offerings.

Problems with data

There are a few problems with the data, such as the following:

• Tells you what, not why.
• Can’t deal with qualitative problems.
• Has noise.
• Can be interpreted differently by different people.

Data will point you to the problem but will not tell you how to solve it. It will tell you what your user does but will not tell you why. Think of a problem where users are installing your app but not using it. Data will tell you they are not using the app but not why they are not using it. This is known only to the user, so talking to the user becomes very important.

Data does not capture a user's trust in your brand/product. Trust is a major driving factor that every brand wants from its users. It, in turn, creates loyalty, where users become your promoters and lead the growth of the business/product.

Torture the numbers long enough and they will tell you a story. But most of us see the story that we want to see. For example, a conversion increase from 2% to 3% can be seen as a growth of 1%, which might be seen as a small win, or a 50% relative growth, which can be considered a bigger win.

Voice of customer (VOC): Additional data

VOC helps to get the direction when data is insufficient or doesn’t show you the way forward. Talking to your customer yields accurate insights that data will not tell you. Some might argue that surveys also provide the required data. But the point is that surveys will also only capture what you ask. It will not capture what a user wants to say, why they feel a particular way about your product, or what stops them from taking the next leap in the user journey you have created for them.

Who should speak to the customer and when

We all know that customer feedback is important. Most product managers talk to their users during the initial phase of their product development/launch. This helps them get valuable feedback and make quick improvements. However, most of us stop talking to customers once we have achieved the desired scale and we instead move on to the next problem to solve or the next feature to build.

The problem is that your user’s needs will change over time and so will their perception of your product. New competition, new technology and new products keep emerging every day. If we don’t gauge our users' needs and emotions before they tell us, we might lose them to the competition who understands their evolving needs. Hence, it is of utmost importance that we keep talking to our users on a regular basis to capture their pulse.

Is it only a specific team’s responsibility to talk to customers? Every team should speak with the customers every couple of weeks, especially product managers. Different people will bring different interpretations to the table, reducing the biases that only one person/team might bring.

So, just pickup the phone and call your customers like you used to do when you launched your first product.