Good data has never been more important to effectively interact with customers both in and outside your product. Knowing how deep (or shallow) customers’ product adoption may be is critical to driving them to achieve value, engaging at the right moment in the right channel, and improving overall customer and user experiences. And this data can only come from effectively capturing and acting on insights measured through product analytics. 

According to the 2023 GartnerⓇ Market Guide for Product Analytics for Technology and Service Providers, “Currently, close to half (46%) of all product managers have stepped up efforts for customer-centric insights. Another 43% of product managers plan to intensify customer-centric insights in the next six to 12 months to mitigate economic uncertainty and disruptions.”

1. Product Data Is Critical Beyond the Product Team

Data-driven customer insights have continually increased in demand across organizations and beyond technical teams to become more and more democratized. In fact, Customer Success teams continually utilize product data to target and address customers and users more effectively, as well as better understand how adoption impacts customer health.

Gartner Market Guide for Product Analytics for Technology and Service Providers   states that “the business value of product analytics extends well outside of product teams. Vendors are addressing this by  providing role-specific journeys, to accelerate the analysis for product leaders, marketing or customer success users within their offerings.” 

2. Analytics Continue to Shift Toward Supporting Customer Outcomes

With the increased focus on customer-centric insights, it’s clear that there is a growing need for customer outcome focused analytics among product data.

Customer feedback data in particular is key, including survey data points as well as understanding usage and behavioral data. Product teams increasingly need to be able to identify where common user paths lead in a product, then use customer health to identify ‘good’ usage parameters. Understanding how customers derive value from your product is essential to both healthy adoption, and impactful product roadmapping.

Ultimately, Product teams need better and deeper insight into customers’ pain points and challenges. Especially as the barriers to entry for new products decrease, and feature parity continues to grow, having more user-friendly and customer-aligned roadmaps will mitigate churn risk and improve customer’s value realization. 

3. Product Analytics Need to Integrate With Other Data 

The need for product data to work in tandem with other types of analytics and insights is also more critical than ever. This includes the importance of generative AI, such as Gainsight’s Horizon AI offering, to better query and draw insights from integrated data.  

In order to truly capture customer insights that make an impact on product adoption and ultimately Net Revenue Retention, It’s also critical to integrate product data with the following: 

• Customer Success data 
• Customer Community data 
• Customer Education data 

It’s critical for PMs to understand these data points in order to know how customers’ experiences holistically impact how they use the product.

Holistically, customer-centric product data is key to better understanding the value your product offers, and supporting all teams—product, customer success, marketing, and others—to create more impactful user and customer experiences as a result.

Disclaimer

Gartner, Market Guide for Product Analytics for Technology and Service Providers, By Adrian Lee, Vivek Tomar, David Norrie, Radu Miclaus, Melissa Davis, David Yockelson, 21 November 2023

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