What is Product Intelligence?
Product intelligence is collecting and processing information about a product to learn more about how people use it. It helps companies find ways to improve things, make features work better, and monitor usage trends.
Product intelligence helps companies answer questions about their products, such as:
- What benefits do people like the most? How long does it take for new users to see the value of our product for the first time?
- What can we do to get people more interested in the product?
- Do we need to fix any bugs or UX problems?
- What can we do to keep customers from leaving and make them happier with the product?
SaaS companies gather product intelligence data by keeping track of usage (for example, clickstream data and the number of hours used each day), asking customers for feedback through polls and focus groups, and testing products to improve them. Data from the product is immediately collected and sent to the right people.
Between Business Intelligence and Product Intelligence
Business intelligence and product intelligence are related but not the same. Product intelligence is all about knowing how customers use and behave with a product, while business intelligence is all about looking at data to get a big picture of how a company is doing across all of its departments.
Business intelligence usually looks at how many items are sold, marketing efforts, how to divide customers into groups, budgeting, making predictions, and setting prices. In some ways, it has to do with product intelligence, but from a business point of view instead of a customer point of view.
The main goal of product intelligence is to get people to use a product or service more. It looks at feature preferences, customer feedback, user engagement, time to first value, and churn rate. It also looks at qualitative measures like user engagement.
It’s the main thing that drives product growth because it’s all about how well a product works and how it’s analyzed. Businesses can make new “innovative” goods, add new features, and improve existing ones by knowing what customers want and expect from their products.
Why product intelligence is important
“You can’t improve what you can’t measure” and “Talk to your customers” may seem like overused business adages. But it’s that easy.
It helps to think about it regarding two well-known strategy games: blackjack and chess.
- Blackjack is based on math and odds, but if you win a lot of money, you must have been lucky.
- The player moves first, and there’s no way to know what the dealer has. You’ll probably lose if you play for too long.
- Chess is all about skill. Everyone in the game and anyone watching can see how it will end. Because of this, grandmasters can make plans that help them win.
Things in business are more like chess when you have product intelligence. It takes luck and a lot of failure, but the results are always the same and can be predicted in many ways.
Your pieces on the board are past facts about your products and direct feedback from customers. They tell you how to win and where your business is going.
Metrics for Product Intelligence
Businesses need to look at metrics like customer success, happiness, and engagement to determine how innovative their products are. They also have to look at things like customer problems as qualitative metrics.
Customer Happiness
To measure product intelligence, this is the most important thing to do. Customer success is a way to see how well a product helps people reach their goals. Time to value, term value, retention rate, and customer churn are common ways to measure it.
- Rate of turnover — The churn rate is the number of people who stop using a product or service after a certain amount of time. Customers who are happy with the product and find it helpful are likelier to stick with it if the churn rate is low.
- Keeping customers—The rate of keeping customers is the opposite of the rate of losing customers. It tracks how many people you keep for a certain amount of time. If the retention rate is high, customers like the product enough to keep using it.
- Time to first value (TTFV) — People measure time to value by how quickly they have their first “aha!” moment with a product. Customers are more likely to leave if they don’t know how to use the product, so businesses try to make the training process as short and valuable as possible.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) — Customer lifetime value is the total amount of money a customer is likely to spend on a product or service. When customers spend more throughout their relationship with a product, they are usually satisfied.
Metrics that measure customer success don’t always tell businesses what they need to fix or how they can fix it. However, they give them a broad picture of how well the product fits the market and how good the product is.
Problems with Customers
Because customer problems are based on qualitative data, they are a little harder to measure. Companies usually keep track of this data by asking customers to fill out surveys, hold focus groups, and get feedback from customer service reps.
Software for a help desk is beneficial for this. When certain words or types of help questions show up in the company’s software, customers are having trouble with those features and areas.
Because surveys are made up of multiple-choice questions, they are easier to figure out how many people answered. Focus groups are just that—observations—but they help businesses understand why customers are having specific problems.
The goal is to discover which parts of the product customers are having trouble with and why they aren’t understanding or using it properly. Then, businesses can use that data to make their goods better and more accessible for people to use.
Engaging Users
Companies put monitoring of user engagement into their apps and SaaS when they make them. You can determine how and why people use a product by tracking user engagement data.
Here are some of the most important ways to measure how engaged users are with digital products:
- The rate at which free users switch to paid users
- The average number of sessions per user
- The split between busy and inactive users
- The rate at which users activate the product or feature
- The length of time customers use the product
- The rate at which core features are used • Stickiness
This is mainly based on clickstream data and patterns of page use. Benchmarking is also done automatically when customers do certain things or reach specific benchmarks, like finishing the onboarding process successfully.
Customer Happiness
There are several ways for businesses to figure out how satisfied their customers are, but the main one is to see how happy the customers are with the goods.
CSAT polls are the most common way businesses find out how happy their customers are. CSAT stands for “customer satisfaction.” It’s a simple measure that asks customers to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 5, with 4 and 5 meaning “Satisfied” and “Very Satisfied,” respectively.
Another common way to find out how happy your customers are is to use the Net Promoter Score (NPS). There are three types of customers: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. Customers’ importance is based on how likely they are to tell their friends and family about the product.
The customer health score helps them determine which people are most likely to be at risk. This metric brings together data on customer involvement, satisfaction, and retention to give businesses a complete picture of how healthy their customer base is. People who are about to leave are often unhappy with the goods in some way.
How Businesses Use Data From Product Intelligence
These days, every product is an event in and of itself. That’s clear from how a customer feels about that offering. The main goal of product intelligence is to set up a feedback loop where companies can use new information to make changes and develop new ideas more quickly.
Make things better for the customer.
It’s better to think of modern goods as experiences than as things you can buy independently. Businesses must use product intelligence data to learn what customers want and how the product works.
Companies can use this information to: improve how they onboard new customers; offer more personalized experiences (like personalized product suggestions); make better content that helps customers get more out of the product; improve the user experience; find out where customers are having trouble; and make support services better.
Boost the quality and features of your products.
Product development teams use intelligence to make products better over time. To do this, they must know why and how people use their goods.
Product intelligence gives you the information you need to find bugs, problems with features, and how satisfied users are with different features. They improve their goods over time by adding or removing features and finetuning the most important ones.
Innovate to Stay Alive Good at competing.
We often think of “innovating” as “making something completely new,” but that’s not what it means. Innovation happens when you listen to your customers and improve the product so they can get everything they need from it.
A lot of companies don’t make something completely new. They make a product better for a specific market than what was already out there.
That’s only possible if you know what people need and want from the goods. In the background, this means using product intelligence data to figure out involvement and use patterns. Then, based on what they learn, product teams either change features that are already there or make completely new ones.
Stakeholders in Product Intelligence
Some people in the company depend on product intelligence, but only the sales, marketing, and product teams use it. They use it to choose what features to put on a product, how much to charge, and how to treat customers.
Managers of Products
Product managers are in charge of ensuring their product does well and keeps improving. They figure out what customers want, look at how changes to the product help the company reach its bigger goals and decide if the product is a success.
Product managers use product intelligence data to find trends and understand the current state of their products. This helps them rally their team and make choices about future product development based on data.
Designers of goods
To make the best user experience possible, product designers follow what product managers tell them and look at what the market is doing. They discover what works for people through experiments, surveys, customer feedback, and analytics data. Then, they change their designs until they get the desired results.
Sales and marketing
Product info is essential to sales and marketing because it helps them improve their messages. For example, if certain groups of customers value certain features, they can make those features the most essential part of their value offer.
For salespeople, this could mean bringing up certain business issues or asking specific questions during cold calls and sales demos. For marketers, it could mean making minor changes to their marketing writing or making all new marketing materials.
Different Ways to Gather Product Intelligence
There are many ways to gather product intelligence because it comes from many different types of info. Most methods involve testing goods and keeping track of what customers do and what they say.
What the Product Does
The product itself is the best place to get product information. Digital goods coded to do so are the only ones that can track you inside an app.
Businesses can keep track of the following in an app:
- Clickstream data
- Milestones and successes with the product
- Usage trends (frequency, time spent, etc.)
- How often users come back to the app
- Feedback on UX/UI problems
These pieces of information help businesses figure out the most essential part of the customer journey: the customer’s day-to-day life and how the product fits into it.
In-App Polls
Most SaaS products and mobile and desktop apps also ask customers for feedback through polls and in-app messages. They usually appear as odd pop-ups or alerts, but they can also appear while you’re using the product.
Most of the time, they are short polls with only a few multiple-choice questions. Sometimes, they’ll have a box where customers can give more information or explain their answers in more detail.
Beta tests and focus groups
Businesses can also get information about products through focus groups and trial tests. Focus groups are used by businesses to test new features or find out what customers think about a particular product or feature. On the other hand, beta testing finds bugs or UX problems before a product, feature, or update is made public.
Talks with customers
Talking to present customers is a great way to find out how different types of customers use the product. It would be best to talk to important people or customers who are very important to your business. DealHub, for instance, would talk to a long-term B2B SaaS customer because that type of customer brings in a lot of money for us.
Tools for Analyzing Products
A business can get information about products in a lot of different ways. A lot of businesses use complex tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude. Companies might use more than one product analytics tool, depending on the type of product and the data they need.
What Customers Say
Many businesses use social listening tools to gather and organize what customers say about their products and how they use them. Third-party sites like G2 Crowd and Capterra often source these reviews. Since these reviews are usually the most honest, they can teach you a lot.
Types of Tools for Product Intelligence
In reality, companies get product information from everything that has to do with their product. What companies do with this data is the most crucial part. They need to turn it into information they can use to make decisions about their product.
There are several tools that businesses use to find out valuable details about their product, how it’s used, and how well it’s done:
- Helpdesk and AI chatbot software
- Survey and feedback tools
- Social listening platforms
- A/B testing and heatmap tools
- A/B testing platforms
- Customer data platforms (CDPs)
- Databases and data stores
Each tool is made to collect and help you understand product intelligence data. Companies must combine them to understand how well their products work entirely.
