15 Questions to Make Smarter Product Bets with Customer Insights

The products that offer the best customer experiences are the products that win. But given the abundance of new channels, devices, applications, and data, the digital experiences of products have become more complex. Consequently, product teams’ abilities to understand these journeys have become more complicated.

Today, the best products go beyond function and deliver experiences that continuously engage, delight, and foster loyalty. The digital pioneers who succeed at this are building products alongside their customers and connecting product innovation directly to real-life customer experiences.

But how do organizations get to this point? Enterprise companies are swimming in data, but not necessarily deriving insights that help them better understand the customer. While the marketing team may be looking at how many visitors viewed and bounced from the website, those high-level insights don’t help product and digital leaders understand what led a user to convert, drop-off, and become (or not become) a loyal customer. To truly respond to customer needs, the best teams will evolve from simply answering questions about what users are doing to understanding why outcomes are happening.

Using analytics to advance our questioning isn’t a new idea—Gartner and others have discussed for years. What has changed, though, is a deeper layer of insights into product experiences has become available across digital teams. Now, product managers can go beyond the “first question” about whether users adopted a new product release, and explore the subsequent questions to learn why one group completes a workflow. At the same time, lifecycle marketers can find an opportunity to re-engage a dormant segment and dig into why new mobile offers drive web conversions. And with access to these deeper product insights, engineers and designers can take ownership of what they build and ask how it’s performing with users who interact with features for the first time.

Companies like , Rakuten, Intuit, , , and dozens more are using these insights to expand the levels of customer insights available to their teams. We’ll go more in-depth into the questions those teams explored at our webinar with Forrester | SiriusDecisions, “.” But to help you get started, here are questions we’ve seen product teams asking about how their customers are experiencing their products.

15 Questions to Gather Customer Insights

Use these prompts to facilitate a conversation with your team about how and why customers engage with your product.

Questions about the digital experience:

1. Can we create stickiness with in-app personalized offers?
2. Does sharing results or inviting new users lead to higher retention?
3. Which features should we prioritize to better convert a distinct cohort/segment of users?
4. What makes our most successful customers so successful? Is it something about who they are, their experience of the product, or both?
5. Where could insights about our customers’ experiences really unlock a key decision or make something possible?

Questions about customer needs and behavior:

1. What are our primary ? Why does one group complete an action but another does not?
2. When was the last time we were surprised by how customers responded to a release? What surprised us?
3. How does expert user behavior differ from beginner user behavior? How long does it take to become an expert?
4. What distinguishes our most engaged users from our less engaged users?
5. What is our level of confidence with understanding a new user journey?

Questions about team process:

1. Who should run point on gathering qualitative customer feedback? What tools are they using to do that right now?
2. How are our teams connected with the voice of the customer? Are they able to have face-to-face interactions with customers? (If not, how can we arrange that?)
3. It’s likely that our customers interact with our company across multiple touchpoints. Who is responsible for understanding that complete experience?
4. What’s our biggest blind spot at the moment? What’s holding our team back from making new product bets?
5. In the last 12 months, can we think of a newly discovered insight that markedly influenced company strategy?

Please note, many of these questions are adapted from a list of discovery questions put together by my colleague and used by the team to help companies uncover answers in their data. to get a sense of the customer insights you can unlock.