The Power of Product Insights
How SAP utilizes data-driven product insights to create user-centric experiences for future readiness
By Malini Leveque, Global VP of User Research & Insights at SAP
Providing insight to opportunity
In 2022, the global SaaS market was valued at over $260 billion. And it’s expected to grow by over 13% annually from 2023 to 2030. While this kind of industry growth provides tremendous opportunity, it also creates pressure for product teams to deliver high-quality experiences at cloud-speed. In addition to growth pressures, we are also seeing massive changes to our global landscape with revolutionary technologies like AI, mounting geo-political and economic uncertainty, and tighter economic cycles that can hinder product-led growth.
While all of this change can feel disconcerting, it can also pose immense opportunity for product teams. The key is to know how to leverage the right product insights to shape our product portfolio, or risk losing business to upstarts and nimbler competitors who are ready to respond to customer needs accordingly.
Given this tremendous business opportunity, how will Product teams shape the future of our product experiences for our customers with creativity, ingenuity and most importantly — empathy?
As a result of these current pressures, SaaS companies are leaning into product-led growth, using their products to continuously engage customers and drive more efficient acquisition, retention, and expansion.
As SAP transitions to a leading cloud company, our product teams are becoming more data savvy. In turn, we see a growing reliance on analytics and triangulation across multiple data sources, including a focus on the needs and opportunities presented by entire markets and industries, rather than singular customer escalations. This is a positive trend, as it means that product teams are increasingly taking a holistic approach to data-informed customer experience and product insights.
Guiding the future of product experiences
In order to build products people love, we need to start by listening to the people who use them. This is where data-driven product insights come in. Product insights result from user research and testing. They are the signals we get from asking the right questions, analyzing relevant product experience data, and listening to what customers say they need. By synthesizing this information into coherent, well-informed narratives about the market, product teams can respond effectively at scale.
SAP is successfully transforming our approach to Product Development to capitalize on the analytics presented by Product Insights; an essential for SAP to remain competitive in the global enterprise cloud software market. We at SAP Product Research and User Insights lead the transformation by focusing on product experience metrics and customer success data as predictive indicators of business performance and revenue.
We started with the SAP business goals that impact the bottom line — revenue — including customer churn, renewals, upsell and cross-sell, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). We then built a Product Insights measurement framework to assess our current portfolio. The framework includes predictive product experience indicators like product satisfaction (PSAT), usefulness and usability (UMUX), task efficiency including time on task, completion, error rates and usage.
Putting product insights into practice
A great example of well-applied product insights and user research is how SAP Concur managed to move all users over to the Next Generation Experience. Initially Concur Expense, SAP’s automated expense management solution, maintained the legacy user experience alongside the Next Generation Experience. To ensure a smooth transition when consolidating the customer base into the Next-Gen Experience, SAP Concur’s leadership decided to run usability tests on key tasks with people who used Concur or similar products. They used these tests to analyze signals provided by product satisfaction, usability and usefulness from in-product data collected at scale through intercept surveys to guide the way forward.
The key finding from this analysis was that the Next Generation Experience yielded higher task completion rates than the Legacy Experience. Newer users struggled to complete their tasks using the older legacy product, while both the novice and veteran SAP Concur users were able to complete them seamlessly using the Next Generation Experience. This disparity was reflected in the fact users gave the Next Generation Experience a higher Net Promoter Scores than the legacy experience.
These findings helped the Concur product teams prioritize features on their roadmap based on the Pareto Principle (80–20 rule) stating that 80% of all outcomes result from 20% of causes for a given event.
Tangible benefits
The results of this particular use case show a four-fold increase in usage of Concur Expense’s Next Generation Experience; 66% reduction in support ticket volume; 21% burn down of identified UX issues; Year-over-year improvement in Product Satisfaction (PSAT), and most importantly a cultural transformation and investment in user research to drive product priorities.
What we can learn from the story of SAP Concur’s move to the Next Generation Experience is that actionable product insights and cross-team collaboration can result in real value for the customer and end-user. By collecting and analyzing data, collaborating across silos, and prioritizing features based on the insights, SAP Concur was able to deliver significant user experience improvements making the product user-friendly, efficient, and delightfully innovative.
From our learnings with partners across SAP, we’ve found three key factors that can help any product team find success and help build products for the future of work:
- Collaboration is key to developing Product Insights and driving them across the portfolio and design and development lifecycle.
- Product insights should always be aligned to and deliver on the corporate business goal.
- As we work to super-charge our products with emerging technology like AI, we must make sure that every aspect of a product experience is designed and built to empower the people using them.
The time is now to lean into product-lead growth. As one of the leading SaaS providers in the world, SAP has a responsibility to not only offer the best possible product experiences to our customers and end users but ensure that these experiences are designed to be ethical and inclusive. In order to make a positive impact on the world, we must continue to do our part in leading transformation and innovation with humanity, responsibility, and inventiveness.
Malini Leveque, Global VP of User Research & Insights at SAP
Malini Leveque leads the Global User Research & Insights practice at SAP, providing strategic vision and next-level maturity to SAP’s Product Research and Experience Analytics practice. She is particularly interested in building a culture of data-informed curiosity, collaboration, and creativity. She has extensive experience leading design-thinking transformation, design strategy, and user research at companies including Citrix, Hewlett Packard, and Oracle.
Experience matters. Follow our journey as we transform the way we build products for enterprise on www.sap.com/design.
