VoX and Product-Led Growth
The relationship between Voice of Experience (VoX) and product-led growth strategies
By Heather Roth, Logan Lally, and Alexis Williams
How leveraging customer insights can fuel your growth engine
Over the years, companies across various industries have increasingly shifted their go-to-market strategies away from relying on marketing or sales-led growth strategies in favor of product-led growth (PLG) strategies.
Powering the growing momentum of PLG is the belief that the product itself should be the primary business lever driving customer acquisition and retention, supported by marketing and sales efforts. Generating revenue leveraging PLG strategies relies on a product’s ability to bring value to the customer. Advocates highlight PLG’s ability to increase loyalty, drive down acquisition costs, and contribute to higher revenue.
While product-centric models are growing in popularity, this model does not guarantee success. According to a recent study, 21% of products released fail to meet customer needs. Additionally, while PLG is meant to drive product strategy and innovation, it’s estimated that 52% of a product manager’s time is spent on unplanned “fire-fighting” activities.
We tend to see three key reasons that a solely PLG strategy does not work:
- Focus on product-centric models have shifted away from customer experience, and more toward feature performance.
- Companies invest in certain technologies to track sentiment, engagement, and behavior, but findings are not fully integrated or leveraged.
- No clear measurement “North Star,” leading to vanity metrics or performance metrics focused on part of the journey instead of the customer outcome.
Challenge: Product-centric orgs prioritize “feature” over “customer”
As companies shift towards a product-centric model, they are investing significant capital and time into restructuring team operations and building out infrastructure, including analytics infrastructure. In fact, the product analytics market is projected to continue growing at 16% year-over-year until 2028, indicating the forecasted focus on deriving value from products.
However, somewhere in this move towards product-centric organizations, the focus has shifted away from who it was created to serve: the customer. Instead, the emphasis is on how feature usage and value stream steps drive conversion. Common product metrics include milestone activation, active users, time-to-value, and engagement — metrics that are important and convey what customers are doing, but don’t reflect how customers are using, enjoying, or experiencing challenges with the product.
A common reason for this is product teams are often siloed from analytics, customer insights and strategy teams. This leads to disjointed analytics processes, over-investment in technology infrastructure, and underutilization of perfectly strong systems. Bringing the customer back into focus can help align teams, reduce technology costs, and create products customers will love.
Bringing customers back to product through Voice of Experience (VoX) data
There are few things more valuable to product teams than clear and actionable data. Voice of Experience (VoX) programs not only provide clear and actionable insights to product teams, but they also layer in how customers are using, enjoying, and experiencing the product.
Our colleague, Jennifer Fleck, shared an article recently about how Slalom thinks about VoX. She defines it as the continuous collection, analysis, and operationalization of feedback across the journey. This often requires multiple connected experience management (XM) and other digital technologies that collect and connect customer feedback across their individual journeys. This article notes that companies should be capturing “ask” feedback methods (such as surveys) and “listen” methods (such as online review sentiment analysis) to gain a better understanding of the experience.
While working with various clients on VoX transformations, we learned that an effective way to connect “ask” and “listen” data to product teams is through a third pillar we call “discover.” Discover is the integration of digital analytics platforms — including experimentation platforms — into the VoX ecosystem. The value of this strategy is crucial for product teams because:
- It leads with the customer emotion — whether it’s a score, a customer service issue, or a series of social media comments — and uses those customer insights to drive investigation into the feature or UX challenges.
- It drives product teams to expand their thinking outside of a feature or a small part of the experience to understand their role in getting a customer through their destination. It makes them a bigger part of the experience.
- It reduces time and costs associated with issues. Many of the leading digital analytics platforms help teams quickly identify, quantify, and prioritize key issues to help manage backlogs.
- It surfaces customer feedback, sentiment, and pain points to help product teams think outside of the narrow and competitive “benchmark” view to what they can do to innovate a new experience for customers.
Constructing the VoX ecosystem for product teams
For product-centric organizations, providing access to digital and customer data to product teams should be a key workstream within any transformation management initiatives. In many cases, organizations either own — or have plans to own — many of the tools necessary to build a VoX ecosystem.
Below are the five key data sets that drive significant value to product teams:
- Voice of customer/experience management data (Ask): Captures emotions, effort, expectations, and challenges across the journey to trigger hypotheses for change with added customer context.
- Contact center data (Listen): Identifies issues that are creating the strongest emotions with customers to prompt hypotheses for change and their impact on loyalty/churn.
- Social listening data (Listen): Without being prompted, listens to what the customer is saying to your brand to identify hidden challenges, ideas, and customer connection points.
- Digital analytics data (Discover): Helps understand the “why” behind the customer’s emotions, as well as loyalty and monetary impact. It also explores ideas to streamline and/or bring new, innovative experiences.
- A/B testing data (Discover): Allows for experimentation of options to improve or innovate within the product experience before launching.
Each of these data sets provide value on their own. However, the true utility for product teams is unlocked when the data streams are connected and operationalized across the product lifecycle. Fortunately, many of the top products in the five areas listed above have seamless integration capabilities, or have joined forces with others to build a suite for better connected data.
At Slalom, we work with many partners across all of these technology areas, but we also urge and advise companies to build the best ecosystem for their customers, internal use cases, internal capabilities, and data privacy standards.
Operationalizing VoX in product teams
Building the right ecosystem for customer and product feedback is only one part of putting the customer experience back into product. Building high-performing product teams that consistently use customer data requires a process framework and product manager upskilling that integrates this data into product strategy, exploration, delivery, and monitoring. Established processes ensure data in your VoX framework is distributed to the product teams efficiently, enhancing capabilities and driving new possibilities while reducing time and cost spent on resolving issues.
To do this, teams must create a purposeful framework to define your company’s key metric goal and build an in-production measurement strategy of released functionality and its connected role in the customer’s experience.
Below are our tips for operationalizing VoX in product teams:
Define your North Star and investigate the levers driving to this metric
Product managers focus on the creation of a value framework that ties customer value propositions to business outcomes. Integral to this value framework is the creation of the North Star business metric. The North Star becomes the target “needle” the business needs to move. Impactful VoX programs ask, “What are the leading customer indicators to this North Star metric?” Product managers need to understand how and where customer feedback impacts the North Star metric and what analyses they can conduct to measure it.
For example, a subscription-based organization’s North Star metric may be two-year customer retention because companies abandon software at a much lower rate after two years of utilization. The product manager knows that customer churn is the primary influencing factor on retention. The questions “Why are customers churning?” (ask), “What are the key issues we’re hearing across channels?” (listen), “What is critically wrong with the journey?” (discover), and “What features keeps customers around?” (all) solicit the input required to react and move the needle on the North Star metric.
Define questions to obtain the contextual data needed to achieve the North Star metric
Product managers focus on building backlogs of epics, features, and stories that will best drive the customer experience. Infusing customer feedback into this process will yield more well-rounded stories. Product managers must use VoX to uncover the most painful shortcomings (e.g., bugs) across the customer experience and identify unmet opportunities (e.g., a new functionality) that will resonate with consumers.
The following questions may reveal new functionality opportunities within the product backlog:
- Where are customers finding a broken experience?
- What is the main reason customers unsubscribe from our platform?
- What are customers complaining about to our customer service teams?
- When customers recommend us to others, what topics/features are referenced most often?
- On social media, what do we receive the most love/criticism for?
Answering these questions through VoX enables product managers to know and understand the opportunities and features that matter to their customers. It also helps them define what data and reporting they need from analytics and insights teams, streamlining access to data.
Use data to remove bias and prioritize important issues
Product managers champion features through a gauntlet of competing priorities requiring detailed refinement, laborious prioritization, exhaustive development, and — ultimately — release.
Two key opportunities arise to embed VoX into this phase of product lifecycle management: prioritization and monitoring.
For prioritization, a tried-and-true method is the estimation of viability, feasibility, and desirability for any given feature. Of these three components, VoX has the potential to inform a data-driven angle to customer desirability of functionality. It opens the opportunity to ask questions like, “What percentage of my negative scores are tied to an issue?” and “What is the size and revenue impact of that issue?” Or “What percent of negative reviews have called this bug out?” This quantitative approach removes bias from the equation, expedites the prioritization process, and ensures that solutions are rooted in customer feedback.
For in-market monitoring, product managers can test and understand behaviors to uncover if users are doing what you intended or surprising you with variations. These observations across surveys, social media, and reviews informs the cyclical process of further developing the backlog, creates a richer understanding of your users, and measures progress against the metrics key to your product strategy.
Leveraging the connected ecosystem of data can help product teams reduce time spent on managing issues, allowing for more time spent testing and exploring new experiences that customers will value.
Bringing it all together: The data-driven product lifecycle
To become a high-performing strategic product team, VoX must be embedded within each step of your product lifecycle management. Integrating “ask,” “listen,” and “discover” questions and processes into product work can be a compass for what companies should focus on to bring value, and guides the product lifecycle from concept to customer release.
The visual below shows a sample guide to product lifecycle measurement when all these components are realized together in high-performing, VoX-enriched product lifecycle management.
Bringing VoX to product-led growth
Optimizing for the product continues to be one of the best ways to attract and retain customers. If your company is shifting to become a product-led organization, embarking on a product transformation infrastructure, or revisiting your measurement strategy within the ever-evolving analytics landscape, it’s worth considering a VoX approach. Beyond unifying data across teams to synchronize the approach towards the customer, it brings the customer experience into product teams, empowering them to better manage backlogs and imagine a new future for the product that sticks with customers.
It’s important to note that companies don’t have to have every piece of the process, team, or technical infrastructure in place to get started — the approach can be incremental over time. Check out this article to learn more about how you can think about the strategy in phases to build a sustainable and operationalized plan, and reach out if you want to brainstorm or partner with Slalom on bringing VoX to your product organization or company.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
