October 2022 Summaries

The high-touch model is characterized by frequent one-to-one interactions between customer success managers (CSMs) and customers, often involving personalized onboarding material and regular sync calls. This approach is typically used for products with a higher annual recurring revenue (ARR), those requiring significant data input, or tools with a steep learning curve. On the other hand, the low-touch model relies on self-serve resources such as help docs, product tours, and knowledge bases to guide customers through their experience. This method is commonly used for SaaS solutions that don't require integration with other tools or data input to get started. Both models have their pros and cons, and the choice between them depends on factors like product complexity, customer needs, and desired support methods.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential metrics that help measure the progress of a team, product, or business towards its goals. They provide quantitative data to support decision-making and ensure alignment with the overall product strategy. KPIs can be categorized into product usage, product quality, product development, and business performance. Examples include trial drop-off rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), daily active user/monthly active user ratio (DAUs/MAUs), customer lifetime value (LTV), support tickets vs. escalations, on-time delivery, team velocity, customer churn rate, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and net promoter score (NPS). Effective tracking and reporting of KPIs can help product managers make data-driven decisions, prioritize budget spending, assess risks, and execute their product strategy.

In the UX Research Expert Roundtable webinar, participants discussed the evolving role of a UX Researcher and how to build a holistic approach to user research. Key points included democratizing research, communicating effectively for different audiences, ensuring research is integrated where decisions are made, using pro tips for collecting feedback and testing, utilizing appropriate tools, measuring the impact of research, and recommended resources for learning more about UX research. The discussion emphasized the importance of research in driving strategic product decisions and bringing business value.

The text discusses how to prepare for a discovery call when considering purchasing a Product Adoption Platform (PAP). It emphasizes the importance of being clear about your needs and wants, understanding the issue you're trying to solve, knowing why it's important, identifying use cases, defining what success looks like, checking if the product has all the features needed, reviewing customer reviews, and understanding operational processes. The text also provides guidelines on how to run an effective trial, including setting expectations and priorities upfront, involving other teams if necessary, creating a testing framework and criteria, evaluating technical support, and wrapping it all up with a comparative analysis of different products.

Product updates are changes made to a product that aim to improve the user experience. These updates can include new features, bug fixes, UI redesigns, or other improvements. Companies typically gather feedback from users and develop updates based on their needs and wants. Announcing product updates is crucial for keeping customers informed about the latest changes and ensuring they understand how these updates will affect them. There are several channels to announce product updates, such as website banners, in-product notifications, email campaigns, blog posts, and community platforms. It's essential to decide on an update frequency, segment users based on their interests or usage patterns, and keep help documents up-to-date with the latest information. To successfully announce product updates, it's crucial to make each announcement channel-specific, keeping the copy clear and concise. Collecting customer feedback following a product update is also important for continuous improvement. Examples of successful product update announcements include Chameleon's "What's New" page, Levity's monthly product update emails, and Slack's in-app product updates.

In-app messaging can be an effective way to communicate with users, but if not done correctly, it can lead to user overwhelm and frustration. To avoid this, consider the context, audience, frequency, and metrics of your in-app messages. Ensure that each message is relevant and valuable to the user, and personalize them based on user behavior and preferences. Use unobtrusive messaging styles, such as banners or customizable widgets, and make it easy for users to dismiss or snooze messages. Finally, control the frequency of your messages by setting rate limits and adjusting them based on user behavior. By following these best practices, you can create in-app messages that enhance user experience rather than detract from it.

Click tracking is a method used to identify and track user clicks within web applications without requiring code-level changes for tracking. It enables the tracking of all user actions, such as hovers, form field inputs, and more, which are called events. The purpose of event tracking is to use data analytics to answer questions related to product usage and improve the user experience. Two types of click tracking include precision tracking, which requires pre-defined events in the codebase, and retroactive tracking, which automatically tracks events in the background. Common mistakes with click tracking include not having a consistent naming convention and not being specific enough with naming conventions. To get the most out of event tracking, it is recommended to use best-in-class tools that are built around this specific purpose and have deep integrations with other tools. The five steps to successful in-product experiments with click tracking include starting with customer data collection, gathering user feedback through in-app surveys, uncovering insights with product analytics, running data-backed experiments in the product, and evaluating experiment results and iterating for improvement.