What Is the Value of Product Experience?
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Oct 19, 2023
Product experience makes or breaks brands in today's consumer-driven market. Product experience meaning refers to the overall impression, feelings, and interactions a user or customer has with a particular product. It encompasses every aspect of the customer's journey, from the first encounter with the product through purchase, usage, and potential after-sales support.
The importance of a positive product experience is easily extrapolated when you consider how that shapes a consumer’s brand loyalty or how likely they are to recommend the product to their network.
Product experience management is of paramount importance, because one negative experience, at any point in this customer journey, could cause a customer to switch to a competitor’s product.
What is the Value of Product Experience?
By far, the most important thing that the product experience impacts is product adoption. The easier and more enjoyable a product is to use, the more likely people are to embrace it. If something technically does what it claims to, only in a frustrating, convoluted, and ultimately irritating way, people are more likely to look for another option to fill the same need.
Note that this concept is relevant long before a purchase has actually been made. If someone doesn't have a positive experience during the consideration and evaluation phase, they are less likely to purchase your product and will instead spend more time investigating your competitors. What you do is as important as how you do it. If that positive experience doesn't begin immediately, you run the risk of turning a lot of people off just as quickly.
The same concept is true of the onboarding process. If a customer has a positive product experience during the purchasing phase, but the onboarding product experience is poor, the customer is far less likely to advocate for your brand. In a larger sense, your product experience strategy needs to account for all these variables and more. The product experience itself is every bit as important as the overall customer experience and will have long-term ramifications on sales, brand loyalty, retention, and ultimately your ability to generate consistent revenue.
What Makes a Great Product Experience?
A great product experience takes into account where a person is in the customer journey.
For example, during the awareness and consideration phase (pre-purchase), a product experience strategy should deliver product comparison materials, buyer guides, and FAQ help content that guides potential customers to see how your product meets their needs.
If a consumer is standing in a store aisle comparing a shelf of similar products, the buying journey is significantly condensed. As such the product experience needs to adapt to meet the compressed decision timeline that the consumer has.
Your product experience strategy needs to have helpful, relevant content ready to go at any touchpoint.
A valuable product experience continues after a customer buys the product. Look for ways your product can continue to engage customers.
3 Examples of Post-Purchase Product Experience
Unboxing: The look, feel, simplicity. and elegance of your packaging sets a tone.
Guided Set Up: Instead of having a thick setup manual tumble out when a new customer opens the product, provide them with a simple QR code to scan to access a product-specific onboarding tutorial.
User/Customer Community: Engaging with an active user community through forums and social media can provide additional support, tips, and a sense of belonging to a user group.
Implementing a Product Experience Management (PXM) platform, such as Lumavate, enables businesses to create a centralized location for all product-related information and assets. This ensures digital product experiences are accurate and measurable.
What Is the Difference Between CX and PX?
Product experience and customer experience are related but have distinct objectives within a business. Think of product experience is a subset of customer experience. Both are critical in building a strong and loyal customer base, as a great product experience contributes to a positive overall customer experience.
Product experience is focused specifically on the product's qualities and interactions, while customer experience has a broader view of the entire customer journey with the brand.