What Is a Product Experience?

Dynamic, fast-paced, and consumer-centric. Those are the words that accurately describe product and brand marketing today. With tons of brands vying for customer loyalty in the same market, the survival of a company or business depends mainly on its ability to bring about customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction and, in turn, customer loyalty, depend largely on customers having a positive product experience (PX). As such, product experience must be thoroughly understood and effectively managed.

What Is a Product Experience?

Product experience refers to the series of interactions that a customer has with a company’s product. Product experience is holistic, dealing with every aspect of the customer’s interaction with the product. This includes when the customer initially became aware of the product, when the customer considered purchasing the product when the customer purchased the product, and when the customer began to use the product. These interactions are not limited to only those with the physical product, but also its digital aspects, such as websites, social media engagement, mobile applications, and online reviews.

Product experience is essential to the success of any business. This is because of its major role in shaping customer loyalty. As a result, many companies have begun to invest in product experience management. Product experience management is a company’s strategic approach to ensure customers have positive experiences when interacting with its products.

Product experience management is very customer-oriented. Many companies are adopting a product experience strategy that involves the usability, functionality, and performance of the product, as well as customer service and support. These ensure positive product experiences for their customers.

What Is the Difference Between CX and PX?

So, what's the difference between product experience and customer experience?

PX stands for product experience, while CX stands for customer experience. Although both terms seem similar and are evidently interrelated, they do have distinguishing characteristics.

By definition, product experience (PX) refers to all the customer’s interactions, perceptions and emotions related to a particular product, while customer experience (CX) refers to all the customer’s interactions, perceptions and emotions with a particular brand or company. 

Although both concepts are holistic, the customer experience concept is by far broader than the concept of product experience. PX deals with the interactions between a customer and a particular product. However, CX deals with the interactions between a customer and a brand. Just one brand can have multiple products. As such, customer experience tends to involve the interactions of a customer with several products that come from the same brand. This shows that the customer experience can be made up of several product experiences. Therefore, PX can also be referred to as a subset of CX.

Product experience is more specific as it focuses solely on the nuances of a single product, such as product functionality, usability, and satisfaction. The customer experience, on the other hand, is broader, encompassing the overall customer-brand relationship and brand touchpoints, cutting across multiple products and services. Metrics for PX include product reviews, customer feedback and sales data, while metrics for CX include net promoter scores, customer satisfaction scores, customer retention rates, and brand perception surveys. By understanding and distinguishing these metrics, PX and CX management can be done effectively.

What Is the Value of Product Experience?

As previously mentioned, many companies have started incorporating product experience strategies into the management of their products. This is because of the immense value a positive PX offers a brand.

One of the benefits of a positive product experience is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction occurs when a customer experiences ease when purchasing a product, finds that product easy to use, is pleased with the functionality and determines that it satisfactorily meets their expectations as well as the need for which it was purchased. All these aspects of customer-product interactions can be positively influenced by good PX strategies. When your customers are satisfied with your products, they are more likely to buy those products from you again — and even explore some of your other products.

When your customers have a positive product experience, they are inspired to have brand loyalty. A positive PX helps to foster trust and affection in customers towards your brand. This makes them determined to be long-term supporters of your brand. Not only will they continually patronize you, but they will also be vocal about it. Loyal customers ensure that those around them are fully aware of what your brand has to offer, increasing brand awareness. They also go to great lengths to persuade others to patronize your brand.

The results of these actions can be incredibly powerful for your brand, both in revenue generation and in creating a strong brand identity. This highlights the value of the product experience and showcases why great emphasis should be placed on it.

How Do You Create a Product Experience?

Now that you understand the importance of product experience, you must be wondering how you can create a seamless product experience for your product. To do this successfully, you must:

1. Know Your Audience

You cannot create a positive product experience for an audience you do not know. As such, you must conduct extensive market research to know your target audience’s preferences, pain points, and behavioral patterns.

2. Understand the User's Journey

When creating PX, you must take the time to study the various points of interaction between a user and your product. You must also know the various processes and steps that need to be taken before such interactions can occur. You can also study successful product experience examples in your niche and see how they handled their users’ journeys.

3. Design User-Centric Products

Ideally, your products should be designed with the user in mind. Your product design should be compelling, simple, and intuitive. It should appeal to its users as well as be easy to use.

There should also be clear, accessible, high-quality audio and visual content that clearly displays information concerning your product as well as instructions on how to use it.

4. Leverage on Technology

Designing a seamless product experience is possible when the right technology is utilized. An example of this is Lumavate, a product experience software solution. Lumavate has powerful data analytics tools that can analyze the behavior of your customers and target audience and provide insights that can guide your decisions and enhance your products.

Without a strong brand identity, it is easy to get lost in the crowd. As such, product experience (PX) isn’t something you leave to chance. You must ensure that you develop strategies to create a positive product experience and inspire brand loyalty. Schedule a demo with Lumavate today and start creating exceptional product experiences.