You are doing great work in creating prominent products to your customers. For this, probably you were planning a lot of campaigns to be unique, to gain customer loyalty , and to stay out of the competition.
However, do you use your product within your business?
If yes, you’re going well! If you don’t, I suggest you should. Let’s discuss why it is crucial to use your product in this article.
Have you ever experienced the feeling of using your product across teams? It keeps you engaged the entire day working with your product and sees how it helps in your company growth! And you can analyze the fact that “how you experience your product is the same way it will be for your customers.” Right?
Let’s call it “drinking your mocktails”
Whatever you call it, it’s crucial and valuable to have experience with your product as a customer, not just a tester.
We’re building it together, what matters most to use our product?
You shouldn’t depend only on your users to convey how your products work and what needs to be updated or removed.
Instead, while using it regularly, you can experience it from the customer side, the better you could figure it out on your own. And you can be proactive to your customers too.
UTILIZING YOUR PRODUCT HELPS BUILD MEANINGFUL INSIGHTS ON YOUR OWN
It’s all about putting yourself in your customer’s pocket. Yes, as I said before the experience you get from your product will be the same for your customers.
You’ll see exactly what it’s like to utilize your product the way that your customers do.
“The important thing for being proactive is when our team can empathize with our customers. So, We are so much more in sync with our customers’ needs since we use Hellonext ourselves”.
Ultimately, utilizing your tool makes you more understanding of your customer’s expectations before they reach out to you!
BUT WHAT IF YOUR TOOL IS IRRELEVANT TO YOUR COMPANY NEEDS?
Before we jump deep more into why it’s crucial to use your product, there’s a stipulation:
Sometimes you can’t use all your tools or products internally.
I’m explaining from the perspective of a tool like Hellonext, which we can and do utilize ourselves.
In Hellonext we used to add all our plans in Roadmaps so that our customers also join with us to plan things for development. We do all of our business planning in our tool.
That’s what, we can create an ideal product management tool and dashboard by ourselves.
But, practically, it’s not applicable for all businesses to use their tool.
For example, a product like Gusto can’t be used by the entire company, but a small group of the company like the HR/employee success team can use it, but the product team finds no necessity of using it. And, some organizations can’t utilize their tools at all.
In this case, depending on a very close conversation with your customer base is the next best thing.
Gathering case studies, customer interviews, and customer feedback will serve you better, and help bridge that gap.
Reasons why it’s crucial to utilize your product
#1. AN END TO THEORETICAL USE CASES
No matter what type your product is, you probably have ample potential customers and personas.
For example, Hellonext can be utilized by:
- Product managers
- Development teams
- marketing/sales teams
- Customer-facing teams
- Internally to gather feedback about organization activities and path overall and so on…
We utilize Hellonext for these personas ourselves. So, we get a clue into whether or not Hellonext is valuable to the product managers, customer-facing teams, etc. We get a unique way to find how people in those roles use Hellonext.
You’ll be able to gather feedback from folks in plenty of roles. You’ll get to know more about use case personas, and get a high-rank of input. You can have a clear view of if your tool is valuable for the customer in your role, at your type of company.
2. IT’S QUITE EASY TO FIND ANNOYING BUGS AS A CUSTOMER
- Is the home page not loading?
- Is something taking too long to submit?
If you utilize your tool, you know before the customer reaches you about this.
That annoying bug will be ultimately obvious to you and you can fix it before it annoys the customer. This creates a super cool experience for your customers.
You can organize common tasks, instead of one-offs. What actions do you expect, as a customer, to find yourself communicating within your product regularly? What do you don’t require often?
You’ll have a clear-cut sense of this if you utilize your product regularly. And, you’ll be able to organize for the most general actions and user flow, versus actions that don’t have necessary as often.
Pro tip: Going through your tool is a better way to get valuable insights into anything confusing, annoying, or unclear about your tool proactively.
It’s simple to forget about this flow since it’s purely for new customers. Sign up for a new account, see your experience to utilize your tool for the first time.
And, when a new person joins, ensure they go through your tool right away. For that create help pages to your customers where they find it easy. The fresh eyes and priority will be more valuable.
3. THE QUALITY OF YOUR PRODUCT IMPROVES
Instead of focusing on fixing UX issues every time, give priority to bugs or small issues within your product.
Because of this, you’ll be able to fix things faster.
For a developer, it will be easy to fix little things like bug fixes, styling fonts, etc. In around five minutes this improves the quality of the product.
Customers won’t always be active to bring quick fixes to your notice. You can notice them yourself if you utilize your product, and be able to make minor changes or communicate problems to your development team.
As a result, your product will become cleaner and more polished.
4. YOU CAN EXPERIENCE YOUR TOOL FROM A CUSTOMER’S SIDE
For people in support, success, sales, or similar customer-facing roles, it’s important to have full fletched experience with your tool as a customer.
This helps you to talk from the customer side instead of just being able to market your tool. Adding your tool to routine use will provide you with more ability to help customers and sell your product.
You’ll have to give attention to insight into how your tool works and feels. It’s simpler to understand how it fits into a larger company or it does the process. And, you’ll be able to converse this to customers in a way that just isn’t theoretical but grounded in your own experience.
How we use Hellonext internally:
We use Hellonext to collaborate with Hellonext users and organize their feedback. We have our own “Hellonext feedback board” where customers can tell us what’s working, what isn’t, and what they’d like to build next.
We also utilize our roadmap feature to update our progress on requested features and fixes.
We use our changelog to notify customers when new features and integrations are set live.
All of these key features, the Hellonext feedback board, roadmap, and changelog build up our product to the successful one. Utilizing them within our company provides us with better insight into how meaningful they are, how can we make that better, and what it feels like to use our tool.
To remind again, not every product has this luxury to use it internally. But, if you have a chance of using your tool within your business, give it a shot.
Or, relying on your tool, it might not make sense for every company to utilize it. If you’re not already using Hellonext, an internal feedback board can be a better way to learn from your team that does utilize your tool about what they like and don’t like.
Our board looks like:
The last thing to converse, regardless of if you’re using your tool but in case you’re not, we recommend gathering feedback from your customers.
You can try Hellonext free for 14 days, to begin gathering feedback and organizing customer feedback yourself.
Be a proactive meaningful product developer with us, let us create together the best products. :)