Building a product from the ground up is a hard thing to do. It is much more difficult when you are trying to make your customers love your product. Product experience is all about users. They should be the sole focus.

A product is not only a service or a technology that your customers use, but it is also the entire experience. Product managers think that only technology and the final product is everything, but they forget about the fact that it is all about users. If your product is perfect as it is but makes the users go through a sloppy process, then you have a failed product. This is why you need to create and optimize every aspect of the customer experience. Because customers judge your product based on each interaction they have at different steps.

Why is product experience important?

If you give your customers a terrible product experience, then they will never become your customer again. It chases away new users as well as makes them hate your product. They are known to increase the churn rate, reduce loyalty and decrease the Customer Lifetime Value. But if you provide them with great product experience, then it increases CLV, builds credibility, improves the scores of all customer experience metrics like CES, CSAT, NPS, etc.

A lot of products lack that punch because there has never been a lot of importance attached to giving the users a great experience while using the product. Having a great customer onboarding process is the start towards having a fantastic product experience. A customer should be able to use the entire gamut of functionalities without feeling exhausted and confused at any point of time.

Who is part of the product experience?

Product managers are the ones who are solely responsible to enhance the product experience. The UI/UX and design employees form a part of it. They are the ones who need to create an interface which is optimized from the perspective of a customer. In fact, anyone who is a part of the product building phase is responsible for giving a smooth product experience.

If your company works in silos, then destroy that setup and work together as a team. There should be information exchange among different departments in your company so that everyone is in the know. There are departments like sales and customer care which are not part of the product team but are more likely to interact with the customers on a more personal level. Why not include them in the product experience as well because they would have a lot to offer since they would have spoken to thousands of customers over time.