Why it pays to be customer-focused

Having great content and data alone is not enough — knowing how it adds value to your customers’ working lives is the crucial next step. This applies to deepening value to existing customers, as well as addressing new target markets.

It has never been easier for these customers to get ‘good enough’ insights from new entrants or more general providers. Large language models enable data curation and extraction at scale like never before, but they also give you, as an established player, the means to accelerate product development.

Customer focus in practice — what are the hallmarks?

The specifics of your domain, the data you provide, and your ideal customer profile will influence what an essential, must-have offering looks like. However, we’ve observed several key hallmarks that consistently define successful, customer-centric products across industries.

1. Prescriptive Intelligence: Moving Beyond Descriptive Data

Data is a powerful asset, but merely presenting raw information isn’t enough. Customer-focused products go beyond providing descriptive data, moving towards actionable insights. The goal is to not just to show the “what” but help customers understand the “so what” and “what next?”.

• Actionable Insights: Products that help customers make informed decisions with minimal effort do so by curating and combining multiple data sources. For example, integrating public datasets, proprietary data, and real-time analytics allows users to quickly derive actionable conclusions.
• Data Enrichment: Enriching core data with contextual information helps deepen insights. For example, by adding sentiment data from social media, products can offer a more nuanced perspective that’s highly relevant to customer needs.
• Contextual Recommendations: Machine learning and algorithms are key in offering proactive recommendations. By analysing trends, identifying patterns, and predicting future outcomes, customer-centric products can provide foresight that gives users a competitive edge. These contextual suggestions help customers anticipate and react to challenges or opportunities.
• Data Visualisation: Even the best insights are ineffective if they can’t be easily understood. Customer-focused companies invest in presenting data through user-friendly visualisations such as charts, graphs, and interactive dashboards that allow users to quickly grasp key takeaways, without having to dive into dense data sets or complex reports.

2. Personalised User Journeys: Enhancing Engagement and Usability

Put simply, the best products feel as though they were designed specifically for each individual user.

• User-Centric Design: Create interfaces that adapt to individual preferences and past interactions, so that your products feel intuitive to every user. Personalisation helps reduce friction, whether by customising how information is displayed or by offering tailored shortcuts that help users accomplish tasks more efficiently.
• Advanced Discoverability: AI-driven search and discovery tools play a crucial role in reducing the cognitive load on users. Advanced filtering, search functionality, and recommendation engines help users find the most relevant data or insights, without sifting through irrelevant information.
• Dynamic Content Delivery: A customer-centric approach includes delivering dynamic content that changes based on user roles, industries, or specific workflows to ensure the presented information is always relevant and contextual.
• Customisable Lenses and Filters: Users appreciate the ability to drill down into specific areas of interest when interacting with a product. Providing customisable views or filters enhances engagement by allowing customers to tailor their experience to their unique needs at any given moment.

3. Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Strategy: Integrating Seamlessly into Workflows

As businesses increasingly rely on data to drive decisions, providing data as a service (DaaS) is becoming a cornerstone of customer-centric strategies. By making data accessible, relevant, and easy to integrate into existing workflows, companies can ensure their product is indispensable.

• Workflow Integrations: Embedding data directly into customers’ existing tools and systems (such as CRM, ERP, or project management platforms) streamlines their workflow. This integration ensures that insights are available precisely when needed, enhancing productivity and eliminating the need to switch between multiple tools.
• API Access: Providing seamless API access enables customers to pull data into their own internal systems or applications. This flexibility empowers them to use the data in ways that are most beneficial to their specific needs, further embedding your product into their daily operations.
• On-Demand Access: Giving customers the ability to access data whenever they need it — whether for real-time decision-making or periodic reporting — removes barriers to use. When customers can retrieve insights on demand, it becomes easier to rely on the product as a constant decision-support tool.
• Flexible Licensing Models: Offering tiered licensing models that cater to different customer needs (such as per-user, per-project, or per-data-pull) creates a more adaptable product. This flexibility not only broadens your market reach but ensures that customers pay for only what they need, increasing satisfaction and retention. Additionally, it creates the scope to unlock unrealised revenue, by providing appropriate access for varying levels and operations within one company.

4. Quality Analytics and Reporting: Driving ROI and Continuous Improvement

Providing customers with high-quality data is just the start. To drive value, products need to offer robust analytics and reporting features that demonstrate ROI and promote continuous product improvement based on customer feedback.

• Customer-Centric Metrics: Products that focus on customer value provide analytics that allow users to measure the ROI of using the data. For example, performance metrics or key decision outcomes help customers see the tangible impact of the insights provided, fostering long-term trust and reliance on the product.
• Data Usage Analytics: Offering insight into how teams use the platform is a valuable feature for both customers and product developers. For customers, it reveals which data is most valuable and how to optimise their use of the platform. For developers, it highlights areas for improvement and features that drive the most engagement.
• Feedback Loops: Actively using customer data and feedback to iterate on and improve the product ensures you address evolving customer needs. Incorporating this feedback into product updates fosters a culture of continuous improvement, which enhances both customer satisfaction and product longevity.
• Building a Proprietary Dataset of Customer Outcomes: By tracking and sharing the results of customer actions based on specific insights, companies can build a powerful dataset that boosts the confidence of new and existing customers. Demonstrating the impact of data-driven decisions helps solidify the product as a trusted, essential resource.

5. Flexibility for Commercial Opportunities: Adapting to Diverse Customer Needs

Offering flexible commercial opportunities enables companies to maximise revenue while meeting a wide range of customer needs. By aligning your pricing and licensing strategies with customer usage patterns, you create a win-win situation.

• Tiered Pricing Models: Offering multiple pricing tiers — from basic to premium — allows for greater market penetration. Customers can start at a lower tier and upgrade as they find more value in the product, creating natural pathways for upselling.
• Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities: Building products with natural add-on features or exclusive datasets supports cross-sell and upsell opportunities. For example, customers who begin using basic data sets may eventually want access to advanced analytics or proprietary data, providing an organic way to grow revenue.
• New Product Launches: Scalability is essential for customer-focused companies looking to expand into new markets or product lines. By leveraging existing platforms and insights, companies can develop new products quickly, ensuring they stay ahead of market demands.

Who is doing this well?

It can seem a lofty ideal, but as we’ll continue to evangelise — focusing on your customers is a commercially beneficial strategy. We’ve partnered with a number of companies who have exemplified this. Despite their differing industries, sizes, and company goals, what unites all of them is an unrelenting focus on serving their customers and the rewards that has given them.

• The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU): By focusing on customer retention and actionable insights, EIU saw an increase in annual subscription revenue retention to approximately 95% over a three-year period, driving over £50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
• IWSR: Through personalised engagement strategies, IWSR achieved a 30% increase in engagement from existing corporate accounts within the first month of a product launch.
• Chemical Watch: By treating technology as a core strategic asset, Chemical Watch drove a 40% increase in ARR, which was key to their successful acquisition by Enhesa.
• The BMJ: The relaunch of the BMJ Best Practice website and app, powered by new APIs, saw a 202% growth in traffic and over one million users per month. Customer renewal rates reached 95%.

Getting Started: A Framework for Building Customer-Focused Products

Firstly, don’t panic. At 67 Bricks, we’ve refined our discovery process to the following core questions, which should inform you with enough depth to make sound decisions about what to do first. So, make sure you know:

• Who is your customer, and what is their most pressing need? Take the time to understand your ideal customer profile and the “job to be done”. Assumptions here can be deadly — ask, and ask again.
• What data and content do you currently have, and how do customers use it? Examine the customer’s journey — both before and after they interact with your product — to identify gaps. And don’t forget additional data you may have that you don’t currently monetise, for example, exhaust data you create merely from doing business, or content that is generated for one-off events that is then filed away and forgotten.
• What is the gap between your current offering and becoming a “must-have” in your customer’s workflow? Determine where improvements can be made to elevate your product’s importance. How can you help them to do something difficult faster or with greater confidence?
• Where is the opportunity for you to provide value? Identify the data, content, or experience enhancements needed to close the gap. What is a sticking point in the way they work with you that could be smoothed over, or is there something that’s simply missing in your arsenal?
• How will your customers pay for it? Define the monetisation model that best aligns with customer needs and behaviour, whether it’s subscription-based, usage-based, or tiered. It’s essential to get commercial teams involved early, so that they can advise on customer pricing sensitivities and buying behaviour, as well as have time to shift their own operating models to accommodate new sales tactics.

Of course, you don’t have to do all this alone. We’re experienced at guiding companies through this mindset shift, as well as then working with them to build the resulting new products, services and platforms required to deliver it. So, if you want to decrease your time to market by learning from experts who have done this before, please do get in touch. We can make sure you get started in the right way, and that you can start realising the benefits as quickly as possible.

67 Bricks provides technology consultancy and full-service product development for information companies.

Email: will.bailey@67bricks.com

Web: www.67bricks.com