Using data to inform your decisions for maintaining and improving your app is key. The best way forward is listening to your customers and ensuring a stable project for the long term.
Full Transcript Below:
Andrew:
Different pages people are viewing right, when they bounce off, where they come in, if they convert.
Cris:
You would be surprised how many companies put reviews on their website and don't read them.
Andrew:
Or this particular part of the app is particularly slow or it's become a bottleneck.
Cris:
What your application actually is, not what you think it is.
Cris:
Data, data, data, data.
Andrew:
The three Ds.
Cris:
The three Ds. Today we're going to talk about making decisions, really four benefits that, there's a lot of benefits, but we're just going to touch on four benefits of data driven decision making.
Cris:
Number one, I say just gives you a greater clarity. And there's a lot of ways that you can obviously get clarity in the way that you can collect this sort of data. So reading your customer reviews, if you sell some product through an eCommerce website, go read your reviews.
Andrew:
Pretty low tech.
Cris:
It's pretty low tech.
Andrew:
Yeah. Anybody can do that.
Cris:
It's important though, go read it. You would be surprised how many companies put reviews on their website, and don't read them. They're like, well, people do reviews. It's a thing. People are used to being able to leave a review, but I don't want to read them, because that's just going to either make me sad, or I think my customers are wrong. They have a myriad of reasons. So go read your reviews. Get some clarity. They might have good opinions. What are other good ways to collect data and actually gain some clarity off of them?
Andrew:
There's low tech ways, like you said, reading reviews or whatever. There is, even things more high tech things like using Google Analytics, where we can see the hotspots on our site, different pages people are viewing, when they bounce off, where they come in, if they convert, all that kind of stuff. Even just from a technical standpoint, we like to build into the software where it's error reporting. So we're getting data of things are breaking or this particular part of the app is particularly slow, or it's become a bottleneck. That's another way we can get data.
Cris:
Yeah, there's so much that plays into that, but if you have all this data and you're actually looking at it and you're actually utilizing it, it gives you a clearer picture of what your application actually is, not what you think it is.
Andrew:
Yeah. That's a good point.
Cris:
That's the big defining factor, that there's a lot of people that they think they know what their app is and they might be close, but without really letting data drive that, perception is reality, as I say a lot. If people are perceiving your app in a certain way, that's what it is. So understand what's going on and get that clarity. And it helps you make actual useful decisions.
Cris:
Number two. What's number two for us, and what are you going to be able to do now you have this data at your fingertips.
Andrew:
Well, as long as the data's usable, as long as it's clean, we can make decisions faster. We can get customer feedback, whether it's intentional in the form of a customer review, whether it's maybe unintentional in the form of like an error report or some sort of analytics. But the goal of this data is not just to have huge amounts of data. It's to be able to react to it. It's to be able to train machine learning it's to be able to make decisions faster, better, smarter off of this data.
Cris:
Even having the chat option on your website, for instance, for the first three years, years of our company, we did not have that feature, that's something that we added, and that obviously allows us to gather data faster. We have people asking us questions about sales opportunities and can you build this? Can you build that? Or people even reporting to, maybe unfortunately, a little bug that they found on some page that somehow slipped through QA, that kind of stuff. If you have a chat option right there, that helps. We make decisions a lot faster than us stumbling across something later on in the process.
Cris:
Number three. I think if you are allowing your customers to obviously interact with your product, if you're taking all this data, you're pivoting these decisions and you're actually utilizing this live feedback, and again, all the automated tools, bug fixing, all that kind of stuff, you're going to increase product loyalty. Because you're building something, like I said, that is what your product truly is, and actually has some ownership outside of just your organization. Rather than what you think your product is, it's actually what your customers know your product to be. And I think it really does help build product loyalty and then kind of increase that. Any thoughts?
Andrew:
No, that's totally true. And, just a different way to look at it too, is what I've encountered with helping clients design products is when you get someone who can put their input in, and that actually gets built into the product, that also increases their loyalty to the product, it increases buy-in. Whether I'm an end user who my voice is heard and that is now integrated into the product, or I'm one of those stakeholders, one of the clients who's helping build this product, when my input is heard and it's built into it does increase that loyalty in the sense of, this is my thing, I'm now part of this. So I think it's super important to both hear people and to discern what is good advice and to integrate the good stuff.
Cris:
Gotcha. Number four. As we wrap this, what's a good point for us to kind of take this home on?
Andrew:
To identify business trends and respond accordingly.
Cris:
Okay. So again, this is the idea of what is going on in my sphere of my application, my widget, my service that I'm providing, whatever it is. Business trends as a whole are obviously a good idea to keep an eye on, but we're talking more specific market trends and business trends within your specific vertical, as I would say. You don't need to be worrying about necessarily all the banking trends if you are not in the banking vertical, it's probably not important. But you'll respond to what your competitors are doing out there. It's not always just, well, okay, they did this, so I got to do that, but at least be aware of it and know, are we seeing, again, gathering this data, are we seeing in influx of customers gravitating to their product? Well, why is that? Did they just launch some new feature? Is it buggy? So on and so forth. And understanding these business trends of what's going on, I think is important and you have to respond because information is only useful if you do something with it.
Andrew:
Absolutely. Otherwise, just noise.
Alexandra:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bixly Tech Tuesday. I hope you enjoyed that conversation between Cris and Andrew, as they talked all about the importance of making data-driven decisions for your business and for your software. If you have any questions about what they talked about today, go ahead and leave them in the comment section and we'll get right back to you. And don't forget to check out the description box down below. We have a bunch of really helpful links for you guys, including a link to our free custom software guide, which will be particularly helpful for you if you are in that startup phase. You can also check us out online Bixly.com and right at the top of our website, we have the big button that says start my roadmap. And that actually gets you a free 60-minute call with Cris to talk about your next app idea. Until next time, this has been an episode of Bixly Tech Tuesday.