Users are now more informed, more fickle, and less patient than ever. Mediocre products sink rapidly into the quicksand of irrelevance, and we’re fast approaching a time when only the best-designed and managed products will stand a chance.

While product intelligence is a relatively recent term, it’s becoming the inevitable direction every product and company that wishes to prevail in the marketplace must take. You can no longer afford to have a ‘dumb’ (or even indifferent) product.

In this article, we explain

• What product intelligence is

• Why it’s important for businesses and customers alike

• The difference between product intelligence, business intelligence, and product analytics

• What you need to do to gather and action product intelligence (and how Contentsquare helps you do it)

What is product intelligence? 

Product intelligence is the process of using tools to automatically collect, analyze, and share data (or ‘feedback’) relating to a product’s performance. 

The goal of product intelligence is to create a positive feedback loop that helps teams iterate and innovate with the greatest speed and accuracy, so they can engage, convert, and retain users efficiently.

Why is product intelligence important?

Today, everything shifts in real time, including your customers. Formerly solid positions, such as brand loyalty, have become moving averages. How your customer feels about your company could change dramatically between lunch and dinner. 

Since people won’t take the time to adapt to your product, your product needs to adapt to its users. You should be listening carefully to anything your product tells you. Product intelligence makes this possible.

And it’s not just your product’s integrity that counts. There’s also shipping, marketing, and customer support to consider—to name a few. 

Product intelligence helps collate all of these factors to evaluate the overall performance and popularity of not just your own products, but those of your closest competitors.

Who benefits from product intelligence

On the company side, product intelligence lets teams connect with their work in greater depth. 

For example, it helps

• Product managers facilitate updates, launch new features, and sunset ineffective ones

• Product designers and engineers improve upon their successes and create new ways to add value

• Marketers develop new campaigns, design more effective ads, and forge deeper connections with customers

As for your customers, they suffer less friction and frustration and have more rewarding experiences with products they enjoy using. This translates to increased loyalty, referrals, and engagement—all of which you can take to the bank.

How does product intelligence work?

To understand the concept of product intelligence, consider two popular games you might have heard of: poker and chess.

• Poker is based on unknown information. The cards are dealt randomly, bluffing is a tactic, and luck plays a not-insignificant role

• Chess, by contrast, exists as a system of perfect information. 100% of the data is out in the open, and the competitors (and even the spectators) have equal visibility of what’s available

In chess, it’s knowing what to do with this obvious information and translating it into strategic action, that elevates players into masters. 

To triumph in business today, you not only have to have more complete information than your competitors, you also have to know how to use it going forward. 

Product intelligence is about acquiring information (through product analytics) and how you use that information. The intelligence of your product is critical—but so is your strategic intelligence.

What does product intelligence measure?

Products are now full-on experiences, and in many cases, entire brands have become experiences as well. The process of attracting and retaining customers has become longer, more complex and multi-faceted.

Given this complexity, you need to measure every potentially valuable aspect of customer behavior, segmenting this data to understand your customers and product better. For example:

• After a holiday promotion, who came to your website, and from which channels?

• Does group X tend to download three special reports before they buy?

• Does group Y usually abandon their carts at checkout?

Your users are intelligent. If your product can tell you what your users are doing, then the product is also intelligent. 

What’s the difference between product intelligence and business intelligence?

Business intelligence takes a broad view of business operations. It’s concerned with the health of your company and the vitality of its different teams and divisions.  

Organizing, visualizing, and analyzing business intelligence data arms decision-makers to make traditionally difficult decisions with greater accuracy. 

It answers questions like:

• Should we build another factory? 

• Expand overseas? 

• Shutter a division? 

• Train more salespeople? 

Where BI uses a wide lens, product intelligence focuses on the specifics of the product: tracking and analyzing user activity, customer engagement, conversion, and retention. 

Product intelligence helps internal teams find answers through behavioral analysis without the need for a data expert to interpret the data.

What’s the difference between product intelligence and product analytics?

Here we see much more overlap—but there is a difference. 

• Product analytics refers to the tools used to establish and measure KPIs

• Product intelligence encompasses the actions and strategies you take based on the analytics data you’ve harvested

Analytics tools help teams formulate and answer questions related to customer behavior to drive engagement, conversion, and retention. These areas include marketing, sales, customer success, and tracking behavior within the product.

Analytics will tell you what’s happening in real time. It’s like sticking your hand out the window to feel for raindrops. 

Intelligence is realizing whether the next quarter will be ideal for raincoats and umbrellas, or sunscreen and beach towels—then tooling up your innovation, production, sales, and marketing accordingly.

In a nutshell:

• BI tools make work easier for decision-makers

• Product analytics tools are the cooperative components of product intelligence

• Product intelligence is how you make predictions and innovate for the future

5 ways to use product analytics to increase product intelligence

Self-service product analytics tools (like Contentsquare 👋) allow teams across your company to make the inquiries they want, when they need them, without requiring the time or resources of data experts.

1. Auto-capture data on product performance

A great suite of analytics tools will automatically record all the data so you can ask and answer questions about product performance and customer behavior on the fly, as often as you like, without prior preparation. 

2. Form hypotheses

With a full data set, the answers are there. You just have to figure out the most effective questions to ask it—and ask as many as you can think up. The more tests you run, the better.

3. Perform cohort analyses

Sort your users into groups (you can do this with Contentsquare’s user segmentation) based on shared characteristics, and study their behavior to find useful correlations. This helps you reduce churn, improve engagement throughout the customer lifecycle, and optimize your website and product to meet conversion and retention goals.

4. Collect feedback from users

Developing interviews, surveys, and focus groups adds another dimension to product intelligence by revealing how customers feel, and their level of satisfaction with your products and services. Text analytics tools analyze reviews, social media comments, and ratings so your team doesn’t have to read through individual comments.

5. Test (and test, and test) your theories

In your quest for product intelligence, never stop asking questions. Remember, Thomas Edison first found 10,000 ways not to create a light bulb.

Best practices for product intelligence

1. Understand your customer journey

Website and app behavior are important, but to reap significant benefits, you need to include insights from your marketing campaigns, ad spend, sales efforts, and revenue.

2. Survey your competitive landscape

Know who your rivals are (and their SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). Strive to understand competitors’ products, strategies, and marketing tactics as well as you know your own.

3. Refine and improve your product

This one seems obvious—but ensure you’re making improvements based on user behavior and feedback, not just internal goals.

4. Ensure your products are easily found and understood

A great product needs to be infinitely searchable, with its key attributes, features, and benefits clearly stated. Customers can’t buy your product if they can’t find it, and they won’t buy it if they have to guess whether it meets their needs.

5. Strike the optimal balance between price and value

Cost is always important for users, but it isn’t everything. Discounts might help sales or hurt them. You need to understand the qualities that create value in your products, and learn everything you can about why people choose to buy—or not.

6. Perfect your product experience

A smooth and seamless experience increases customer lifetime value (CLTV) and builds loyalty while decreasing churn. Use Contentsquare’s surveys to measure popular metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and understand the ‘why’ behind your customer behavior.

How Contentsquare helps you optimize product intelligence

Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform auto-captures a complete set of customer data, including product analytics and digital experience analytics data. 

Use our platform’s powerful AI to learn how users interact with your product, across multiple sessions and devices—without having to dig for it.

And when you do need to dig to understand the ‘why’ behind behavior, we give you a range of tools to investigate the data you’re capturing:

• Visualize, segment, and compare your user journeys with Journeys

• See where users are clicking, tapping, hesitating, scrolling, and swiping on your product pages and screens with Heatmaps

• Investigate the meaning behind the metrics by watching reconstructions of individual sessions via Session Replay

• Capture, analyze, and act upon customer feedback at scale and speed with voice-of-the-customer tools like surveys and a feedback button

• Apply user segmentation to assess performance of features, segments, and behaviors and optimize for customer lifetime value

Overall, our platform gives you what you need to quickly turn insights into action and optimize your products to give customers what they expect, want—and love.

But don’t take our word for it. Get in touch today and we’ll show you just how intelligent your product (and your business) can be with Contentsquare to guide you.

Book a demo