You Have a Customer Experience Plan. Now What’s Your Product Experience Strategy?

As consumers, we purchase 100’s of products and services each year – from skin care products to coffee makers and bicycles, consumers are continually adding to their household to help make life a bit easier or more enjoyable. More and more of this shopping has shifted online where consumers can quickly discover, learn about, and compare different products before deciding to purchase. This pre-purchase phase is the playing field of many marketers where they have access to a broad set of digital tools to guide customers on their journey, learn about their prospects, start a relationship, and hopefully acquire a new happy customer. 

Once that purchase is complete, however, many brands lose the connection with their customers, often never regaining it until a problem comes up or a special offer is presented. The result for many retail brands is not great – up to 50% of new customers are lost within the first 90 days of purchase. Brands are stuck in a constant, costly search for new customers while losing valuable existing customers. 

So, what’s a brand to do? It’s time to steal from the digital product playbook and augment really great Customer Experience with Product Experience. In fact, supporting customers through their ownership journey is more important than ever for the highly competitive consumer market. Let’s walk through what this means. 

A Brief History of Customer Experience

Born out of the shift from in-store to online purchasing patterns, CX gained traction as an initial differentiator to drive a positive feeling about a brand and to solve problems when they arose. Soon, ensuring customer satisfaction became the way to formalize retention strategies and quantify a customer’s experience with a brand. Marketing teams have long since shifted to a CX formula, largely encompassing the Discover, Educate, Compare and Purchase cycle, or pre-purchase phase, as well as the ongoing service and support for a product when there’s an issue.  

However, for providers of digital products and services, think SitterCity, Netflix, Kayak, or Amazon, CX is part of a full customer journey that also encompasses the ownership experience. This means that these brands remain in constant contact with their customers throughout their usage, suggesting new options to look at, providing helpful advice, or sharing alternative purchase options. 

This ability to stay connected to customers throughout the full customer journey is a major advantage and one of the reasons why digitally native offerings have a considerably higher retention rate.  

But how does this work when the product you're selling is a bicycle or a new skin care product? Today, many of those customers struggle during unboxing – that first moment where expectation meets reality - as well as making the all-important shift from new and novel to a daily habit. 

The Shift to Product Experience

Once a physical product is sold, brands often lose visibility into how customers engage with it. Are they using it regularly? Are they satisfied? Are they running into challenges that impact their likelihood of repurchasing or spreading positive reviews? Unlike digital products, where real-time engagement data provides instant feedback, physical product brands still rely on outdated, reactive methods like surveys, focus groups, and support tickets to understand the unique customer perspective.  

This gap isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s a missed opportunity to engage, support, and delight customers in ways that foster loyalty and long-term value. 

The key for providers of physical products – from smoothie boxes to wellness products to e-bikes – is to maintain a connection with your customers through the critical phases of Unboxing, Usage, Care and Maintenance, and Upsell/Resell.  

PX is all about hyper-personalized connection to customers during their ownership experience. This requires that brands maintain and interact with customers in a way that understands both their usage state and the specific product they purchased.  

Let’s look at an example 

Say you sell a line of specialty juices for health and wellness. Your new customer Susan has purchased the starter kit and is now waiting for the box to arrive. Since Susan is a new user, you know little about her tastes and preferences and likely even less about why she’s started drinking the juices – what are her goals? What will get her to purchase again? How can you help her use the juices in the optimal way? This is where PX shines! 

First, PX starts by making sure that Susan is ready when the product arrives, in this case alerting her to a delivery that requires refrigeration is key. But also, letting her know that she should plan to have a hand whisker at the ready to ensure the best drinkability of the all-natural ingredients where pulp can settle.  

Once the order arrives, it's time to learn more about Susan's experience with juices. Is this her first time doing a cleanse? Knowing more about Susan enables the brand to customize her full product experience, make personalized recommendations about when to drink them, and even how to achieve her larger goals around wellness. 

In a nutshell, PX is about knowing the customer and the product and building a custom experience that meets each customer where they are at – from a goal and an experience perspective. 

When done right, a focus on PX also enables brands to get ahead of common problems (like separated juice pulp), offer valuable advice, give helpful prompts to new offerings, and just stay closer to their customers. 

The Business Benefit of PX 

When brands gather insights directly from a product’s usage, the benefits can be game changing. Zero-party data, collected passively through customer interactions rather than impersonal surveys, provides real-time visibility into customer behavior without interrupting their experience. These insights help: 

• Identify and resolve issues faster 
• Inform product roadmaps based on real-world usage 
• Develop smarter strategies for cross-sell and retention 
• Engage with customers in a way that builds loyalty and trust 
• Expand word of mouth and review opportunities 

When brands connect with customers through personalized interactions, guided usage experiences, and predictive support, that connection drives retention and builds loyalty. And, when customers feel supported throughout their product journey, they, in turn, develop long-term usage habits that turn them into lifelong advocates. 

The Future of Product Experience is Seamless 

To stay competitive, physical products need a digital connection, but it has to be meaningful. Traditional marketing and support tools aren’t designed to guide and support customers in their use of a product, leaving brands with a critical post-sale connection gap. The missing piece has been finding a way to create this connection in a way that enhances customer engagement and satisfaction.  

 That’s where BluStream comes in. BluStream transforms the product experience, bridging the gap between customer acquisition and customer support to turn first-time buyers into lifelong brand advocates. 

 By utilizing both product specific details and a deep understanding of the individual customer, the BluStream Product Experience platform delivers hyper-personalized customer engagement at scale. From unboxing to usage to maintenance and care, the BluStream Product Experience platform provides a constant connection between brands and their customers, enabling product teams to guide and support customers while gathering valuable, actionable data. 

Become a PX Champion 

Digital brands have long enjoyed the ability to engage with customers in real time, guiding them through product usage, personalizing experiences, and improving retention. It’s time for physical product brands to do the same. 

Want to see how BluStream can elevate your customer retention and experience strategy? Book your PX readiness assessment today.