Predicting Customers' Behavior
Nalpeiron Technology Blog, September 2013 http://Nalpeiron.com
HOW TO PREDICT FUTURE CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR
Many years ago I used to teach Business Writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Before addressing any of the practical aspects of writing, the text book devoted the first chapter to the concept: Communication is difficult. I think most of us think the opposite, that communication is supposed to be easy and how come so-and-so misunderstood my email/instructions/hints/report/text/detailed notes or whatever.
Communication is partly difficult because as humans, we are constantly translating the facts into the facts as we see them. This type of translation is completely different from lying, which is the deliberate attempt to communicate that which is not true, but a possibly perfectly sincere attempt to deliver the truth. However, this objective truth has to pass through multiple filters before it can be delivered to the receiver. These filters might include wanting to sound smarter than I really am, more in with the in-crowd, more up on the latest thing, less aware of the problems, or any number of issues.
As tech enterprise businesses, we often survey our customers seeking accurate information. We provide opportunities for feedback and solicit reviews; however, the answers we receive have always travelled through these internal filters first. With the best will in the world to answer our questions honestly, customers may tell us information about their application usage behavior that is simply not accurate. If we want to assess the success of our products with customers we need to supplement the answers they give to our survey and review questions with actual software data analytics.
Such data provides what Jim Collins in his seminal business management study Good to Great called: “Confronting the brutal facts.” Unless a business is armed with the brutal facts, it is simply operating in the dark, wishing and hoping that its customers and the market will behave in beneficial ways. Data analytics offers the truth. Not what we would like the truth to be, and not even what customers think it is. Actual truth.
When a company begins receiving data from Nalpeiron Software Analytics, it is seeing the results of the end-users actual key strokes in real-time. For example, let’s say a company launches a new feature in a freemium version for 3 months so that its customers can try it out. The software analytics will follow the end-users as they sign up for the new feature and immediately discover whether they are blossoming into happy and excited customers and referrers, or fading out and losing interest because something is preventing their success.
Nalpeiron Software Analytics provides runtime intelligence services in addition to data analysis of the user adoption lifecycle, and business intelligence to improve business performance. This suite of services fully arms tech enterprise companies, product managers, and engineers all the information needed to succeed with their products and businesses.
The goal of installing Nalpeiron Software Analytics is to bring product management into the present instead of the future. Rather than spending years in development and planning, products can be brought to market based on the end-users real-time behavior, on churn and acquisition analytics, and on the rapid elimination of unnecessary features. By tracking application usage in the present, we can improve user adoption, which can only and inevitably lead to driving yet more user adoption in the future.