The 5 O’s of User-Centric IT

“Surprise,” “Delight”...turning customers into fans is at the forefront of every organization’s mind these days. Particularly for PaaS, SaaS, and other subscription-based services, building products that customers are obsessed with is critical to recurring revenue growth and long-term business success. At GoodData, the customer is at the heart of both our product and business strategy, advising us on everything from product features, to user experience design, to platform capabilities and more in forums like our recent Customer Advisory Board, held last week in San Francisco.

GoodData’s focus on the customer is one of the reasons customers prefer our report designer (97%), data visualizations (91%) and report interface (91%). So, how does GoodData turn customers into partners, fostering product satisfaction and loyalty? We follow a 5 “O” model to nurturing customer obsession.

Opt for user-centric IT from Day 1.

Building products that will not only delight, but empower customers is difficult, especially in the ever-changing field of tech. Organizations have to think deeply about how their offering will enable customers to make transformative decisions and changes, and that requires some foresight in the field.

We built GoodData in the cloud five years ago for one reason--to accelerate the delivery of actionable insights to users. We maintain the Open Analytics Platform as a platform-as-a-service for the same reason. The agility and flexibility that the cloud provides have helped many user-centric tech organizations thrive, like our partners at Okta and Box, and since cloud adoption will triple in the next 5 years, it seems that users now demand cloud tech.

Orient your strategy using customer input.

Companies gather user input in a variety of ways, and customer feedback data is key to driving customer obsession. As Business 2 Community has reiterated recently, a data-driven customer strategy is key to experience, satisfaction, and ultimately, retention. As Jeff Bezos famously quipped, you should “start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.”

At GoodData, we orient our entire product strategy by consulting customers and partners at our Customer Advisory Board. After gaining their insights, we seek insight from user experience experts and developers beyond our organization, to get a third-party view of our product. We also leverage five years of user experience to make our platform more intuitive every day.

Observe your customers, get inspired.

Customer obsession done right not only considers input from customers, but learns from their interactions with the end product. We derive much of our inspiration for innovation from our Powered by GoodData customers, who build value into their products using analytics. Often, their projects go beyond “embedded business intelligence” to creating entirely new data products. While they are innovating using our platform, they end up enabling their user communities with data.

In this way, the reach of customer obsession scales, from the initial platform through the customer to their end-user. And as we learn from our customers about new ways they use analytics to enrich their own products and build revenue streams, we are inspired to continue innovating, to keep finding new ways to use data provide insight.

Optimize customer and user experience.

Functionally, business intelligence is a difficult industry. Thousands of variables could change at any time without warning, from a connector breaking to a data source drying up. Yet, innovative analytics solutions allow customers to manage their entire data portfolio seamlessly. At GoodData, we do this by maintaining a friendly, recognizable UI that enables everyone in the organization to see inside their data.

Of course, customer experience extends beyond BI. The theory behind creating an intuitive user experience requires both input from users, and the tenacity to make big changes. Once you know what your users want, it’s time to get it done.

Own your customers’ successes and failures.

Along with customer obsession, one of our strongest-held values is ownership, and that extends to customer successes and failures. We don’t simply provide our enterprise users a login and ask them to plug in their data (unless that’s their wish), we implement, educate, and ally with our customers’ needs. We’ve launched GoodData University to empower customer success, and we walk with our customers in every step of the analytics-to-insight journey.

In the future, we see our customers building out embedded analytics, which create new revenue streams and seamlessly integrate data for their customers. We also see our customers turning into market experts, continuously adding data to master their field.

Want to find out how GoodData’s customers feel about us? Read the G2 Crowd report.