In today’s economic climate, businesses are looking for ways to cut costs and optimize operations. One area that is often targeted is software and technology expenses.
To ensure your product remains valuable to customers and is not cut from their budget, it is essential that your product proves that it provides value, and one of the ways to do that is by giving easy access to data.
Analytics and reporting not only provide useful insights for clients, but also demonstrate the ROI of your product and help justify its costs.
Times are changing
It’s becoming increasingly vital for companies to assess the true value of their software and technology services. In recent years, with easy access to funding and a focus on growth, many businesses have hastily acquired various licenses and subscriptions without fully evaluating their worth.
As a result, organizations now find themselves with an array of software solutions that may not be delivering the intended value or being fully utilized. With a newfound focus on cost-cutting and optimization, companies are now turning to this area to maximize returns on their investments or cut costs.
However, while your product may be providing clear value to your users, it may not be as evident to the decision-makers who foot the bill. Additionally, long-term customers may have forgotten the benefits of your product or service, and how it has helped them over time.
This has led to a situation where product teams are under pressure to justify the costs associated with their products and to demonstrate their value to clients, in an easy and accessible way.
By adding analytics and reporting to your product, you can empower your customers with valuable insights that can help them make informed decisions, thereby increasing the value they receive from your product. Moreover, you’re not just helping your clients; you’re also providing a refreshing reminder to your long-term users of the value your software has been delivering to them all along.
By giving them the data they need to prove the value to their colleagues and CFO, you’re effectively demonstrating the ROI of your product and why it’s worth the investment.
In essence, integrating analytics and reporting into your software will be a win-win situation for both you and your clients.
Why not?
Some businesses may shy away from integrating analytics and reporting into their products due to the perceived high costs associated with the process.
However, it’s important to consider the long-term benefits that this investment can bring. By giving your customers valuable insights, you not only enhance their experience with your product but also provide them with the tools to uncover the full potential of your offering. In fact, with the right reporting in place, your customers can even help you do some of the heavy lifting by identifying areas where users are not maximizing the product’s benefits, ultimately driving more value for both you and your clients.
Additionally, there are many embedded analytics tools available that can be integrated into a product so you don’t have to do all the work from scratch, or you could have your team generate the reports, and share them with your customers.
Sometimes businesses are afraid that sharing data and insights might be a risk and open up flanks for criticism when the data points to challenges that might be related to you.
In reality, your clients know that you are not perfect, but when they don’t have concrete data and numbers for this, the perceived challenges might be much much bigger than what is really going on.
We all want to work with people and companies who share openly, even when things are tough, so start sharing.
Some might say “analytics and reporting will be too complex for clients to understand and use”. While it is important to ensure that the analytics and reporting tools are accessible and easy to use, proper training and support can help ensure that clients are able to understand and make use of the insights provided by the analytics.
At Pixelz we use the same analytics and reporting tools that were built for our customers, at our quarterly business reviews with clients, and this is a great time to get valuable feedback from them, educate them on your products and show our value.
What do customers want to know?
From KPIs and OKRs to Goals and Rocks, there’s no shortage of ways to define and measure success, and customers bought your product to help with some of these metrics.
If you can help them report on these metrics and show how your product makes a difference for them, this would be perfect data to include in your analytics and reporting.
Another area to focus on is the usage of your product. How many users do they have, how active are they, who is using key areas of your product and who is not. The list is long, but by proactively guiding your customers to get the full benefits of your product, you will drive even greater value for both your customers and your business.
A next step could be to allow your customers to customize their reporting experience to match their unique needs. This includes the ability to choose which data points to include, how frequently reports are generated, and how the information is presented.
By providing these customization options, you can help your customers tailor their reporting to their specific business goals, and thereby drive more value from your product.
At Pixelz we help ecommerce businesses with their image retouching at scale, and this is a business which is notoriously known for being a “black box” with little transparency.
Usually, customers will send their images to be retouched, and the next datapoint will be when they receive them back, hopefully before the deadline and in the right quality. At the same time, as customers are often working with thousands of images daily, keeping track of all of these is a huge undertaking.
We decided to change this, so in our analytics and reporting tool, we share very detailed data about deadlines (Also the missed ones), any mistakes we made, where any given image is at any given time, and which retoucher or AI’s worked on their images.
We also have metrics showing the savings we help the client achieve as well as data that is completely controlled by the client, like how many images they processed.
By offering this level of transparency and control, we’re empowering our clients to make more informed decisions and ultimately drive more value from our services.
Key Takeaways
Building analytics and reporting into software and technology products can be a valuable feature for your customers and help justify and demonstrate the value of the product.
By providing useful insights and demonstrating the ROI, analytics and reporting can help ensure that your product remains an integral part of a client’s operations, even in times of economic uncertainty.
Integrating analytics and reporting into a product may have some upfront costs, but these costs can easily be outweighed by the long-term benefits of being able to demonstrate your value to clients.
