What Is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Product Management?
by Lumavate | Last Updated: Dec 6, 2023
When your company is focused on bringing products to market, customer experience, product experience, and product management all need to work together. Though they are closely connected, each aspect brings its own unique requirements to your team. In this article, we'll take a deep dive into the differences between these aspects of your business and how each one can impact your bottom line.
What Is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Product Management?
Customer experience encompasses all the touchpoints and interactions your business has with its customers. It includes your product experience strategy, customer service experiences, shipping times, product availability, product quality, and other factors that determine customer satisfaction. As an example, you could sell the best product in the world, but if it's rarely available or shipping is a nightmare, you won't build a good customer experience.
By comparison, product management is focused on an individual product's lifecycle. Product managers are responsible for understanding customer needs, market trends, and competition to define the product vision, roadmap, and features. Product management tends to be focused much more tightly on a single product or a line of products rather than the company and brand as a whole. The product manager is more focused on how the product experience plays into the customer experience.
What Is the Difference Between Product Experience and Customer Experience?
Product experience and customer experience are related but distinct concepts. Product experience is a subset of the overall customer experience. It describes the specific interactions a user (i.e. customer) has with a product. A customer’s product experience encompasses the usability, design, functionality, and emotional connection established with the product itself.
Whereas customer experience defines the overall experience a customer has with a brand across multiple touchpoints. A customer’s interaction with a brand’s product is part of their customer experience. It also includes a customer’s interactions with support, customer service, sales, advertisements, as well as online and in-store shopping experiences.
Product experience has grown to become a key factor in a customer experience strategy.This is why product experience management has become such a significant focus for manufacturers.
How Do You Create a Good Product Experience?
Because a good product experience can help improve a poor customer experience, it's vital that your customer's product experience is second to none. But how do you curate an exceptional product experience that really wows your customers?
The first step is tracking and cataloging product information throughout its lifecycle. This starts by inputting your product' data into a Product Information Management (PIM) system, which allows you to track a number of quantitative and qualitative details across a period of time. By having all of these details in a single central location, it's much easier to encourage collaboration across your business. A PIM that is connected to a digital asset management (DAM) system, enables teams to store product images, videos, documents, and more. PIM solutions like Lumavate offer a built-in DAM, which makes it easier to unify your product information across the entire company.
Used for creating digital product experiences, Digital Asset Management (DAM) is simple to undertake when you use an all-in-one Product Experience Management (PXM) software solution like Lumavate. Once you've entered your data and stored your digital assets in one location, the next step is to use those assets to create touchpoints for every step of the customer's journey. Some digital product experience examples include product guides, marketing campaign landing pages, and product detail pages.
Good product experiences should extend beyond your customers. In many cases, business partners such as dealers, distributors, or retail stores also require exceptional product experiences from your brand. Creating a product experience that not only educates the partner's staff, but also gets these partners excited about the product can have a large impact on the success of your product.
What Does a Product Experience Manager Do?
Typically responsible for one or more products, a product experience manager oversees the overall product experience for these products. That makes them the individual in the company that is accountable for the product experience. The product experience strategy and the implementation of that strategy are often cross-functional. However, they tie into many other roles that have a tangential relationship to the product experience.
In some businesses, the product experience manager may be a full-time individual who is dedicated to this role alone, while in others, product experience management is a part of the role the product manager takes on. This is because the task falls at the intersection of the product experience and the customer's expectations. It's expected that a product experience manager can take a product after development and create a product experience that is in line with the customer expectation of that experience.
The differences between product experience, customer experience, and product management can be nuanced, but focusing on the impact each has on your brand is critical to your success. With an all-in-one solution like Lumavate your team will be able to handle the complexing of product information management and execution of digital product experiences. Ready to get started and transform how your business gets marketing done? Contact us today to get started.