How Virtual Lifestyles During COVID-19 Has Made Product Development More Precise

Editor’s Note: Alon Ghelber is CMO at Revuze, an AI-enabled technology analyzing millions of customer reviews, online opinions, and offline pieces delivering experience-related insights and intelligence for companies to optimize decision-making.

Even with all the advances in technology and decades of prototypes to analyze, when it comes to successful product development planning – we still need to know the answers to the three basic “what” questions:

What is missing in the current market? What are customers looking for? What will sell?

And, now, it's never been more possible to find out.

With the worldwide COVID-19 crisis keeping everyone confined to their homes, more people than ever are spending hours upon hours in front of their computers. And, while this “new normal” continues, product development teams from designers to marketers have the ability to find out about customer attitudes to help create a roadmap that will guide new product innovations or enhancement along with exploring ways to improve systems for the supply chain.

Having a way to capture customer frustrations to satisfactions during this time provides the invaluable product trend analysis which can be gathered through the “unstructured data” of customer reviews, call center data, surveys and e-commerce sales.

Quite simply, product trend analysis is a focused review of past and current consumer data related to a single product in order to extract insights about future market shifts and directions. What better path to success can manufacturers and supply chain partners have when this data can then be utilized to form the overall product marketing strategy and brand innovation plan.

We know that market trends are heavily influenced by customers' habits and behaviors. Performing market research and collecting customer experience data is a major part of analyzing and understanding how the market is reacting and what are the primary needs and wants of the consumers. This kind of data driven trend analysis gives manufacturers, product development and marketing teams and supply chain partners the opportunity to know what a brand needs to do to stay ahead of the competition.

With the internet being the primary interface for billions across the globe right now, the both abundant and specific from online sharing in reviews and comments, e-commerce shopping conversions and cart abandonment, call center communications, survey data (which now people have more time to complete). Here's how manufacturers, product designers, supply chain leaders can use and apply this information:

Listen to your Customers. Don't just read the reports—actually listen and understand what is being said. In order to stay ahead of the game, companies need to know what customers are saying about products, services and brands. While this may seem obvious, too many companies think they know best and push out products even when customers aren't asking for them creating rows and rows (and warehouses) of unsold inventory. Now it is possible to respond with innovation of what customers liked or discover what has been missed in the current market.

Watch your competition. What is really going on in the marketplace? In order to stand out and maintain market advantage, it is vital to know where your competitors had success and where they failed. Collecting and analyzing “voice of the customer” input about your competition can illuminate market trends to consider in the product design process.

Save time and money. First, seek the most up-to-date data and don't automatically assume that what previously worked is easy or worth replicating. Second, don't forget to check for market activity times, meaning the times consumers were the most active. This will help determine the best time to launch a new product. This info will make it possible to improve efficiency and reduce waste in resource allocation across your manufacturing teams.

As we continue to operate in a stay-at-home world, manufacturers, product developers and supply chain partners must embrace and utilize the unprecedented amounts of “unstructured data” on what customers want and need. Find the right tools to help you gather and analyze it all to effectively lead you to better customer satisfaction and increased sales and earnings.

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