Customer behavior analysis for increasing product usage

Understanding how your product is received by customers reveals a lot about its competitiveness, engagement levels, and improvement opportunities. By analyzing the deep-set challenges and preferences of a product’s users, non-users, and abandoners businesses can not only boost future usage but also better inform their R&D initiatives. This was the end goal of a global IT major manufacturing large format printers. It wanted to increase the usage of its cloud-based decorative software aimed at printing companies. Knowing this would mean undertaking a detailed customer behavior analysis across its global base, it sought to employ Netscribes’ holistic research and survey capabilities.

Objective

A global IT major that produces large format printers, wanted to increase usage of its cloud-based decorative software aimed at printing companies. To that end, it engaged Netscribes to conduct an in-depth customer behavior analysis to understand:

• The profiles of existing and potential users
• Reasons dissuading non-users
• Product features that users like and dislike

Solution and Approach

Netscribes conducted a quantitative study of over 200 customers of the client’s brand of large format printers. We identified the target respondents to be individuals holding leadership positions in the marketing or sales teams at large printing firms. In the case of small firms, these were owners or general managers. Since these individuals were not known at the outset, we recruited and interviewed them using a phone-based survey.
We worked closely with our client’s Insights team to develop the screener and questionnaire for capturing the following information:

• Rate of usage
  We sought out to understand the characteristics of the respondents segmented by:
  • Active users: Customers that have used the client’s software product at least once in the last three months
  • Abandoners: Customers that have used the client’s software product, but not since the last three months
  • Never used: Customers who have never used the client’s software product
• Usage behavior insights
  We then derived insights into the software’s usage by capturing information about respondents’ design needs, the features that work well and those that don’t, and the improvements they wished to see.

Scope of the Study

The study spanned across:

• North America: (the US and Canada)
• Europe: (Germany, UK, Austria, Switzerland, other English speaking countries)
• Asia: (India, Australia)

Results Delivered

The study revealed valuable insights into the usage behavior of large format printer owners. These included:

• Over 50% of the respondents had never heard about the client’s design software.
• Satisfaction with existing software tools and the lack of need for a new software were the major reasons for respondents’ unwillingness to try the client’s product.
• 78% of the software users heard about it from the client’s promotional emails.
• 63% of active users said that the software had a positive impact on their business.
  Some of the improvement areas highlighted by the respondents were:
  •   The need for more sophistication in the design tool
  •   A simpler interface that would make it easier for end customers (non-professionals) to use the tool
  •   A simpler online registration and login process