An article that analyzes user operations in detail!

Preface

I recently browsed recruitment information for Internet operations and felt the segmentation and systematization of the operations position. The demand for user operations also showed convergence, so I can finally give a complete definition of it. I hope this will be helpful to those who are curious about user operations, or have just entered this industry, or are graduates who are still looking for jobs, so that everyone can better understand this work.

1. Demand description of user operation positions by large companies

In order to clarify the issue of user operation, I dug out 26 user operation job requirements from the official recruitment websites of Tencent, JD.com, NetEase, and ByteDance, and then derived their common needs from three aspects: tools/applications, goals, and capabilities.

From the data in the above figure, we can see that in terms of "tools/content", the most important thing is "activities" (such as event operations, event planning, etc.), followed by "stratification" (that is, user stratification, different users use different operation strategies), and the following ones such as growth (system), user life cycle, research, user portraits, user incentives, etc., seem to be rarely mentioned, but in fact they will be used when doing activity/user stratification, and they are ubiquitous tools/methods. In terms of goals, the most prominent ones are activity and retention, followed by attracting new users, which basically covers all goals in the user life cycle. In terms of capabilities, in addition to general requirements such as stress resistance and cross-departmental communication, data analysis is a key point (the author believes that operations themselves are also data-driven work), and only one of them explicitly mentions SQL as a bonus.

2. What does user operation do and the relationship between each transaction

How are the many nouns mentioned in the first part reflected in the entire operation? The following figure can give you a direct understanding of this overview

Generally speaking, user operations are based on the user life cycle and user growth model; the goals of the work are to attract new users, promote activation, conversion (first purchase, repeat purchase, key behavior conversion...), and retention.

As for the strategies or means to achieve work goals, it depends on the specific product needs. Usually, apps that meet routine and repetitive needs such as food, clothing, housing and transportation have the following work content: stratify users, then conduct research on the stratified users to draw portraits, and use different methods to reach users with different portraits according to their purpose (usually using activities as the carrier), then analyze the data to see the results, and then iterate.

To help you further understand these relationships, I drew a picture (roughly understood as plants that can bloom different flowers [products] and bees that can evolve [users]):

Looking upward from the root, each time a branch is separated, a layer is completed. The different flowers growing on different branches are activities or surface interactive functions . The fragrance of the flowers is the touch, allowing users (alien bees) to discover and interact with the product (collecting nectar/spreading pollen). Different flower shapes/fragrances attract different bees, and different flowers determine the way bees interact. The branch on the left is an incentive system . It grows multiple flowers. The difficulty of collecting nectar from each flower is different. Bees accumulate evolution points by collecting pollen from primary flowers. After evolution, they can collect pollen from advanced flowers. As for what the flowers look like? The reason why it can attract a certain type of bees is that the user research and user portraits were completed in the early stage of stratification. After many tests, the flowers finally grew into the appearance that the bees (users) like. (Of course, users’ honey-collecting behavior can also provide further feedback on their acceptance of the product’s performance)

3. Detailed explanation of key points

Goals and basic thinking:

1. Objective. Different businesses have different requirements for the specific analysis and precision of these terms. For example, for most apps, new users refer to new registrations, while for some shopping apps, new users refer to first-time users. For another example, many apps look at next-day retention or next-month retention when evaluating retention; but for low-frequency tool apps, they may tend to use 7-day retention. This will be observed in detail in specific work.

2. The life cycle is a general model, which includes the user life cycle and the product life cycle. Of course, the main focus here is on users. In the early stages of acquiring users, we may do channel placement or fission activities, and these placements or new user acquisition activities will consume certain costs, so the user value is negative at the beginning; as the user's key behavioral interactions with the product increase, the user's value begins to rise (different products are different, some may be user payment value, some may be advertising value); when the user sinks or loses, if the product still maintains the user such as SMS, email contact, etc., and the user does not respond to relevant key behaviors, the user value here will drop to a negative value. There are already many articles on the Internet about the user's lifetime value. If you are interested, you can search it on Baidu.

Work content:

Layering

What is stratification? In a broad sense, stratification is a way of thinking about refined operations, which actually means stratifying users into levels or categories in some way. For example, by life cycle, there are new users, active users, lost users, etc.; by user value, there are important value users, important development users, important retained users, general value users...

Why layering? From the perspective of user development, different users have different usage needs and payment habits, and different familiarity with the app. Differentiating operations for different users, providing different product consultations, and providing different services will reduce users' search costs, improve user experience, and increase user stickiness and conversions. From the perspective of operational efficiency, operational manpower is limited. If users are classified and stratified, and more operational time is given to users who contribute more to the target value, operational efficiency will be higher.

How to layer? It is necessary to extract data based on the goals/hypotheses, analyze the data, and derive different user groups; verify the hypotheses/goals through surveys/activity reach, and further optimize the stratification. (Sometimes stratification cannot be achieved overnight. It requires repeated testing and verification to obtain the best stratification standard. The more refined the stratification, the more stratification standards there are. For example, "the maternal and infant product purchasing group among important value users" has two restriction standards.

1. Common layering methods:

(1) See the above picture (just stratify by work objectives)

(2) Value stratification: RFM "How to conduct user stratification and achieve refined operations? Using the RFM User Value Model (Chirs) This article is quite detailed. It should be added that the principle of this method can be applied to many aspects:

And you can pay attention to its main mathematical logic: take the user proportion and observation indicators as the YX axis, define the observation indicator level according to the change of the curve, and then proceed to the next step of assignment operation. (This means that it does not necessarily have to be RFM. Even if you define other criteria yourself, you can use a similar method to stratify users.)

(3) Element weight stratification

User portrait research after stratification (know who they are and what they prefer, so you can reach them accordingly)

User portraits are generally divided into several categories:

1. Demographic data profile: age, gender, occupation, education, income, geographic location...

2. User behavior portrait: browsing habits (browsing time, browsing duration, browsing categories), purchasing habits (average purchase order, purchase category, purchase frequency, related purchases, etc.), sharing habits, etc.

3. User attitude portrait: product satisfaction, needs that the product hopes to meet, preferences, lifestyle...

Among them, demographic data can be obtained through simple questionnaire surveys or user ID card information, behavioral data can be directly collected from system data, and user attitude data can only be obtained through long-term interaction between users and products. It usually refers to the following data: satisfaction, competitive status and position of feelings, desire characteristics, to meet needs, lifestyle, brand preference, compatibility and personal values, concepts, and various preferences.

Demographic data and preference behavior data profile (partial)

Attached user preference data and its corresponding value

When understanding user preferences, the following data is often needed: actual behavior, ratings, market segmentation (segmentation is ongoing, and can be gradually strengthened from the initial RFM; methods include profitability segmentation, demographic segmentation, channel utilization segmentation, RFM segmentation, personal attitude segmentation, preference segmentation), straightforward dialogue (indicating preferences, answering questions, making requests), third-party information (including demographic data, resumes, lifestyle habits, etc.)

Usefulness: A High value B Medium value C Low value

(This table is listed to remind myself and my classmates that when we spend a lot of time on something/some data in our daily life, we should occasionally stand up and look at the relationship between what we do and the actual task value)

Activity

The pre-launch operations of the event were mentioned in the previous article, you can check it out, I won’t go into details here.

" In-depth analysis of event operations (I): Preparation before the event (including detailed flow charts and a lot of details)"

The essence is basically the above two pictures, but please note that

1. For user operations, every activity is a tool to understand users. Regardless of the success or failure of the activity, as long as users interact with products through the activity, we can further understand users. Therefore, regardless of whether the activity is organized and executed by user operations, user operations can pay more attention. (What activities did the user participate in? How sensitive is he to the activities and rewards? How active was he in the past and during the activities? Which activities did he not participate in enthusiastically...)

2. In the complete hierarchical process, activities can serve as the last link to verify the hypothesis.

User incentive system

It is still the previous article "Operational Advancement: Analysis of the Bottom-Level Logic of the User Incentive System". The key points of the full article are shown in the figure below:

The user incentive system is actually a way to guide user behavior and improve user value by using the peripheral value of the product.

When creating an incentive system, you need to think clearly about the value of a certain user behavior .

Some products blindly enter functions such as point systems and points malls. Points can be earned just by retaining users (daily login/check-in/browsing) and can be exchanged for physical gifts simply by accumulating some time. This practice is likely to attract users who take advantage of the system and increase operating costs.

So what factors should be considered before establishing an incentive system? How to tap into user value behaviors? How to match user value and calculated score equally?

4. Daily work of user operation (for reference only)

Then let’s take a look at the daily work of user operations (this is just an extraction of my own work experience and may not be universal)

In addition, because user operations are responsible for goals such as activity, retention, and conversion, they may also involve reach planning (sms, email, WeChat, push, etc.), resource planning, coupon distribution planning, etc. However, since these are not included in the hot recruitment terms, we will not go into detail. In fact, the work of operations is generally similar, and it also involves communicating with multiple departments. For new operations personnel, the key is to quickly familiarize themselves with backend applications, product processes, the division of labor and work styles of each department/group, communication processes , etc.

Not only that , as mentioned before, the purpose of user operation is to acquire valuable users, and strive to retain users and increase user value. Therefore, advanced operations can move in this direction, combine with the company's goals, and then try new work content and projects, and do not limit your creativity to a few known nouns.

5. CRM’s enlightenment to user operations (thinking aspect)

The analysis of CRM and user operations are quite consistent, and we can also get some inspiration from them.

1. Objective Interpretation

Abandoning unprofitable users: In the description of CRM goals, "abandoning unprofitable" customers is also one of the goals. In the daily work of user operations, one of the tasks is to "recall lost users", usually through text messages, phone calls, etc. This work is complicated and has a low conversion rate, and requires manpower costs and high communication costs (domestic text message charges are low, but some countries such as Vietnam have high text message charges). Therefore, there is no need to "recall" endlessly at work. Standards should be established, and when and under what conditions, giving up users is also a part of user retention.

Reducing service costs and operating costs is a key point of growth. Therefore, when measuring the value of our work, we can also take cost reduction into account. For example, the automatic answering system reduces the cost of manual communication.

2. Management Model IDIC

Identify the unification of multiple channels and systems, and quickly identify the customer type and any important past interaction information when the customer comes.

Treat people differently and save your time for high-value users

Interactive and efficient interaction, each interaction is based on the previous one and continues the previous interaction

Customer-centric , personalized services (requires customer trust and more two-way communication)

It should be noted that the identification step requires more technical support because it requires the integration of multi-channel information. For example, when a user reports a problem through the mini program and communicates with customer service, when he later transfers to the app, the system also needs to identify the problems that this person has reported in the mini program and the progress of related communication. (The biggest contradiction in this step should be privacy data security)

Differentiated treatment is also a key point, including reserving time for high-value users, while also requiring different treatment of users based on different customer needs.

3. Customer value (profit contribution)

Customers contribute to corporate profits: 1. Profits from increased purchases; 2. Profits from reduced operating costs (customers become more experienced, the number of times they extract requirements decreases, and the probability of errors decreases); 3. Recommendations; 4. Price overflow: long-term customers are more likely to pay normal prices

Author: Hans Christian Andersen

Source: Andersen