Product Adoption
What is product adoption?
Product adoption is consistent product usage by a customer. Product adoption is an important part of the customer journey and a good indication of customer health. Limited use of a product and/or its key features is an indicator of future churn
Why does product adoption matter?
Customers need to consistently use your product to realize its value and become loyal advocates. But consistency is hard, and adoption doesn’t just happen – it requires changing habitual behaviors. To drive user adoption beyond onboarding, companies need an engagement strategy that delivers prescriptive guidance to grow user confidence and competence within the product that aligns with their goals.
Product adoption tips
- Understand your customers’ goals. Have a goal-setting talk. It’s nice to have customers use your product, but without understanding what objectives and impact they want to achieve, it’s difficult to truly guide and advise them on the best outcome. From there you can create a customer journey that aligns with their goals and details milestones along the way to better ensure their success.
- Build small but meaningful wins into the customer journey. Think of this akin to achieving a fitness goal – if you only see results at the end, you’re less likely to have the motivation to keep moving forward. Setting your customer up with small celebrations along the way is critical to keeping your customer moving forward under their own steam.
- Make your primary contact look like a rockstar. You should know what’s important to the success of your POC’s individual goals. Partnering together to achieve those goals creates a product advocate and helps the customer to determine the value of the product in the renewal decision.
Common mistakes hurting your customers’ product adoption
- Training only the admins. In this scenario, you don’t think about your end user and only think about the person you work with on a regular basis. When it comes time to get backup and prove the value of your solution, you may fall flat.
- Failing to define initial success or benchmarks. You can’t succeed if you have no starting point, no point of comparison, and no understanding of what constitutes a “win” for the customer.
- Starting customer training too late. Once your customer has access to the product, the clock is ticking. Would you rather they learn the easy way to use your platform, or the hard way?