BLOG, CUSTOMER SUCCESS, ONBOARDING AND ADOPTION 5 Best Practices to Improve Your Adoption Strategy September 13, 2021 How do you track the consumption/adoption of your products/services? Tracking product adoption should be the number one question after “how do we sell this?” Unless you have a strong adoption plan in place, you will likely fall into the dreaded consumption gap.  The technology consumption gap – or the difference between what your solution can accomplish vs. how your end users are using it (or not using it) – often results in a revenue gap due to customers churn or missed opportunities to grow your customers.  Closing the consumption gap can lead to more mid-term upsells, higher contract renewal rates, and more satisfied customers. Here are five ways you can improve feature adoption.  1. Track Adoption with the Right Tools Extracting insights into how customers are consuming your product is nearly impossible without the right tools. Simply asking the customer how they use your product isn’t enough to get a complete, accurate picture. After all, customers don’t know what they don’t know. If they are not properly trained on how to use a product/feature to solve their problem, they won’t know what to tell you. While you may not need a dedicated customer success management platform like Gainsight or ChurnZero, you can benefit from an analytics solution to track usage data. Telemetry tools can also help you compare what features or functionality your customer uses and what was purchased.  Understanding your KPIs can offer opportunities to see if your customers are benefitting from your product. If their usage data doesn’t align with solving the problem that led to their purchase, your customer success rep can guide your customer to use your product more efficiently and effectively.  Using analytics tools to track your KPIs helps your team stay focused on value-added tasks too, which ultimately increases growth rate and makes it easier to scale your operational capabilities. 2. Align Your Internal Teams on Adoption Strategy High adoption rates are directly related to consistent messaging, so ensuring that every employee fully understands your product is essential to a solid adoption strategy.  Develop a training program to keep every department up to date on your product’s features, why customers love your product, and the pain points your product solves. That way, customers always receive a consistent experience, whether it’s business development, sales, or a customer success rep. Meet and share notes across departments about why your customer bought your product, the outcomes they want to achieve, and the features included in their purchase. Review KPIs together to see if and how a customer uses your product, then compare insights from the data to your customers’ intended goals. When you recognize the consumption gap, show your customers how they can better accomplish their goals with all the available features.   Customer insight is a huge benefit to enhance the stickiness of your product, so creating feedback loops between departments guarantees that you only develop the most valuable features. Basing features on real customer input gives your customer success team more cross-sell and upsell opportunities.  3. Choose and Measure Impactful KPIs With the support of analytics tools, you can look at tons of metrics to determine adoption success. Gaining insight into how customers use your product can help you set goals more effectively and satisfy your customers. There’s no need to examine every click your customers make. Some of the most common KPIs for adoption are: Number of customers who downloaded the application or claimed licenses Total number of logins within 30 days Number or percentage of daily/monthly active users Time of the first primary action Time spent on each feature These metrics are a great place to start examining how quickly customers integrate your product into their workflow, how they’re spending their time within your product, and how successful adoption is across their organization.  4. Address Underusage Early Tracking KPIs can reveal early opportunities to reduce churn and reengage your customer. Automated reporting shows your customer success team which customers may be slower to adopt the product they purchased, which can be an early indicator of churn. Use your usage data to reach out early and address customer concerns or issues long before the first quarterly health check.  Examine your data to identify opportunities where your customer success team should provide more information or support. When you see under usage, here are some questions your team can ask to glean helpful insights and support the customer: Is the customer using the features they paid for? Does the customer need a walkthrough of the product features? Does the customer need help with integration or support with internal adoption? Is there a bug within the tool or a particular feature that’s limiting usage? Is the customer using the latest version of your product? Do they know about the latest features? 5. Create and Deploy Customer Success Plays Once you discover what’s perpetuating your technology consumption gap, develop customer success plays to address the gap early. Training your customer success team on these plays helps them address customer concerns faster and ensure that more customers use and love your product. A strong adoption strategy has two categories of plays: expansion plays, and recovery plays.  Expansion plays drive active customers to expand their use of your product. When you introduce new features, expansion plays offer opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. An Adoption Blitz campaign is a great way to get more customers to try a new feature. Your team can use low-touch email campaigns or create discount-driven campaigns, too. Substantial discount and incentive programs are often significant drivers for higher adoption. Meanwhile, recovery plays offer insight into how your product or service could be better. Customer exit interviews help you create your Voice of the Customer (VoC) and better understand why they stopped using your product. The insight you get from these interviews should play a key role in feature development and your adoption strategy. Use Data to Close the Consumption Gap Ultimately, your customer decided to purchase your product, hoping that it would deliver their desired outcomes. However, if they aren’t using all the features they’re paying for, they may not be seeing the results they need. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways your company can use data to strengthen your adoption strategy and encourage customers to use your product to the fullest.  At ServiceSource, we’re committed to ensuring your customers love your product. Our excellent customer success specialists can help you reduce the consumption gap and drive technology adoption strategies that allow customers to see what your product is truly capable of. Schedule a call today and see how our expert team can help your business thrive. Explore more resources. 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