Think back to your first smartphone. Unless you’re one of the first people to buy an iPhone, way back in 2007, there was probably a time when you thought a smartphone was unnecessary. All those features were flashy, sure, but who needed it? You’ve got calls and texts on your current phone already.
When you first got a smartphone, you may have thought it was nice, but not necessary. Sure, you’d look things up while you were on the move, but you could live without it. Now, all that has changed. You need your smartphone — you probably check it over a hundred times a day for work and personal reasons alike. Somewhere along the way, you adopted it, and now it’s irreplaceable.
But how does the manufacturer know when that moment happened? They can’t just ask — you probably don’t know yourself when that tipping point occurred. Gauging adoption isn’t a simple task, but it’s important. Adoption predicts renewal and repeat business, so your business needs to have a sense of what it looks like.
Once you’ve figured out how adoption usually comes about, you can start to examine prospects and new customers and predict whether they’re on track to success. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Does the Customer Rely on You in Their Day-to-Day?
A customer who’s truly adopted your product will be using it — probably more often than one who’s still undecided about the value you provide. You should be able to examine the usage rates of your customers to establish a threshold for adoption, then sort your customers by daily, weekly, or monthly login.
If your customers aren’t using your product or service as often as you’d like, it may be for lack of knowledge on what your service can do. Email reminders to infrequent users about the features they’re not using can be a great way to boost adoption rates.
Keep in mind that “in their day-to-day” doesn’t mean “every day” — a payroll administrator might only be logging in once a week to approve hours, but that doesn’t mean the software isn’t crucial to their job.
A Customer Success Automation tool can be a critical function in measuring usage data at adoption time, and automating the communication triggers to your end users via e-mail, in-app notifications, and reminders to reach out personally. These tools can also learn patterns over time, and give you insights as to what adoption behaviors drive outcomes, good and bad.
As with any adoption metric, there’s no hard-and-fast answer for how often customers should be logging in. You’ll have to establish your own benchmarks, based on past users who renewed, and compare current users to those numbers.
How Many Features is the Customer Using?
A simple login to look at a dashboard isn’t the same thing as organizing tasks, setting up workflows, installing on multiple machines, or other signals of comprehensive use. Look at past usage patterns first to get a sense of what kind of behavior is usually indicative of higher adoption, and then look for that same behavior in your current customers.
Your onboarding process will strongly affect how your customers use the product — if they’re not using a given feature, they may simply not know how. “Time To Onboard” is a KPI you should be tracking — it’s simply the number of customers who have completed the onboarding in the time you expect divided by the total number you onboard — and it’ll give you a good sense of who isn’t finishing the process as quickly as they should. Customers can’t adopt the product if they don’t know how to use it, so you should be focusing your attention on those who might need extra help.
Is Your Customer Getting the ROI They Expect?
Your customer picked your product or service for a reason — something they expected to get out of your product that will help them do their job or serve their customers. They might love your product and find it easy to use, but if it’s not delivering the results they need, they won’t keep renewing. You need to set up a way to track outcomes — after all, the core of Customer Success is making sure your customer is successful.
The most useful KPI to track here is Time To Value (TTV). We explain TTV in more depth here, but it’s essentially the amount of time between a customer taking an action and seeing the value of that action. In this case, it’s the amount of time between a customer making an initial purchase (or trial download) and getting what they want out of it.
You’ll need to lean on your sales team and CRM to keep track of what each customer wants to get out of your product — it’s not the same for everyone. Divide them into categories and monitor when they start getting the utility that made them sign up in the first place.
Also, keep an eye on potential early issues. Have they opened a lot of tickets? Is the low usage due to a need for further training? If the client is feeling pain early on, clients will quickly question if they’ve made the right decision.
Is Your Customer Continuously Adopting?
Your product will dictate the answer to this question — some products are adopted easily, after which usage is sustained rather than increased. Other products are more complicated — customers will begin to use them more and more over a longer period of time.
Your product adoption curve will vary depending on the exact service or product that you offer, but you can look at your past customer history to find the points at which your customers generally upgrade or renew their service.
Tracking continuous adoption will be easier if you think of different levels of use as different products entirely. KPIs like usage rate and TTV can be broken down to each feature to create a timeline for how quickly you expect your customers to ramp up their usage. If they’re not using more features over time or aren’t taking advantage of new features as quickly as you’d like, it may be worth giving them some extra onboarding attention.
There’s nothing wrong with a product with a long adoption curve, as long as expectations are managed and the customer starts to see benefits early on.
Do the Customer’s Contract and Adoption Cycles Line Up?
Adoption cycles and renewal cycles don’t necessarily have to match up perfectly, but if they don’t, you need to bridge the gap. A customer who isn’t fully realizing the potential of your product before they arrive at the renewal phase might think that your product doesn’t meet their needs, or doesn’t have the features they expected.
This is another reason why tracking TTV is so vital. If you’re celebrating the small wins with your clients, even though there’s still more work to be done at renewal time, the initial value should be clear.
Your job will be to assess their adoption profile before the renewal phase comes along, comparing them to past consumers to see if their adoption has progressed enough to make them likely to renew. If they haven’t, you might need to change your onboarding strategy to get customers to integrate your product into their workflows more quickly.
The Bottom Line
There’s no master template for how your customers should adopt your product — the rate at which they adopt and the depth at which they utilize your service will be unique to your particular business. Often, adoption is neglected after on-boarding, when in fact, the point at which your customers are leveraging your product independently is likely when they need the most monitoring.
That’s why it’s so important for you to establish these benchmarks yourself. Use your hypothetical ideal customer, rolled together with historical data from existing customers, to track the way that customers use and adopt your product or service between onboarding and renewal. The better you can understand that cycle, the better you’ll be able to appeal to people who are still on the fence, preventing churn and fueling sustainable growth.