The User Adoption Metrics That Matter for Your Customer Success Team

Your user adoption metrics create a silent, unending conversation between your enterprise and your customer. They are invaluable in helping you understand the results your customers are getting from your product. And in today’s customer-centered economy, there’s nothing more important than generating real value for your customer.

Adoption is about more than just usage; it’s about helping your customer get the most out of your services. It follows then, that your adoption metrics should reflect this deeper goal and generate insight into customer engagement.

The adoption phase is the first time your customers start seeing the value of your product and getting returns in the form of improved ROI. As such, the user adoption metrics that matter should address issues such as whether your product or service is helping your customer complete their work more efficiently.

Three Keys to Successful Adoption

Your customer will spend most of their journey in the adoption phase. It’s the point when the promises of the sale and the lessons from the onboarding process are leveraged into everyday value. This phase leads you into the renewal and upsell process.

Here’s the breakdown:

The adoption phase is your opportunity to nurture your customer relationship and establish a recurring revenue cycle driven by a commitment to customer growth. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as the growth stage. As a manager, your focus in the adoption phase should be on using the customer success platform to monitor three key questions:

1. Is the customer using the product?
2. Is the customer getting value from the product?
3. Is the customer enjoying a positive and trusted relationship with your company?

Let’s look at each in turn.

Is the Customer Using the Product?

Once the customer enters the adoption phase, you want them to start seeing value as soon as possible. And to achieve value, they must be incorporating your product or service into their everyday working lives.

Regularly monitoring customer uptake is the easiest way to tell if your customer understands and is happy with your product.

Metrics that Matter

The most immediate way to track your customer’s product usage is through license utilization. It’s a simple measurement of the difference between the number of active daily users in an account and the total number of licenses purchased. You can move beyond this at-a-glance count by creating an engagement score based on more detailed information. This broader metric offers greater insight into the health of an account by also measuring the time spent online in an application, individual user frequency over a defined timeframe, and the number of features accessed. Distilling this data into a numeric value helps your customer success team rapidly identify active and at-risk accounts.  

Is the Customer Getting Value from the Product?

Customers achieve value when they maximize the features and functionalities of your offering within their unique environment. Knowing, for instance, that your customer is regularly accessing only three of four key features produces a behavior-based opportunity to foster direct engagement and a more rewarding customer experience.

Metrics that Matter

An engagement score for the breadth of customer engagement provides a broad insight into your customer’s use of your product. You can track overall usage as well as time spent using specific product functions both across and within accounts. You can use this metric to effectively monitor the uptake of both existing and new functionalities in response to direct campaign engagement. For example, you could directly monitor the movement of engagement rates following a new launch campaign or different renewal messaging.

A customer-centered company should always be able to read and proactively respond to a customer’s behaviors across their journey.

Is the Customer Enjoying a Positive and Trusted Relationship with Your Company?

A key component of driving lifetime customer value is building and maintaining a trusted relationship. Using the data insights from a customer success platform and adopting a customer-centered approach across your business should enable you to maintain an active dialogue with your customer which, in turn, generates more customer information to shape future engagement.

Ultimately, the best way to build trust with a customer is to deliver valued ROI. You can keep that priority at the forefront by consistently engaging customers with goal setting and achievement, reminding them of their progress, and employing targeted campaigns.  

Metrics that Matter

It can be difficult to quantify levels of trust in a useful way. You can, however, measure the frequency and content of customer responses to quarterly business reviews (QBR) and campaigns and chart the success rates of support cases. You can also use a centralized customer success platform to monitor every communication and interaction that occurs between your customer and a team member. It’s helpful to monitor fluctuations in this correspondence over time to check for seasonal increases and decreases in customer engagement and to plot an overall measure of activity.

By combining this qualitative assessment with metrics that measure the depth and breadth of customer product usage, you can build an overall customer health score. This metric can include detailed business rules and algorithms to reduce all your customer engagement into a highly visible and readily actionable status. The user adoption metrics that matter most are, after all, the ones that guide your future customer engagement.

Defining the User Adoption Metrics that Matter

User adoption metrics should keep you constantly informed of your customer’s behavior and product engagement. These metrics should center on how frequently and effectively your customer uses your product and the overall health of your relationship. Maintaining this information in a centralized customer success platform lets you quickly visualize a customer’s current engagement and personalize your interventions.

Gathering such important information will guide you toward creating a customer-centered approach that leads customers to see and feel the value of your product or service. After all, the adoption process is a chance to demonstrate your commitment to the customer by building your strategy around their needs.

Totango can guide you through every aspect of the customer engagement process, including the crucial adoption phase. Our modular approach helps you prioritize your goals and grow your customer success initiatives. Request a demo or explore Spark today to start improving your customer relationships.    

Image courtesy of Mateja Sekulic.