AMA: Gainsight Director of Customer Success, Meenal Shukla on Product Adoption

Online communities play a pivotal role in driving product adoption and enhancing customer success. When done right, they serve as vibrant hubs where users can engage with each other, as well as with the product team, creating a dynamic ecosystem that supports learning, feedback, and advocacy. Here are key ways in which online communities facilitate these processes: 1. Peer-to-Peer Support Online communities allow users to help each other by answering questions, sharing tips and tricks, and offering solutions based on their own experiences. This peer-to-peer support can reduce the load on formal customer service channels and provide quicker resolutions to common issues, enhancing user satisfaction and retention. 2. Feedback and Co-Creation Communities provide a platform for users to voice their opinions, suggest improvements, and discuss features they would like to see in the product. This direct feedback is invaluable for product development and helps ensure that the product evolves in line with user needs. Additionally, it can foster a sense of ownership among community members, leading to higher engagement and loyalty. 3. Increased Engagement/Adoption Through Gamification Many online communities incorporate gamification elements like badges, leaderboards, and rewards to encourage participation. These elements can motivate users to engage more deeply with the product and community, contributing to higher product adoption rates and ongoing engagement. 4. Accelerated Learning and User Onboarding For new users, communities can serve as rich resources for learning how to use the product effectively. Existing users often create guides, tutorials, and FAQs, helping new users overcome the learning curve much faster than they might through formal training or support channels. 5. Advocacy and Brand Loyalty Active community members often become brand advocates who share their positive experiences on social media and other platforms, attracting new users. Their testimonials and success stories can be powerful tools for marketing and building trust with potential customers. Gong.io does a fantastic job in creating a powerful advocacy driven community. 6. Building a Knowledge Base Over time, discussions and solutions posted in online communities can form a comprehensive knowledge base that is beneficial for both current and future users. This resource can significantly enhance the customer experience by providing instant access to a wealth of information. 7. Creating a Sense of Belonging Online communities can foster a sense of belonging among users, making them feel part of a larger group with similar interests and challenges. This emotional connection can increase product loyalty and reduce churn, as members are more likely to stick with a product where they feel a sense of community. The Pulse community of Gainsight is an example of one such community. 8. Market Insight and Trend Identification Communities can also serve as a window into broader market trends and user sentiments, allowing companies to quickly adapt to changing needs or capitalize on emerging opportunities. Monitoring discussions can reveal insights into how users are using the product and what external factors may be influencing their behaviors. 9. Reducing Barriers to Entry For potential users, seeing an active, supportive community can be a deciding factor in product adoption. The community's enthusiasm and support can help alleviate apprehensions about the learning curve or product efficacy. 10. Product Differentiation In competitive markets, a vibrant community can differentiate a product from its competitors. It adds value that goes beyond the product's features and functionality, highlighting the company’s commitment to user success and satisfaction. In conclusion, online communities are not just support channels; they are strategic assets that can significantly influence product adoption and customer success. By nurturing these communities, companies can create a feedback-rich, supportive, and engaging environment that drives product growth and user loyalty.

1. Best practices framework Purpose: This is the framework for how we talk about Gainsight’s value proposition and ideally this begins in the sales cycle to understand the business challenge that brings a prospect to us in the first place Usage: Our value realization program, commonly known as Operationalizing Outcomes or O2, enables our customers with the building blocks to quickly define and achieve value with Gainsight. Depending on the outcome our customers like to achieve, we have a set of metrics that will be how we measure their return on investment. And a set of workflows that we’ll put in place to help make progress on those metrics. 2. Tutorial Videos Purpose: Visually demonstrate how to use the product or its specific features. Video tutorials are especially effective for visual learners and can simplify complex processes. Usage: These can be shared during initial onboarding, embedded within the product, or made available through a help center. 3. FAQs Purpose: Address the most common questions and concerns that users may have, providing quick and easy answers. Usage: FAQs are crucial for self-service support, helping to reduce the volume of basic inquiry tickets to customer support. 4. Knowledge Base Articles Purpose: Offer in-depth explanations and solutions for various scenarios, including troubleshooting steps, advanced feature usage, and best practices. Usage: Users often access the knowledge base when they encounter issues or want to explore the product more deeply without reaching out to support. 5. Webinars, Live event recordings and Live Training Sessions Purpose: Engage with customers in real-time to provide training, showcase features, and answer questions directly. Usage: These sessions are great for interactive learning and can be tailored to different segments of users, from beginners to advanced. 6. Case Studies and Success Stories Purpose: Illustrate how other customers have successfully implemented and used the product to achieve their goals. Usage: Case studies can motivate new customers during onboarding and inspire existing customers to explore new ways to use the product. 7. Email Newsletters Purpose: Keep customers informed about product updates, new features, tips for success, and upcoming events. Usage: Regular newsletters help keep the product top of mind, encourage ongoing engagement, and ensure customers feel connected to the ongoing development of the product. 8. Community Forums Purpose: Foster a space for users to discuss the product, share tips, solve each other's problems, and provide feedback directly to the company. Usage: Forums can enhance customer loyalty and provide a wealth of peer-to-peer support, which can be a rich resource for both users and the CS team. 9. Onboarding Checklists Purpose: Guide new users through the initial setup and basic functions of the product, ensuring they don’t miss critical steps. Usage: These checklists are crucial in the early stages of customer onboarding, helping to establish a foundation for successful product use.

When dealing with accounts that have frozen their subscriptions and later choose to reactivate, it's essential to implement a strategy that not only welcomes them back but also addresses the reasons they paused their subscriptions in the first place. Here’s a strategy that can be effective in such cases: 1. Welcome Back and Re-onboarding When an account reactivates, it’s important to make the customer feel valued and welcomed back. Sending a personalized welcome back message can make a big difference. Additionally, offering a re-onboarding process helps reacquaint the user with new features or updates they might have missed during their hiatus. This can include targeted emails, product walkthroughs, or tutorial videos. 2. Feedback Loop Understanding why the customer froze their subscription initially is crucial. Implement a feedback mechanism that prompts returning users to share their reasons for pausing and coming back. This information can be invaluable for improving the product and reducing churn. 3. Tailored Promotions Offering tailored promotions or incentives can be a good strategy to re-engage returning users. For example, offering a discount for the next billing cycle or providing premium features for a limited time can enhance the perceived value of the subscription. 4. Segmentation and Personalization Use data analytics to segment returning users based on their usage patterns and preferences. This allows for more personalized communications and recommendations, making the user experience more relevant and engaging. 5. Monitoring and Support Keep a close eye on the activity of reactivated accounts. Offering proactive support can help solve any issues before they lead to another pause or cancellation. Make sure customer support is readily available and responsive to their needs. 6. Continuous Improvement Leverage the data gathered from reactivated accounts to refine the product and user experience continuously. This could involve enhancing features that are frequently cited as reasons for return or improving areas that cause dissatisfaction. 7. Community Engagement Encourage returning users to engage with the community around your product, whether through forums, social media, or direct interactions within the app. Community engagement can increase loyalty and provide users with valuable tips and tricks to get the most out of the product. By focusing on a warm re-welcome, personalized engagement, and continual support, you can significantly enhance the experience for users who decide to reactivate their accounts, thereby improving retention rates and overall satisfaction.

Here are some key roles onboarding plays and practical techniques for ensuring a smooth process: 1. Educating Users: Onboarding educates users about the core functionalities and value of the product, helping them understand how it can solve their problems or enhance their workflow. 2. Reducing Time to Value: Effective onboarding shortens the time to value, enabling users to experience the product's benefits as quickly as possible. This is crucial for retaining interest and commitment. 3. Lowering Initial Friction: Onboarding aims to reduce potential friction by guiding new users through setup processes, integrations, or initial configurations that might otherwise be overwhelming. 4. Building Confidence: By gradually introducing features and allowing users to succeed early, onboarding builds confidence in using the product and encourages deeper exploration. 5. Encouraging Habit Formation: Good onboarding guides users toward behaviors that will become habitual, ensuring that the product becomes a regular part of their routine. Effective Onboarding Techniques: 1. Segmented User Journeys: Tailor onboarding experiences based on the user’s role, industry, or experience level. This ensures the onboarding process is relevant and aligned with the user’s needs and goals. 2. Interactive Walkthroughs: Instead of just video tutorials or manuals, interactive walkthroughs guide users through the key actions they must take within the product environment. This hands-on approach helps reinforce learning and engagement. 3. Progress Indicators: Incorporating progress bars or checklists during onboarding shows users how far they've come and how much is left to complete. This can motivate users to continue through the onboarding process. 4. Immediate Value Delivery: Design the onboarding flow to demonstrate value quickly. For example, if your product is a marketing automation tool, help the user set up their first campaign during onboarding. 5. Use of Tooltips and In-App Messaging: Subtle tooltips and contextual in-app messages can provide additional information and reminders without being intrusive. They help users learn at their own pace. 6. Regular Feedback Collection: Implement mechanisms to collect feedback during and after onboarding. This helps identify pain points and areas for improvement, ensuring the onboarding process remains effective. 7. Personalization and Flexibility: Allow users to personalize their onboarding experience by choosing what to learn about or skip based on their prior knowledge and experience. Offering flexibility makes the process more user-friendly. 8. Integration of Support Resources: Ensure that help resources, such as FAQs, training links, community forums, and customer support contacts, are easily accessible throughout the onboarding process. Knowing help is at hand can reduce anxiety for new users.

Collaborating effectively across teams like product development, marketing, sales, and customer support is crucial for enhancing product adoption efforts. Here’s how you can foster such collaboration: 1. Establish Clear Communication Channels: Set up regular meetings, shared digital workspaces, and communication tools to keep all teams aligned. Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Product Board or Asana can facilitate seamless communication and project tracking. 2. Define Common Goals and Metrics: Align all teams around shared goals related to product adoption, such as user engagement rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. Establishing common metrics helps ensure that everyone is working towards the same objectives and understands how their contributions fit into the broader picture. At Gainsight, product teams and CS teams are both measured on adoption as one of the metrics. 3. Cross-Functional Workshops and Brainstorming Sessions: Organize workshops where team members from marketing, product development, sales, and support can come together to brainstorm strategies to improve product adoption. These sessions can help surface insights from different aspects of the customer journey and foster innovative solutions. One of my favorite days at Gainsight is brainstorming at an AI summit organized by the product. 4. Shared Customer Insights: Create a system where insights from customer feedback, support tickets, and user behavior analytics are shared across teams. This can help the product team understand user pain points and requirements, while marketing can use these insights to craft targeted messages. 5. Feedback Loops Between Teams: Implement structured feedback loops where teams can provide insights back to each other on what is working and what isn’t. For example, the sales team could share common objections they hear from prospects, prompting the product team to make adjustments. 6. Co-Creation of Content and Resources: Work together to create educational content, tutorials, case studies, and other resources that help users get the most out of the product. This content can be used by marketing to attract new users, by sales to close deals, and by customer support to help existing users. 7. Role-Specific Education/Enablement of new and existing releases Educate each team on the roles and responsibilities of other teams. For instance, training sessions where the product team explains new features to the marketing and sales teams can ensure that everyone is well-informed and can effectively communicate the benefits of these features to users. 8. Celebrate Shared Successes: Recognize and celebrate the achievements that come from collaborative efforts. This not only boosts morale but also reinforces the value of working together towards common goals.

Go to: https://pulselibrary.gainsight.com/ Search for Product Adoption and you will see a lot of customers sharing their stories and journeys. Note that this is a Gainsight agnostic content shared during our customer success industry event. Here is how you can search for content. https://share.zight.com/rRuDqWEr

Here are several top reasons why customers might not adopt a product: 1. Complexity and Usability Issues Problem: If the product is perceived as too complicated or non-intuitive, users might feel overwhelmed and reluctant to integrate it into their daily routines. Solution: Streamline the user interface and user experience. Offer comprehensive onboarding, easy-to-follow tutorials, and responsive customer support. 2. Poor Onboarding Experience Problem: Ineffective onboarding can confuse users about how to use the product effectively, failing to demonstrate its value immediately. Solution: Enhance the onboarding process with guided tours, video tutorials, and checkpoints that ensure users understand key features and benefits. 3. Mismatch Between Product Features and User Needs (Bad Product Market fit) Problem: If the product doesn’t meet the specific needs or solve the actual problems of the target audience, users will not see a reason to adopt it. Solution: Conduct regular market research and feedback sessions to align the product’s features with customer needs and expectations. 4. Lack of Perceived Value Problem: Customers might not understand the value of the product or see how it stands out from competitors. Solution: Clearly communicate the unique selling propositions and benefits of the product. Use case studies and testimonials to illustrate its value in real-world scenarios. 5. High Cost Problem: If the cost of the product (or maintaining the product) is too high compared to perceived benefits or available alternatives, adoption will likely be low. Solution: Review pricing strategies and consider introducing tiered pricing models, discounts, or promotional offers to increase accessibility. 6. Insufficient Support and Resources Problem: Lack of adequate support can frustrate users, especially when they encounter issues or have questions. Solution: Invest in a robust customer support system that includes FAQs, community forums, live chat, and other resources to assist users effectively. 7. Change Resistance Problem: Users often resist switching from products they are familiar with due to the inertia of existing habits. Solution: Address this by highlighting ease of transition, offering migration services, or demonstrating clear advantages over existing solutions. 8. Technical Issues and Bugs Problem: Frequent bugs and technical glitches can deter users from adopting the product as they undermine trust and reliability. Solution: Ensure rigorous product testing before launch and maintain continuous monitoring and quick fixes to maintain product quality. 9. External Factors Problem: External factors such as economic downturns, AI, regulatory changes, or competitive actions can also hinder product adoption. Solution: Stay adaptable and responsive to external changes. Adjust your strategies to navigate challenges and seize opportunities as the market evolves.

. Here are some common early warning signs that a customer may not fully adopt a product, along with strategies to address these concerns: EARLY SIGNS OF POOR ADOPTION 1. Low Engagement Levels: * Sign: Infrequent logins and low interaction with key features. * Strategy: Implement targeted onboarding that highlights the value and utility of key features. Use engagement tools like email reminders or in-app notifications to draw them back into the product. Have customer success managers actively work with customers showing signs of low adoption, guiding them through product features, and directly addressing their concerns. 2. Lack of Progress in Onboarding: * Sign: The customer stalls at early stages of the onboarding process and doesn't complete initial setup milestones. * Strategy: Offer personalized assistance, such as a dedicated customer success manager or tailored onboarding sessions to help them through the setup process. 3. Negative Feedback: * Sign: Customer complaints or negative feedback about the product's usability, performance, or relevance. * Strategy: Address feedback promptly and transparently. Show how you are taking their concerns seriously by making necessary adjustments or providing workarounds. Engage with customers regularly through check-ins and follow-up messages. This helps in understanding their needs and addressing any issues before they escalate. 4. Limited Understanding of the Product: * Sign: Questions and support tickets indicate a basic misunderstanding of how to use the product effectively. * Strategy: Enhance educational resources like tutorials, FAQs, and webinars. Consider revising your educational content to ensure it is clearer and more accessible. Provide additional training sessions, detailed documentation, and responsive support to ensure customers feel fully supported in using the product. 5. Comparison with Competing Products: * Sign: Customer makes frequent comparisons to features or benefits offered by competitors. * Strategy: Reinforce your product’s unique value propositions. If appropriate, highlight upcoming features that may meet their needs better. Regularly update customers about new features and improvements. Ensure they understand how these changes benefit them directly to increase product value perception. 6. Low User Sentiment Scores: * Sign: Poor scores in user satisfaction surveys, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score). * Strategy: Dig deeper into the reasons behind these scores through follow-up surveys or direct conversations to address specific issues. Show that customer feedback leads to real changes. Communicate back to customers when their input has been instrumental in shaping product updates or policy changes.

Here’s a strategic approach to effectively use customer feedback to enhance product adoption: * Collecting Feedback Across Various Channels * In-app and email feedback tools: Use prompts and surveys within the application to gather real-time, context-specific feedback. Use emails for stakeholders who are not logging in regularly to engage and cover all your bases. At Gainsight, we use in-app NPS for end users and email NPS for our key decision makers. We also use CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys to identify friction points in adoption. * Customer support interactions: Analyze issues and suggestions that arise in support tickets. CSAT ratings are a good proxy of product satisfaction as well. * User interviews and focus groups: Conduct detailed discussions with users to dive deeper into their experiences and gather qualitative data. * Use your customer-facing teams: Your CS, Sales, Sales Engineering, Support and Services are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to product and the customer feedback on features. Sakes can tell you which features land well in a demo and help us create a market differentiator. CS can tell you which features are driving most value and which features have the highest friction. Support can tell you which features have the highest number of priority 1 support tickets (which, mind you, is not a bad thing because it also shows mission-critical features of your product). I have seen product teams not gathering enough data from customer-facing people who have a synthesized understanding of the product adoption across your future and current customer base. * Segmenting Feedback: Organize feedback by user type, feature, or phase in the customer journey. This helps in understanding which parts of your product or which user groups need attention. For example, if new users report difficulty understanding a core feature, that’s a signal to improve onboarding materials or the feature’s design. * Prioritizing Feedback: Not all feedback will be equally important. Prioritize based on: * Impact on user experience: Feedback that addresses widespread or critical issues should take precedence. * Strategic alignment: Focus on feedback that helps achieve business goals like increasing adoption or reducing churn. * Feasibility: Consider technical and resource constraints in prioritizing which feedback to act on. * Close the Feedback Loop: Communicate back to customers about the changes made based on their input. This not only validates that you value their feedback but also encourages further engagement and feedback. For instance, update release notes, blog posts, or direct emails can be used to inform users about how their suggestions have been implemented.