AMA: Jellyfish Senior Vice President, Customer Success, Nicole Alrubaiy on Product Adoption

Onboarding is critical to long-term product adoption! We have a dedicated onboarding team for new customer accounts. They're accomplishing a few key things in the onboarding phase. 1. Integration and Configuration * Get the right data integrated and configure the application to meet the customer needs 2. Building Champion Confidence <- this is critical! If they don't trust the numbers, nobody will. * Educate the customer champion, executive sponsor and administrators on key concepts * Build their confidence that they can trust the information they're seeing in the application (lots of show and tell, answering detailed questions) * Train administrators to support the application long-term 3. Seeding Adoption * We narrow the customer's focus to use cases that are easy to adopt and provide a big impact to their business to get started. We coach them on how to successfully roll out to users and provide templates/materials to do that. <- the CSM actually does this while the Onboarding team is working on #1 and #2 * Train core users early on on those basic use cases (get them into the app quickly) and again on more complete use cases that drive their desired value * Train broader groups of users on basic use cases Once a customer exits onboarding, we continue rollout efforts and reinforcement with our champion and monitor adoption patterns.

It's all about alignment. Product, Marketing, and Success need to be well aligned on the adoption goals and need to execute cross-functional programs to drive those goals. You need to be specific about which users should be using the app in what ways, and on what frequency. You also must be able to measure (and slice/dice) adoption to move the needle. In a prior company, we put someone in a dedicated role that played between these 3 functions with a specific focus on driving customer adoption through all channels (in-app paired with events, emails, community posts, CSM motions, etc.). It worked well because: * We were able to isolate the user personas we expected to see in the application weekly/monthly and measure their actual adoption * We were able to see which parts of the app the various personas were using * We built a weekly cadence to certain activities that each persona should do in the application * We built campaigns and materials to push specific personas to do specific activities in the app * We rolled out those digital campaigns in coordination with CSMs monitoring accounts and discussing the same things with our champions in accounts * The person in the role was highly motivated, creative, and understood our product and users deeply It can certainly be done without a dedicated person, but it's often difficult to carve out the appropriate time and departmental focus to achieve real movement.

This is going to depend heavily on your product. In our case, customers use our product to improve the way they work, so we have dozens or hundreds of users in a given account with high consistency role to role, and we have centralized administrator(s). That means we can talk to a few people to move the needle on the many. We do a few things: * Talk to someone! Start with the champion or the exec who purchased the product to understand if their needs are changing, if we should push on a different use case, or what makes the "good" users different from the "not so good" users. Refresh your success plan and move forward. * Roadmap as Bait: Many disengaged customers will show up for an exclusive peek at the roadmap. Offer a roadmap preview as a way to get the customer on the phone to check in on their priorities, and to get them excited for what's to come. If you don't have a customer-facing roadmap slide, insist on having one made. * Benchmark: Show your customers how they stack up against their peers. Our best customers are achieving X, you are way below... let's talk about how to get you there. You can do this at scale or in a conversation. * Engage users directly: You have to get the content right. Personalize according to roles and use cases that are likely important to them and push content directly through in-app, webinars/events, emails <- whatever works for your users. Always give them 2-3 easy things they can start doing in your app immediately and have big payoff. * The bold move: Send an adoption report to your exec buyer or champion. This highlights top users, what parts of the product they are/aren't using, and who is not using (Note: this is risky if you have a renewal coming up so experiment before going big.)

I'm not directly facing that at the moment, but I do have some thoughts. Self-led onboarding is amazing if it's likely to succeed. Let's maximize your changes of that. Here are some things you can explore: * Is the person doing the onboarding highly motivated to get it done quickly? * If the buyer is delegating to someone else to implement, how can you set expectations for their effort and get the buyer to keep pressure on? * Consider aligning on the process and expectations in the sales process while you still have their attention. Provide the checklist/plan then and make sure the buyer sees it. * Provide progress reports to the buyer during the onboarding so they can keep pressure on and unblock issues * Bonus Points: Gamify the onboarding experience for the person doing it. Add little celebrations of confetti in your app, give them points toward something, give certificates or possibly even swag when they hit major milestones. * Does the customer have a high likelihood of success implementing themselves? If no, why not? * Product experience not intuitive enough: What in-app changes or guidance can be provided? Can you also provide short videos to help? * Customers have lots of questions: Can you educate them through online courses and/or a mix of live office hours or webinars. You can also have dedicated parts of your online community for this. * Can you offer a mix of self-led and moments where they really need a human to help? Give them a scheduling link for those human sessions to allow them to book at their own pace. * Consider using a customer portal to prescribe the steps they need to take, content they need to learn, and any important meetings they should book with you. * Consider formalizing self-led onboarding. If it works, put some resource behind making it more viable. You could also explore monetizing the higher-touch onboarding offerings.

We have weekly business reviews with the entire executive team where we review certain metrics including several adoption metrics like WAU, a composite product adoption score, uptake of certain critical features and whitespace. In this meeting we're monitoring week-over-week trends and aligning on areas where we need to dig in further or focus some effort. We also have more focused monthly adoption meetings where we go deeper on adoption patterns by persona, by product, and feedback we're hearing. We'll use these meetings to align with the product managers, CS leaders and others on goals / challenges / initiatives. Of course, we do more comprehensive reviews of adoption patterns quarterly with the executive team and as part of board preparation. These often include a high-level review across all lenses, with a deep-dive into a particular product or persona.

Yes! In the past, we had various approaches to driving adoption in our accounts that would cause temporary boosts but didn't result in sustained adoption. Now we have a motion that's working! First things first: you have to understand why users do/don't adopt to move the needle on this. When/where do the users get value from using your product (things that would make them come back)? How easy is it for them to pick the product up and use it without instruction? What use cases are easiest to start with? For us, we learned that users do best when their leaders are setting the tone: why they purchased the product, when/how they should use it, and what metrics the organization will start to rally around from the product. We are leaning into that with a motion of Rollout and Adoption planning (which is a flavor of success planning) which was actually invented by some members of our CSM team: * Identify key user groups and use cases that align to the outcomes our customers want to achieve. This is done through a focused conversation with our executive/champion in the account. * Prescribe use cases (simple to advanced) that align to those outcomes. * Provide the customer with templates to communicate those to their users about Why, When, How to use the platform. * Orient user training (both online and live) around those key use cases and help train the users. * Measure results, discuss them with the customer * Rinse and Repeat