AMA: Sitecore VP of Customer Success APJ, John Brunkard on Product Adoption

Onboarding is a critical and important launchpad for driving Successful Product Adoption. Onboarding is the first impression your customers receive, therefore setting the stage for their entire experience across the customer life cycle. Here's how it plays a key role: 1. Foundations of Understanding: A well-designed onboarding process equips users with the knowledge and skills they need to use the product effectively. They grasp the product's value proposition and how it solves their problems (their desired outcomes). 2. Reduced Friction: By guiding users through initial setup and core features, onboarding eliminates potential confusion and frustration that could come later. This increases the likelihood of continued engagement. Focus on the golden features i.e. those whose benefits align with the customers desired outcomes and that will deliver value early on. 3. Building Confidence: A smooth onboarding experience empowers users. They feel confident navigating the product and achieving their goals, fostering a likelihood of long-term use. 4. Validation of Customer Objectives: Onboarding provides an opportunity to validate the customers objectives and desired outcomes. Open ended questions could be asked during the onboarding to help fine tune these a little further. Here are some approaches I've found effective: * Personalized Experiences: Tailor the onboarding based on user roles and needs. Don't overwhelm them with everything at once. Focus on what is needed for the first time to value and what is in sync with the desired outcomes. * In-App Guidance: Sitecore has enhanced some of it’s product offering to provide In-App guidance. This provides contextual help within the product, like pop-up tips or short explainer videos, providing immediate support. * Track Success Milestones: Set achievable goals for early wins. Celebrate user progress through the onboarding process, keeping them motivated. * Onboarding is an ongoing process. Consider offering refresher courses or advanced tutorials for users who want to delve deeper.

Customer feedback can be a goldmine for improving product adoption rates. A wealth of information can be gleaned if you go about it the right way. A key point to note is that it is important to leverage both solicited and unsolicited feedback to continuously optimize your strategy: Solicited Feedback: Targeted Surveys: Conduct surveys at key points in the customer journey, like onboarding, feature adoption, and renewal periods. Tailor questions to gather specific insights on the user experience, their effort and satisfaction. In-App Feedback Tools: Embed tools within your product that allow users to easily submit feedback, report bugs, or suggest improvements. Unsolicited Feedback: Active Listening: Develop your active listening skills during customer calls, training sessions, or support interactions. Pay attention to user language, hesitations, or workarounds – these can reveal hidden challenges. Support Ticket Analysis: Mine your support tickets for common themes and recurring issues. Look beyond the specific problem to identify underlying factors impacting adoption. Social Listening: Monitor social media platforms, user forums, and industry review sites (example Gartner Peer Review). Analyze conversations to identify trends in user sentiment and pain points related to your product. Turning Feedback into Action: Actionable Insights, Not Just Data: Don't get bogged down in data. Analyze both solicited and unsolicited feedback to identify recurring themes and pain points. Focus on actionable insights that can be translated into concrete improvements. Prioritize Based on Impact: Not all feedback is created equal. Prioritize issues based on their potential impact on adoption. Address critical usability hurdles or roadblocks that hinder core workflows. Close the Loop: Communicate back to users how their feedback is being used. Demonstrate that their voice matters. This builds trust and encourages continued engagement. Targeted Onboarding: Use feedback to personalize onboarding experiences. Highlight features that address common pain points for new users of a specific segment. Focus on the "Why" Behind the Feedback: Don't just fix the "what." Understand the underlying motivations and goals behind both solicited and unsolicited feedback. This helps you solve the root cause of adoption roadblocks. Important Point: Establish a feedback loop with your Product Development and Product Management teams. Share customer insights directly with those who can translate them into product improvements. By actively soliciting feedback through surveys and in-app tools, while also being a keen listener for unsolicited feedback in conversations and online discussions, you'll gain a well-rounded understanding of your user base. This comprehensive approach enables you to continuously refine your product and the onboarding process, thereby creating a user-centric experience that drives product adoption and long-term customer success.

Product Development: It is important that Customer Success has a close collaborative working relationship with product development. Customer Success Managers can provide user feedback, share pain points, and provide information on feature requests to input into the product roadmap. Customer Success should highlight the importance of Product Development clearly documenting and communicating the benefits and value proposition of product features. This helps CSMs to effectively position these features during onboarding and user training. CSMs can provide access to real users for testing and feedback sessions, ensuring new features address genuine customer needs. At Sitecore our CSMs collaborate closely with Product Management on user research initiatives. Marketing: Alignment on Value Proposition: Work with marketing to ensure your messaging aligns with the customer journey. CSMs can share insights on how users perceive the product's value, aiding marketing in crafting compelling narratives. Targeted Content Creation: Collaborate on creating targeted content (e.g., blog posts, case studies, webinars) that showcases product features and their impact on user success and value realization. Coordinated User Journeys: Work together to ensure the user journey is seamless across touchpoints. CSMs can provide feedback on marketing campaigns or website copy to ensure clarity and alignment with the product experience. Other Teams: Partner with the sales team to identify successful customer use cases. CSMs can leverage these stories for onboarding, training, and marketing materials, demonstrating the product's real-world impact. Collaborate with support teams to analyze common customer issues and feature requests. These insights can be shared with product development to prioritize fixes and improvements that enhance user experience.

Driving product adoption is all about helping users achieve their desired outcomes with your SaaS product. Here are some effective strategies I've used: 1. Align Adoption with Customer Goals: Uncover Objectives: During onboarding, understand each customer's unique goals and challenges. Align product features to their specific needs. Outcomes Over Features: Focus on the outcomes your product will deliver – how it will help them achieve their goals – rather than just listing features. 2. Personalize the Onboarding Journey: Segment Users: Group users based on needs and roles. Tailor onboarding experiences with relevant content, tutorials, and support. Dynamic Onboarding: Use user data to personalize the onboarding flow, highlighting features that directly address their needs. 3. The Power of Storytelling: Customer Success Stories: Showcase real-world examples of customers who achieved success using your product. This resonates with users and builds trust. Goal-Oriented Scenarios: Create narratives that mirror user goals. Show them how your product helps them overcome challenges and achieve success. 4. Deliver Value Early - Quick Wins Matter: Focus on Core Features: Prioritize features that deliver immediate value and address user pain points. Low-Hanging Fruit: Identify easy-to-use features that generate quick wins. This fosters early engagement and motivates continued use. 5. Golden Feature Focus: High-Impact Features: Identify a small set of "golden features" that deliver significant value to a large portion of your user base. Targeted Promotion: Promote these features heavily during onboarding and through product tours. Ensure users understand their benefits. 6. Identify and Empower Champions: Internal Champions: Empower internal customer-facing teams to become product adoption champions. They can advocate for the product and guide users. Customer Champions: Identify enthusiastic users who excel at using your product. Leverage their expertise through case studies, testimonials, or peer mentoring programs. I believe that by Implementing these strategies, you can create a product adoption plan that feels personal and valuable to each customer. This combination of user-centricity and clear value proposition will drive successful adoption and long-term engagement with your product.

Self-onboarding is becoming an increasingly popular approach for SaaS products. Follows are some strategies that can help ensure customers achieve successful implementation even without direct CSM engagement: Product Complexity: Recognize that self-onboarding success hinges on product complexity. For simpler products, robust on boarding and implementation resources can suffice. However more complex solutions may still require direct engagement. Note: It is important to understand the underlying reason as to why the customer wants to self-onboard. It is also important to create resources tailored to different user personas (e.g., beginner to advanced). This ensures users find content relevant to their needs and skill level. Before allowing customers to self-onboard it is important to have a strong foundation of self help resources in place. * Comprehensive Knowledge Base: Create a well-organized and searchable knowledge base with clear step-by-step guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting articles. * Interactive Tutorials and Onboarding Flows: Develop interactive tutorials and in-app onboarding flows that guide users through initial setup and core features. * Video Resources: Offer video tutorials and explainer videos to cater to visual learners and provide alternative learning methods. * Community Forums: Foster a vibrant online community forum where users can ask questions, share best practices, and support each other. Proactive Customer Health Monitoring: It is important to have a mechanism to track customers that are self-onboarding. Here are some of the methods we use at Sitecore. * Product Telemetry: We leverage product telemetry data to track user engagement and feature adoption. We identify users who might be struggling and proactively reach out with targeted support. * Warning Triggers: We set up automated warning triggers based on key adoption metrics. These alerts flag potential customer health issues and allow for early intervention. Provide Options: For customers that want to self on-board - we can give them options to do otherwise if needed, while at the same time clearly communicate self-onboarding expectations. We clearly outline the available resources and support options. * Follow Up: We will then follow up and check in with customers as needed.