Using the 80/20 Rule to Maximize Customer Experience

Regardless of industry, the key to marketing success isn’t creating a bunch of flashy sales materials. It’s ensuring that customers can easily and immediately grasp what your product can do for them.

In the case of Smartsheet, we’ve developed videos, tutorials, blogs, and much more to help customers understand how our best features could add value to their organizations. But you know what? When we looked closer at our lead generation data, we found that most of our new users didn’t come from the content we created to drive sales. As helpful as those materials are, a majority of our signups come from those who dove in headfirst and simply started using our product.

Consider this while helping your own team align on simplifying UX: Some of your customers understand your product immediately while others struggle. How do you maximize your efforts to ensure those on the tipping point remain customers? By applying the Pareto Principle to know who is using your product to its fullest and how.

What is the Pareto Principle?

In 1941, quality management pioneer Joseph Juran discovered an imbalanced ratio of output versus input in virtually every corner of the business world. He dubbed it “Pareto’s Principle of Unequal Distribution” in homage to Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. This principle — or “the 80/20 rule” — means 20 percent of an application’s features make up 80 percent of its usage, 20 percent of customers produce 80 percent of revenue, and so on. Knowing how to use the 80/20 rule helps outline clear goals, so you can reap the benefits in both customer satisfaction and revenue.

Identifying the vital few

If a select user base accounts for the greater part of your revenue, the product experience of those vital few is your key to customer retention.

Think of your product’s industry as a swimming pool. Smartsheet’s pool contains collaborative work management (CWM) tools. The product’s UX determines the depth at which customers jump in for a swim. The shallow end of the CWM pool is simple task tracking software users understand immediately (i.e., Google Calendar). The deep end contains applications made exclusively for enterprises, requiring extensive training or experts (i.e., SAP). Jumping into the deep end without prior knowledge, consultation, or help with deployment can feel like using a concrete block for a flotation device.

Smartsheet represents the middle of the pool. Thanks to our familiar, intuitive interface, most of our customers jump right in, try the product, and don’t drown. But some struggle to stay afloat. Successful swimmers (a.k.a. the 20 percent) quickly understand how our features work together to achieve results — like our sharing, reports, and attachments. Knowing what they do helps us point struggling users toward vital solutions that will help them thrive. From our knowledgeable representatives (who focus on support over sales), to our supplementary content materials, it doesn’t take much for our users to quickly graduate from dog paddle to breaststroke.

The 80/20 rule of UX

Because only certain experiences represent the majority of productive usage, you should know exactly where to direct your efforts to maximize usability.

The capabilities used most often by your 20 percent should be the most intuitive and receive the most attention during product upgrades; they will help struggling users grasp what your product can do for them. I’m not saying you should ignore the other 80 percent of features; if you can pinpoint what customers appreciate about the 20 percent they use most, you can use that knowledge to improve the other 80 percent. And before you know it, you’ve flipped the 80/20 rule so the 80 percent contributing least to revenue are now buying in to boost your sales even more.

At the end of the day, you can create all the webinars and tutorials you want, but the success of your product will hinge on good design and user experience. Simplify your product. Improve and learn from your best features. By doing so, you’ll be rewarded with a lot of strong swimmers.

Originally published at www.smartsheet.com on February 5, 2016.