Earlier this year, we surveyed more than 450 SaaS leaders to understand how top companies are managing and prioritizing user adoption and onboarding. We know that driving strong adoption is a fundamental step to customer success, retention, expansion, and advocacy, so we wanted to find out what success and challenges companies are seeing with it today.
Based on the data we collected, we developed the 2018 SaaS User Adoption & Onboarding Benchmarking Report. In it, we uncovered some pretty eye-opening stats, like the fact that 70% of companies are focused on improving their onboarding process this year, and 26% are specifically looking to develop a more self-service/high-tech onboarding model.
Here are 3 recommendations we have for developing a better user adoption strategy. You can see these recommendations and more in the report.
1. Ensure adoption is a top-down, cross-functional initiative.
If making not coming down from leadership, it likely has no formal processes in place, making it a secondary priority at the departmental level at best. Since driving user adoption needs to come with a range of KPIs (not just usage reports) across a range of functions, it should be an organizational effort.
- Best practices to consider:
- Create a cross-functional adoption team and develop a shared and agreed-upon best customer profile. Ask: ”Who are our best customers and what makes them our best customers?” Document the usage patterns that strongly correlate to proven ROI with your customer base.
- Ensure your sales team identifies clear use cases for your product upfront and ties them to business ROI.
- Understand the nuances between user roles and the different goals between user types (i.e. admin users vs. power users, etc.)
2. Institute dedicated training and implementation resources.
Since onboarding is a significant mile marker in the road to adoption it is best to have a leader, plan, and team focused on doing it right. Only 19% of our respondents had a dedicated onboarding team, which is encouraging, but many more lacked a dedicated adoption plan and leadership.
- Best practices to consider:
- Understand the onboarding investment and timeline across each customer segment and ensure those individuals on the frontlines responsible for onboarding have sufficient time and capacity to perform the necessary activities required.
- Look to reduce as many handoffs as possible and where you do have handoffs, focus on smooth transitions that put the user experience first above your own internal workflow challenges.
3. Introduce a high-tech approach where possible.
High-tech models are more scalable and proactive than high-touch approaches, so look for opportunities to replace current high-touch workflows with tech-touch engagements.
Best practices to consider:
- Start with automating a few areas. Learn and grow from there. Some ideas for places to start to include feature feedback, NPS and onboarding tours that contain links to additional videos, knowledge-base articles, and other important resources.
- The right technologies can help you keep an objective, data-driven view of your clients, so you more fairly assess users and develop stronger user adoption strategies based on their needs.
- A dedicated User Adoption solution can help you create self-service trainings that drive stronger user adoption through better onboarding, user engagement, and analytics.
You can read more about these recommendations, the data we uncovered, and other tips and best practices in the 2018 SaaS User Adoption & Onboarding Benchmarking Report.
