Learnings about improving customer adoption in a SaaS model company
When in SaaS business, retaining and expanding revenue is critical to guaranteeing the health and growth of the company. That’s why more and more companies are investing in improving the customer experience as a way to make the customers see more value, and do it faster. The result is that these customers stay longer, become advocates for the brand and, of course, the companies avoid losing clients to competitors.
For this to happen, it is essential to have a deep-dive analysis in the customer journey to see if all the phases and milestones are well defined — that means, if they really help the customer reach success. The name of these phases can change from one company to another, according to each business model’s needs, but there are some that are widely known, such as onboarding, adoption, and growth.
Here I want to explore the adoption process, a critical phase in which the customer needs to ensure they know how to use and see recurrent value from your product by really putting your solution in their routine. With this, the challenge that most CS teams need to solve is to ensure if the customers are effectively accelerating, maximizing, and sustaining full adoption of software within their organizations. If they are not, it can end in churn.
NO ADOPTION = NO RESULTS = NO RENEWALS
As said in 5 steps for developing a powerful adoption playbook from Amity, “CS teams can spend all the time in the world talking about features, roadmaps, strategy and quarterly business reviews (QBRs), but without adoption, this is all moot.”
And how do we know what adoption means in each business? Commonly, SaaS businesses have access to tons of customer data, and we must wisely use them to understand what are the best ways to reach success. When mapping the adoption profile of your clients, make sure it is informed by what you know indicates high adoption. Look back at successful customers and identify the steps they took. Similarly, look at the path churned customers took and identify what went wrong. It could be, for instance, identifying “Customers who churned out had an adoption rate of less than 30%. They only used 20% of the features they should have been using at this moment of their customer life/they only used 45% of licenses or seats they bought”.
Adoption is one of the challenges of my CS teams at RD Station, the Brazilian company I work at. Here, I want to share some main points about what we did to better explore the customer adoption and, with this, improve our business financial results.
Customer adoption at RD Station
At the CS department of RD, we have specific teams offering onboarding services (which I had the opportunity to run for 3 years) responsible for leading the customer to their First Value using our software RD Station Marketing, a Marketing Automation platform. The First Value is related to the creation of their first digital marketing campaign. Over the years, we’ve made many fine-tunings in this operation in order to deliver First Value faster and better to our customers. And we’ve had very good results regarding the onboarding phase.
As time passed, we identified it was not enough to ensure the customers kept using our software after the implementation process. Instead, we found out many customers stopped using some key features of our software just after the onboarding phase was done. That showed us something was wrong and we needed to fix it.
At that time, the company made a deep dive analysis regarding customer retention, and the study detected some important learnings about the correlation of usage of some specific features and retention after the onboarding phase. The study showed us customers who really put our software in their routines by generating recurrent leads and sales opportunities had a retention rate significantly higher than other groups studied. And for this, helping them with only the first campaign was not enough.
This led us to reflect on the adoption phase, and the data of this study helped us identify a new metric to measure the effectiveness of the adoption phase, which we call the Full-Adoption metric. With this in hand, we made some changes in our CS operation, aiming to increase the number of customers fully using our software’s main features after the onboarding, seeing more recurrent results for their own businesses. Here are some important steps we took:
Alignment with Product: any SaaS model company knows the best way to deliver success and scale is through great products. With this in mind, we made some efforts aligned with the Product team to make the product lead the customers to the right steps targeting recurrent results. Improving the adoption rate was a shared goal of both the Product and CS departments. We tested many ways to help the customers, such as in-app messages and more educational content inside the product, like webinars and articles. We also constantly release improvements related to these key features.
Long-term strategy: A very important leverage was related to showing a long-term vision for the customers, and this should start in the onboarding process. As the onboarding team is responsible for the first digital campaign, the onboarding managers were used to focusing on a short-term goal with the customer. By amplifying this vision, giving the customer a clear strategy not only to see a first value, but also know how to take the next steps and reach recurrent results were small changes that would make all the difference.
Additionally, the CSMs started to keep tracking the strategy and goals throughout the journey, supporting the customers with the following steps after the onboarding process was done. For this, we made some changes in the handover process, targeting to have Onboarding and CS teams more aligned to help customers keep taking the right steps.
Team education to understand what the customers need: Each customer has their own challenges and needs, which means there is not only one way to success. It is crucial to have it in mind when talking to a customer and showing them what they should do to reach their goals. One challenge of ours is to always keep it in the CS team’s minds, so they can explore each customer’s need and understand how to show them our methodology in the most appropriate way. For this, we provided our CS teams with all the training sessions, role plays, tools, and playbooks they need to coach the customers in adopting our software. Sometimes, we review some points to guarantee all CSMs are well prepared. We also reviewed the team leaders’ role, which resulted in closer leadership to support the team members with the barriers they could face. As I always say: the CS leader is the CSM of their own team members.
Results
In 2019, we ended the year proud of our results: our adoption rate increased by 69.2% compared to the end of 2018. This means more customers are using our software regularly and seeing value in their routines.
I’m very proud of what we have done so far and of all the things yet to come. To end, it is also important to remember all processes should be continuously revisited and improved, as the product, customers and market constantly evolve. Delivering success is an ongoing process.
