Just get started: How to use a Lean Startup mindset to develop effective customer programs

So you have an idea for a “digital touch” customer campaign, but you don’t know where to start? Excellent! You’re right where you should be.

There’s no need to be intimidated by the idea of digital touch. If you haven’t done it yet, then you aren’t going to have any baseline or knowledge about what works. So job #1 is to figure that out.

If you’re familiar with the Lean Startup methodology, you’ll know that all product development starts with a hypothesis. Think of your digital touch campaign as your product. Your job is to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test your hypothesis. In layman’s terms this means trying something and getting some customer feedback and evolving your “product” from there. Don’t spend months putting something untested together and then find out it’s not resonating. You won’t know what works and what doesn’t until you start actually doing something and measuring the results. And you don’t need to start big with some super robust program — in fact you don’t want to. Start with something small.

I’ll share an experience where we did exactly that at one of my past companies. This program targeted HR administrators at small- to medium-sized businesses. They would spend much of their day in the software and we knew through exit interviews and user research that these admins had a significant impact on whether or not the customer would renew. In a smaller company, decision-makers are much more aware of how their people feel about a software product and if Jenny in payroll is super unhappy, they are going to hear about it. We also knew that most of our admins were coming off of other platforms they may have used for decades and where their comfort level was high. So our hypothesis was that making them feel adept at our software as quickly as possible would have a positive impact on retention.

In partnership with Customer Marketing, we created a single email that welcomed new admins, provided them with a few helpful links to resources, and gave them a PDF they could download and save with those resources. We would send this email once a month after manually pulling the profiles of any user who had logged in for the first time with an admin profile in the past month. So pretty manual but it gave us some early learnings. We saw that open rates and CTRs were quite high, indicating that we were on the right track with the concept and the content.

The next step was to offer up a monthly “new admin webinar” that customers could attend, including this link in the email. We surveyed customers who attended and found that while they appreciated the overview, it wasn’t as useful as they had hoped given the very customized nature of their instances. So I’ll get to how we solved that challenge in a minute.

At this point we saw that there were too many CTAs in the email, so we broke it out into a drip campaign that cycled through over a period of about 6 weeks. We introduced the admins to the concept of this being a journey, and spelled out for them each step we were going to take. In each step there was a single call to action, but customers could see where they were in the journey and could also access all of the prior or upcoming content from a single web page we created that contained all of the resources. Our click-through rates in each email rose significantly.

We then experimented with offering up personalized training sessions with product experts, who would assist customers in walking through their specific instances and answering any questions. Now it may sound crazy to offer up such an expensive resource, but I think the most uptake we ever got was about 12% of new admins actually taking us up on the offer. You’re asking people to invest a lot of time and most won’t do it. Others may have been getting enough from the self-serve resources or internal peers who were helping them. But those who went through the one-on-one training LOVED it. We know this because we surveyed all new admins who had received the campaign and those who had taken us up on the personalized training rated their comfort level with the software meaningfully higher than those who had not. And even better, they rated their happiness with the software more highly as well. We were not only training admins, we were creating champions!

The one mistake we made was not surveying new admins prior to kicking off the program so we could establish a true baseline. I would have to imagine that new admins were happier and more well trained after we started the program with that first email, but I didn’t have the proof. So lesson learned: always think up front about how you are going to measure success. And don’t just make it about “better retention” because that is so hard to prove. Given all of the many factors that go into renewals, it is hard to pinpoint a single cause, and that metric is just too long tail to help you shape and improve a program in the near term.

From there we continued to make incremental improvements to make the program even more impactful. Here’s what we did:

— Worked with the product team to automatically detect when a new admin first logged in, and delivered an in-product version of the new admin program to complement the email campaign. We did this through a proprietary “personalization panel” that was built into the software but you could easily do this through Pendo or other tools.

— For the 10% of customers who had named CSMs, we created an automatic trigger in Gainsight notifying them that their customer had a new admin and prompting them to run a simple playbook of reaching out to the new admin to introduce themselves and to encourage them to take advantage of the free training.

— Continued running the new admin webinar, but added live support staff to answer customers’ specific questions (done through a chat interface behind the scenes). The webinar was pre-recorded so all we needed was someone to kick it off and then a support person or two answering questions for the hour.

I hope this was useful. Hit me with questions and I’d love for others to share some stories as well!