The onboarding journey doesn’t merely stop once you’ve introduced your customer to your product. The challenge now lies in transforming your customers into power-users and brand ambassadors. Below are 3 strategies to jump right out of onboarding, straight into adoption and nurture.
Drive Adoption Through Feature Discovery
Sure, your system might be relatively easy to navigate. Nonetheless, customers need an extra boost to adopt additional features. The features you actively covered during onboarding build the foundation that allows for additional adoption. After onboarding, feature adoption should be encouraged at various touch points: in-app, during QBRs, via email… anything is possible. For instance, use in-app triggers to communicate with customers via automated emails or launch an in-app training pop-up. This can range from tutorials about key related product features or a series of emails covering upcoming steps.
As a rule of thumb, keeping feature discovery nudges interactive and short will increase the likelihood of customers remembering your tips and sticking to them. Highlighting specific product features relevant to the customer’s needs will help you remain one step ahead throughout adoption.
Broaden The Scope of Customer Education
Don’t limit yourself to product-related communications; plan to educate your customers in other related topics such as increasing productivity or workflows using the product, in addition to other tricks to make them successful in their daily lives. Take the opportunity to explain premium features, helpful integrations that might aid them, and ways to expand the way they use the product. Your customer came onboard with your software for a reason, and you should know what that reason was. Your goal, even after onboarding, is to hit the ‘aha’ moment as quickly as possible, by reducing time-to-value. At first, some hand-holding is necessary, but after they graduate from onboarding and step into the adoption phase, customer education allows you to let go, giving them more space for independent decision-making.
Develop a Regular Engagement Cadence
While it is important to provide on-demand resources that the customer can learn from, a lot of customers expect some personal, proactive, and tailored engagement on top of self-service options. Be mindful of the level of touch your customers get used to during onboarding and ease the transition so they don’t feel overwhelmed as soon as onboarding ends. Make it clear to the customer how to reach you, why, and set expectations for response time. If the customer transitions from an Onboarding Specialist to a Customer Success Manager, make that handoff clear to them so they don’t go back to emailing their first point of contact down the line.
Dedicate channels to Support, such as chat and social media, and associate other means of communication with Success. Finally, if you have the bandwidth to meet with customers one-on-one, you should set a clear cadence for calls, with an agenda, and set expectations on both ends. The meetings will allow you to drive adoption well after onboarding while building a strong relationship and encouraging advocacy. These meetings are a good place to highlight strengths and achievements while giving you a window to address bumps on the road.
Key Takeaways
The key to successful adoption is to work with a structure.
During onboarding, the customer is expecting the high cognitive load associated with launching a new product. However, after onboarding, overloading them with too much information at once won’t make for effective engagement. Develop a structure that flows nicely from onboarding, sustains the work that has already been put it, while building on top of it. Whether that’s in person or automated, design a cadence that will drive adoption and allows you to proactively step in when it goes off the tracks.
