Sabina Pons is Operating Partner at Growth Molecules™ and a 2022 Top 100 CS Strategist.
In a recent post, we covered how customer moments of truth act as a map to achieve digital scale. Beyond the WHAT and WHY of digital-led customer success strategy, we also want to share tips on HOW to make the strategy a reality.
There’s a lot to cover if we consider the entire customer journey, so our focus here will be on those moments of truth where your goal is to activate customers and get them engaged with your product. So, let’s explore digital-led activities for key phases of the customer journey including implementation and adoption.
Creating a Digital-led Experience From the Onset of the Customer Lifecycle
According to Joey Coleman, author of First 100 Days, as much as 20% and up to 70% of your customers will churn within the first 100 days if they aren’t successfully onboarded with your products. This is a critical time and can set you up for customer churn or success.
Setting your users up with basic tips and resources from the start can create an immediate impact and reduce time to the first value.
Strategies such as short and simple email campaigns or in-app automation can set new users up for success and instant value while also enabling every user. These are simple tasks that Customer Success Managers (CSMs) wouldn’t typically have the bandwidth to implement or maintain consistently for every single user and customer.
Below is a chart that maps critical moments of truth during implementation and onboarding. These correspond to digital-led approaches, including who should be involved and what should be measured.
Drive Adoption Without Overwhelming CSMs
The adoption stage in the customer journey is critical to enabling expansion opportunities. This stage is also where there are many potential risk points along the journey. Keeping your product and best practices top-of-mind, as well as continually building the relationship, will be key to creating the stickiness that leads to greater adoption.
A significant piece that is often missed by customer success (CS) teams is how to address change management. It’s common for users to resist change especially as most users are uninvolved in the initial purchase decision—this can lead to some resistance. As the leader and subject matter expert in the relationship, it’s up to the CSM to guide customers to integrate new tools and resources into their day-to-day processes.
Strategies such as automating bite-sized tips, reminders to enable settings, and monthly team adoption reporting for leadership allows you to reach many customers at once while providing quick and accessible value. Incorporating a post-launch survey will give you early insights into customer expectations and value realization. You’ll also uncover other things they may need on their path to successful adoption.
Here are examples of digital-led touchpoints that can drive adoption, including insights into roles, responsibilities, and important measures of success.
Successful implementation of your product, and how you drive adoption once a customer has been onboarded, will set a strong foundation for customer retention. Without establishing scalable methods for managing customers in these phases, your CSMs and CS program will lack the bandwidth to focus on how to renew and expand customers.
The critical moments of truth that need to be addressed in the latter phases of the customer lifecycle are the focus of the third (and final) post in this series. Stay tuned for more to come!
Get more tips on effective customer onboarding through this essential tool from Gainsight and Growth Molecules™.
