Well-defined customer touchpoints are the foundation of a strong digital experience with your product. As the SaaS industry evolves and gets more sophisticated, so do customer and user journeys along these touch points.
Today’s customers expect a seamless omnichannel experience as they move from onboarding to product adoption to renewal—and it’s critical to lead them to value quickly to ensure your product becomes sticky along the way. Here’s a look at how to drive adoption with digital user journeys.
Customer Journeys vs. Users Journeys
Let’s start with the basics. What’s the difference between a customer journey and a user journey? The terms “customer” and “user” are sometimes used interchangeably—but each has a distinct set of priorities and needs when it comes to their digital experience with your business and product. And, most importantly, product teams need to address both journeys with their in-app and digital product experiences to drive adoption and retention.
Customer journeys encompass everything with an overall account. For example, are they new to your product and still need to implement product tags or integrations to complete setup? Has the previous customer admin for your product found a new role and a new admin needs training? These milestones and lifecycle events are critical to address via your in-app programs and should be a key part of your customer journeys.
Unlike the customer journey, user journeys address the specific needs of an individual user of your product. While customers, or accounts, have a few significant lifecycle moments, users vary greatly in terms of specific user types, product needs, and daily usage. User journeys can include granular mapping to key features, re-engagement if users go dark in your product, and outreach such as one-to-many webinars or feature release notifications.
Creating a Cohesive, Measurable Digital Program
When you think about your customers’ and users’ digital journeys, many touchpoints probably come to mind. You might send automated emails, have a welcome video play in-app, or guide users through activating certain features in-product via step-by-step walkthroughs.
Most organizations have elements of these journeys but lack a cohesive way to orchestrate—and measure the impact of—their digital efforts. Having a cohesive and measurable digital program as part of your customer’s product experience is critical.
Suppose you don’t know when users will navigate to certain features or what in-app touch points are actually moving the needle on adoption. In that case, you’ll have no way of guiding your users successfully to value—a critical need for Product teams, customer-facing teams, and overall SaaS business success.
The good news is cohesive and product-driven digital journeys are easier to curate than you might think, and there are a few key ways you can ensure these journeys align to increase adoption and retention, not only within your product but across the entire customer relationship.
Using Digital Journeys to Drive Adoption
Whether your business is high touch, low touch, or somewhere in between, it’s just not feasible to guide users to adopt key features at scale when these efforts are all manual. Expecting your Customer Success (CS) team to effectively support all customers and intervene when they are dropping off in adoption flows isn’t realistic.
Digital adoption journeys, especially when based on product usage, let you curate one-to-many content in a way that provides all customers with a cohesive experience and scales your manual efforts. The best user journeys should:
- Be based on usage. Trigger in-app content that guides users to the content they need to reach value based on their sign-up date, feature activation, or user parameters.
- Prioritize high-value feature activation. When helping users reach value quickly, it can be overwhelming to promote all feature/functionality. First, guide users to adopt tools in your product with the most value-add to reach fast time to value (TTV).
- Showcase curated content via an accessible checklist. With a knowledge bot embedded in your product, you can organize and launch in-app guides to specific, stage-based milestones. For example, you may surface an onboarding checklist or an adoption one to users as they get deeper into your product. Using an embedded checklist also helps users relaunch guides if they want to review specific content.
- Change over time. The best journeys are continually evolving as user feedback is collected and acted upon. Review the impact of your in-app content on feature adoption and use in-app surveys to ask for user feedback to collect information, such as Customer Effort Score, to fine-tune how you guide users to value.
Influencing Retention via Digital Journeys
Both user and overall customer account retention are essential in SaaS, and ensuring your digital user journey content promotes sticky experiences that lead to retention is key. A few ways to lean on the digital journey to drive retention are to:
- Promote features that correlate with retention. You may think you know what features add the most value for your users. Still, it’s essential to do regular Retention Analysis to understand what features are strongly correlated with retained users. These are the features that should be promoted via user journey flows to increase overall retention.
- Address user friction points. By reviewing where users get stuck or encounter challenges when using your product, you can proactively address user needs via in-app guides that help them navigate around key challenges as well as use data-driven analysis to make future roadmap priorities to address these challenges long-term.
- Ask for in-app input on leading indicators like NPS. By incorporating rolling NPS programs into your in-app digital content, you can get a better measure of the likelihood of customers to renew. Asking for NPS in-app instead of via email or in person has a dramatic impact on response rate, with some Gainsight customers seeing increases of 3,900% and 2,700% in NPS responses, just by moving from email to in-app. You may also use a combination of in-app and email NPS to approach different levels of stakeholders or end-users with more targeted surveys.
- Automate renewals via digital touchpoints. When renewals are highly manual, customers take longer to renew and have more opportunities to discontinue their services. Consider making renewals a part of your in-app and email programs, in order to simplify the renewal conversation and automate renewal outreach.
- Encourage users to dive deeper into your product. Whether it’s via a thriving community of peers sharing new use cases, or by promoting deeper feature usage for more proficient users, guiding users to more deeply engage with your product will build stickier experiences making renewal a no-brainer.
Digital user journeys are key to effective user experiences, and aligning your journey with adoption and retention is critical to overall business success. When journeys are mapped to user needs and guide users to key value, product experiences, and overall digital touch points can drive adoption rates, reduce churn, and drive overall NRR.
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Are you ready to make the most of your users’ experience with your product and drive real business impact? Check out Gainsight Product Experience today.
