Understanding Feature Adoption

Everyone knows that product adoption is key to customer retention. However, the challenge is - how can your Customer Success team measure and monitor it in a way that gives them meaningful and actionable information?

To begin, you need to first know the answer to this question:

Which features (or modules or products) are your most value creating and sticky?

You should know the answer to the first question. If you don’t, you should sit down with your (product) management team to figure it out. Use data, ask your customers, and let the vision of your product guide you.

Once you have those features outlined, you can now begin to define what factors (user behaviors and actions) determine how well each of these features are being adopted by your customers, and you can start collecting the data you need.

But to make use and better sense out of that data, you need to have a tool that enables you to immediately see where there is poor feature adoption so that you, as a CSM, can take proper action. Or, where there is strong adoption and there might be a potential up-sale opportunity!

Have the Right Tools

Just having the data doesn't do much, you have to know what it all means and what it can tell you.

And no one wants to take huge excel sheets of exported data and try to sort through it to make sense of it. That takes time and energy that could be spent doing more meaningful things than digging through data.

Planhat does the heavy lifing for you.

Within the application you are able to use your data to see which features each of your customers are struggling to adopt, or which ones they are using a lot.

When you first come into your portfolio you get a "heat-map" that immediately let's you know which areas your customer may need help in, and where they are excelling and getting a lot of value.

This information allows you to reach out to those customers to see if they need extra training, additional help materials, or ask why they might not be using the feature - maybe this is feedback you can bring back to the Product team to help them improve usablilty and adoptability.

It also helps you identify where there might be a potential upsale opportunity. If a customer is heavily using the Basic subscription plan features, and you could see them benefiting from upgrading to a Pro-Plan with extra features based on their great adoption and usage, you can prepare some materials to show them how they can benefit from an upgrade.

Knowing how well each of your customers are adopting your features allows you to adjust your Customer Success strategy in meaningful ways. You can take a look back and which training and outreach methodologies worked, and which ones didn't. You can choose to potentially adjust a part of the onboarding, or training process for each of the features that customers struggled with. Or you can communicate to the product team where customers are struggling with adoption so that they can look into how to improve that feature.

Having this knowledge is powerful, and makes you a more efficient CSM.