How to increase user adoption for your SAAS product

In a SAAS business, retaining and expanding revenue is critical to guaranteeing the health and growth of the company. Increasing number of companies are investing in improving their customer experience as a way to help customers understand the value they provide.

A key part in this process of introducing an application to a customer, is adoption where they can see how to use it and see recurrent value from the product by really putting it in their routine. This is where the CS team comes into play, they focus on supporting customers as they adopt, or onboard, the new product.

A fairly obvious way to do so, is by looking back at successful customers and identifying the steps they took. Similarly, look at the path churned customers took and identify what went wrong.

It could be, for instance, identifying “Customers who churned out had an adoption rate of less than 30%. They only used 20% of the features they should have been using at this moment of their customer life/they only used 45% of licenses or seats they bought”.

While there’s a plethora of things that can be done to ensure growth after the user starts using the product, it’s fairly difficult to get a user to know or even try your product, especially if you’re a small business.

I worked on this project in the past around optimization of HR processes in a company. This case is particular to getting employees to install the organization’s super-app (I gave the name) on their phones.

Some context, the objective for building this mobile app was to — improve internal communication, boost employee engagement while improving any inefficiencies in the HR department. The Dev team and HR team had done a lot of internal research and worked brilliantly into designing the app, thoroughly thinking of the interface, features, user experience. The only issue that remained was that even after 2 months of launching the app, the adoption rate across the company was 37%. I wasn’t there for the actual execution of the project, but it gave me some understanding on how to improve user adoption rates.

With respect to Onboarding : The majority of customer churn is going to take place between two pivotal milestones:

• While customer is signing-up for your product
• When the customer achieves their first “success” with your product

Make your presence known

If you know your audience well, like even know how they spend their daily routines, it becomes a little easier to generate awareness of your product. For example, for the days before and during the launch of the employee app, the plan was to be present everywhere where employees normally spend their time -

• Posters with QR codes present in strategic locations where employees frequent everyday, like cafeteria, elevator, break rooms
• Blast out emails for the launch of the product
• Posts sent on Communication channels with a direct link to the app or a QR code (Ex — Slack)
• Create personalized backgrounds advertising the product on video conferencing tools (Ex — Zoom etc.) (P.S. This is so relevant right now due to this enforcement of WFH)

There will always be some number of early adopters for your product. These are the people who want to be part of the community and can actually be the voice to raise interest about your product. To leverage this group of people, you can launch a referral program, ensuring that there’s enough incentive for both the inviter and invitee to partake in it.

Onboarding is Much Like Marketing — Have a Story

In marketing, you’re taught the old adage ‘WiFM’, or ‘What’s in It For Me?’. Getting people to change their habits and embrace change is difficult. Learning a new process, a new software and how to work with people differently, is hard.

You should be able to position the value of the software in terms that each important audience can understand and get behind. Such as the employee app, the benefits of using the app was clearly communicated in simple language and was consistent across channels. A lot of emphasis was made on add-on resources like how-to guides with lots of screenshots to explain certain processes.

Think Through the Support that Users Will Need

In SaaS, there are usually 2 primary support needs, Functional Support and Technical Support.

1. Functional Support — Like creating dashboards that are meaningful and actionable for each important user.
2. Technical Support — It can mean troubleshooting when things aren’t working properly. It usually incorporates implementation getting machinery connected.

For the employee app case, there wasn’t either, atleast not a full-fledged team. The app was built in-house and it had a lot of integrations for various HR functions, to optimize the current HR process/system without forcing the user to shift to something entirely new.

Feedback

Think about how you’ll know if the roll-out is going good; basically how to measure user adoption and roll-out success?

Users are never going to onboard exactly how you planned; but focusing on their actual behaviors can dramatically improve the process.

There are different types of adoption rates you can measure, with each one targeting a segment of consumer engagement with your product. However, three metrics stand out that helps you identify the success of your campaign.

But I will be looking at how to calculate the adoption rate to provide a tangible result. So the three product adoption metrics are:

• Adoption Rates
• Time-to-first key action
• Percentage of users who completed a primary action for the first time

Originally published at https://catwomaniya.io on November 23rd, 2020