Customer Engagement – the Holy Grail of any company with a product. Engaged customers make retention easier and can help with upsells and expansion.
But how do you keep that momentum going, and even more importantly, rekindle that excitement they felt when they first started with you?
This week, the Gain Grow Retain Office Hours focused on identifying obstacles, and using incentives and support to build the fire and keep it burning.
Questions to Consider
- Identifying Barriers – what are the primary obstacles in preventing your users from consistent engagement with your product, and how can we address these hurdles effectively?
- Optimizing Incentives – how can we refine our incentive strategy to better motivate site leaders/decision makers and users, ensuring sustained engagement beyond the initial phase?
Barriers fall into a number of categories:
- Unclear WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) can lead to a lack of value perception
- Limited usage can decrease the importance of the product
- Lack of learning content for ‘moment of need’ help
- Transition of users without a clear onboarding process
- No integration with tech stack
- No use cases to help increase the vision for the product
- Personal privacy data and risk management concerns
Incentives and Support can help reduce those barriers and increase adoption and thus engagement
- Focus on education that includes benefits
- Build trust with the organization – you are there to help, not just sell then something and move on
- Create a champion program for those that are moving into higher level usage
- If a customer is not using the program regularly, identify whether it is due to lack of understanding of it’s fit or is the program too limited?
- Identify whether the customer organization is bringing the right seats to the product table. Is everyone using it that should?
- Ensure your usage emails are in sync with your customer needs so they get good information at the right time in their journey
- Help your customers include your product into their existing workflows to make it more natural
- Education content needs to be robust and address the various needs at all stages for customers in an easy to access space
- Make sure your onboarding is focused on the benefits your product brings to them (time saving, quality, etc) and their organization (increased data, decrease in errors, etc.)
- Include training opportunities and things like Office Hours to highlight areas within the product that may be underutilized
- Use your champions to help build out strong use cases to share with similar users/industries
- Capture feedback to make sure you understand real versus perceived needs, motivators, frustration points, etc. to address in content
- When transition within the user-group happens, make sure you have a mini-onboarding program for the new additions
One of the questions often heard from customers is “what are other people doing?” How a community can help here by letting customers learn from each other. But how do you do this effectively?
- Create segmented groups that focus on use cases, industry, or maturity to allow peer to peer sharing, learning, and collaboration
- Create a process to identify super-users (gamification) and build in a recognition program
- Give customers the ability to move into a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) program through their engagement and usage leadership
- Embed the community into your onboarding as the space to find tips, case studies, help articles, etc. so that customers use it to strengthen their engagement
A customer who purchases your product but never truly adopts it into their processes is in danger of churn. Identifying the barriers to why a customer might not be engaging in a sustainable way is the foundation for change management. Using this knowledge to build out content, activities, recognition, and opportunities that drive that WIIFM will help drive engagement in a way that is sticky.
