5 usage and adoption heuristics for customer success

I wanted to capture some simple rules of thumb that I could use to easily remember the top line influences on my work in customer success. I created a doodle to make it fun and memorable (for me) but also shareable.

I came up with these 5. I’m sure there are more. These would only really become heuristics if they were endorsed by a lot of people so I’ve added a poll below. I’d love your input – please vote on them and add any in the other option and I can update this list later. Below the poll I elaborated briefly on each in case the doodle is not legible – it’s self contained with the doodle so you can share it with this link if you want.

1. Launch well

I really do believe you only have one chance to make a good first impression. This goes beyond onboarding which I cover in a separate point. I think its fairly self explanatory but I do have an entire post on this if you are interested: Launch like a boss – bringing consumer startup practice to your enterprise technology platform

2. Social proof

Showing users other successful users or customers gives them the proof they need to adopt and use something. It becomes a self fulfilling cycle of success if you have good examples. Having a social layer in your tool to foster community and sharing will help greatly in scaling your efforts. I cover some of that in this post: Scaling your customer success efforts online – a guide

3. Signals sell

Creating feedback loops (dashboards) to let users see how they are using a system and what progress they are making can spur on further use. In other words, stats on how they are using the tool, what they have achieved in a given period, etc. Sharing other user stats with them might add a degree of competition, i.e. gamification.

4. Continuous onboarding

Users, especially in an enterprise environment, are continuously churning, i.e. leave the company. For the new ones that come onboard and also for new features (if you are frequently releasing new features), you need to constantly re-educate users. Self service training options and automation are a good way to address this at scale.

5. Use before value

By this I mean your first challenge is getting users to use a platform. They have to be familiar with it and its purpose and grasp the fundamentals. Only then can they go on to higher order value creating activities that achieve business outcomes. So first track usage and adoption metrics and ensure this is going in the right direction, then try capture other types of value related metrics.