Customer Adoption: Process, Metrics, and 3 Critical Best Practices

What Is Customer Adoption?

Customer adoption is the process a company uses to gain new customers and users of their products and services. It also refers to how quickly consumers learn to use a product or service effectively.

The customer adoption process is all about helping customers maximize their potential enablement with pre-planned journeys and effective pushing of the features your solution or application is offering, based on the customer’s needs.

A recent OpenView product benchmark survey showed that customer adoption is higher when customer success or support teams contact new product signups (35% when compared to 8% only when contacted via sales personas).

The customer adoption process has five stages:

• Awareness: The first stage, when customers learn that a product or service exists
• Interest: The stage when customers become curious about the product or service
• Evaluation: Customers evaluate the product or service and decide if it’s right for them
• Testing: The customers first try the product or service to determine their needs
• Adoption: A customer decides to make a purchase

Customer adoption is different from acquisition, which is about bringing in new customers to try a product, while adoption is about turning those customers into users. The success of customer adoption efforts can be measured by KPIs like:

• Customer adoption rate
• Time-to-first key action
• Feature adoption rate
• Number active users
• Customer lifetime value

The Benefits of Improving Customer Adoption

Customer adoption delivers several key benefits to businesses:

• Increased customer retention rates: Ensures users are continuously engaged with the product. By guiding customers through their journeys and addressing their needs proactively, this can significantly reduce churn.
• Higher customer satisfaction: When customers fully understand and utilize a product’s features, they are more likely to be satisfied with their purchase. This satisfaction translates into positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations.
• Revenue growth: Engaged and satisfied customers are more likely to purchase additional features or services, contributing to upselling and cross-selling opportunities. These customers are often willing to renew their subscriptions or contracts, ensuring a steady revenue stream.
• Deeper insights: Strong customer adoption practices provide valuable insights into product usage and customer behavior. This data helps organizations define their product offerings and develop new features that meet customer demands.

What Is the Customer Adoption Curve?

The customer adoption curve is a model that illustrates the stages consumers go through when adopting a new product. It is typically represented as a bell curve, divided into five categories.

The key stages in the product adoption curve are:

• Innovators: The first to adopt a new product. They are willing to take risks and are often technology enthusiasts who seek the latest innovations.
• Early adopters: Users who follow the innovators. They are usually opinion leaders who embrace new technologies early but are more cautious than innovators.
• Early majority customers: These are more deliberate in their adoption process. They wait until a product has been tested and proven before adopting it.
• Late majority customers: Adopt a product after the average participant. They are skeptical about new technologies and adopt them only when necessary.
• Laggards: The last to adopt a product. They prefer traditional methods and only switch when the new product becomes the standard.

The Customer Adoption Process

Here’s an overview of the five stages of the customer adoption process.

Awareness

Product awareness is the foundational stage in the customer adoption process, where potential customers first become aware of the product’s existence. This stage relies heavily on marketing strategies to capture the attention of the target audience.

Companies employ a variety of channels to achieve this, including digital advertising, content marketing, social media campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, and public relations efforts. The goal is to create a broad reach, ensuring that as many potential customers as possible know about the product.

Interest

Once awareness is established, companies seek to generate interest in the product. At this point, potential customers are curious and seek more information about the product’s capabilities and how it can address their specific needs.

Companies should provide detailed and engaging content, such as in-depth blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, and instructional videos. Interactive content, such as live demos, Q&A sessions, and tutorials, can also be highly effective. The objective is to educate potential customers, demonstrating the product’s value proposition clearly.

Evaluation

During the product evaluation stage, potential customers critically assess the product to determine if it meets their requirements. This typically involves a comparison with competitors, examining features, pricing, and overall value.

Companies should support this evaluation by offering comprehensive product documentation, detailed comparison charts, and transparent pricing information. Providing access to expert consultations and personalized product demonstrations can help address specific concerns and questions.

Testing

Product testing is where potential customers interact directly with the product, usually through a free trial or a pilot program. This hands-on experience allows them to explore the product’s features and assess its usability and effectiveness in their specific context.

During this phase, it is crucial for companies to provide strong support, including onboarding assistance, training sessions, and responsive customer service. A well-structured onboarding process can enhance the user experience, helping customers quickly understand how to use the product effectively.

Regular check-ins and proactive communication during the trial period can address any issues or concerns, ensuring a positive testing experience. Gathering feedback is useful for continuous improvement of the product and support services.

Adoption

The final stage, product adoption, occurs when potential customers decide to purchase and fully integrate the product into their operations. This involves formalizing the purchase, setting up the product, and training users to ensure they can leverage all features.

Companies must provide a seamless and supportive transition from trial to full usage, including comprehensive training programs, detailed user manuals, and ongoing support. Continuous engagement is essential to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This can be achieved through regular updates, user community forums, customer success programs, and periodic check-ins to ensure the product continues to meet evolving needs. A feedback loop allows customers to share their experiences and suggest improvements, which helps the company refine its offerings and enhance the customer experience.

Measuring Customer Adoption Success: Key Performance Metrics

Here are some of the ways that customer adoption can be measured.

Customer Adoption Rate

This measures the percentage of new users who start using a product within a specific period after it becomes available. This metric provides insight into how well the product is being received by the target audience.

To calculate the customer adoption rate, divide the number of new users by the total number of potential users and multiply by 100. A high adoption rate indicates successful initial engagement efforts, while a low rate may signal the need for improved onboarding processes or marketing strategies.

Time-to-First Key Action

This is the duration it takes for a new user to complete a critical action within the product, such as setting up their profile, completing a tutorial, or making their first transaction. This metric reflects how quickly users can derive value from the product.

Reducing the time-to-first key action can enhance the user experience and increase the likelihood of continued usage. To optimize this metric, companies should focus on streamlining the onboarding process and providing clear guidance to help users achieve their goals swiftly.

Feature Adoption Rate

This measures the percentage of users who utilize specific features of a product. This metric helps identify which features are most valuable to users and which ones may require further promotion or improvement.

To calculate this rate, divide the number of users who use a particular feature by the total number of users and multiply by 100. Understanding feature adoption patterns can guide product development and marketing efforts, ensuring that the most impactful features are highlighted and enhanced.

Number of Daily/Monthly Active Users

The number of daily active users (DAU) and monthly active users (MAU) are metrics that track the number of unique users interacting with the product on a daily or monthly basis. They provide a snapshot of user engagement and product popularity over time.

A high DAU/MAU ratio indicates strong user retention and consistent engagement, whereas a low ratio may suggest issues with user satisfaction or the product’s value proposition. Companies can use these metrics to assess the effectiveness of their engagement strategies and identify opportunities for increasing user activity.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV is a prediction of the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer account throughout its relationship with the company. This metric is crucial for understanding the long-term value of customers and guiding investment decisions in customer acquisition and retention strategies.

CLV is calculated by multiplying the average purchase value by the average number of purchases per year and the average customer lifespan. A high CLV indicates that customers are consistently finding value in the product, leading to repeated purchases and long-term loyalty. Companies can increase CLV by offering upgrades and ensuring strong customer relationships.

Customer Adoption Best Practices

If you wish to elevate your adoption rates, here are some best practices:

1. Customer adoption is NOT a one time action

Getting customers to adopt your product and choose it again and again every day, requires a never ending cycle of keeping them engaged and making them feel valued.

Most companies think of customer-focused departments as a cost-center, therefore missing out the opportunity to gain more value from customers. What are the additional actions to ensure adoption after the “adopted” signal is on?

• Continuously engage for feedback about your product (don’t overdo it). 
• Don’t ignore the silence, track your stakeholders engagement trends both with the product and your team.
• Recognize the good ones – when happy customers give positive feedback and adopt your product fast, don’t forget to show them some love. Praise them, try to meet them, send them swag. These good customers tend to be forgotten when there’s a barrage of complaints or users that require a lot of attention. But make sure you are not making this mistake.

2. Continuously educate and update

Your customers have a life, and your product is not the only thing happening in it. Find the right ways to educate them about what matters to them without overwhelming or confusing them.

• Set reminders for customer requests, use case requirements, new feature releases, and similar events that may impact adoption. 
• If you still don’t have the solution to their needs, show them you really care and promise to update them once the feature request is done.
• When product releases are out – read them and think about the customers who can benefit from them. Don’t forget that most of your customers will miss the product email as average open rates stand at 20-25% in the B2B industry.

3. Visualize and track customer communications

The idea behind this is simple – the more you improve customer engagement across all channels, the stickier your accounts will become. Many businesses focus on in-app onboarding and fail to create better omni-channel communications – marketing, product, customer success, and support channels to be more specific. But the problem is that you probably have many blind spots here.

It’s hard enough to know what’s going on which accounts. You need to invest in gaining visibility into these omni-channel communications. Having a heatmap is nice, but visualizing all touchpoints can be a gamechanger. Some modern customer intelligence platforms are also offering active stakeholder tracking, where even their communications can be monitored in real-time via a centralized dashboard.

Related: Customer Journey Mapping Tools

The Customer Adoption Framework

The typical customer adoption framework isn’t a linear trajectory, but more of a cycle where chronological processes can be challenged, analyzed, and optimized based on different use cases, business limitations, and changing scenarios.

That said, here’s the typical customer adoption framework you should follow:

1. Onboarding – Your onboarding experience needs to be user-friendly and intriguing like your general user experience. Use more tooltips and popups to answer questions faster and help users reach the aha moment.
2. Healthy adoption – You’ll be constantly scrutinized by users – support response times and in-app friction need to be minimized, while brand credibility (success stories, positive user reviews) need to be highlighted.
3. Periodic health checks – Map your user experience and understand what touchpoints are key to the user journey. Make sure users are reaching these goals and identify where adoption is weak. Track feature engagement too. 
4. Escalation points – Establish clear communication channels with customers to manage escalations. Besides pushing educational content and reaching out before customers call you, you should also follow-up with them later.
5. Surveys – The survey is no longer a silver bullet, but it’s still an effective way to collect feedback and feel the pulse. You can track your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and also plant microsurveys to fetch contextual feedback. 
6. Active outreach for health checks – You can be getting seemingly positive emails from customers, but they may well be masking dissatisfaction with your product or service. Reach out even when things seem fine.
7. Set stakeholder KPIs – Your stakeholder KPIs help you keep your customers engaged. You need to have engagement thresholds, stakeholder outreach KPIs and a goals for a defined count of stakeholder relationships in place to trigger your attention. If a customer stops logging in daily after a year of usage, it’s time to make a call. 

Related: Top 10 CS Tools for the Productive CSM

Customer Intelligence: Keeping the Green Light On

If you reached the stage where your adoption rates and active usage rates are trending up, congrats! But achieving a long-lasting customer adoption curve and sustainable growth isn’t easy without the right tools to track true account health. Healthy adoption is a state you wish to maintain. Learn about the obstacles, issues, friction points, relationship changes, and other factors that can impact customer sentiment. 

With Staircase AI, you can track your relationship dynamics, monitor changes via relationship maps, learn about sentiment and engagement trends, and more. Not detecting customer journey risks can impact your customer adoption, eventually leading to accelerated churn and brand damage. Take control of your accounts now.

Book a Demo With Staircase AI