Whenever your company introduces new products, services, or tools, you hope that your customers will want to upgrade, buy, or adopt those new products. It is what customer adoption is all about. It’s about helping customers adopt the latest products and services you introduce through your customer success organization. It is sometimes called product adoption. There are many customer-driven business terms in the market today, such as customer service, customer experience, CX, customer facing – and a new one: “customer adoption.”
What is Customer Adoption?
Customer adoption is when a business introduces its new product to the market and acquires new customers. It is the end-to-end process of product awareness for product integration in the consumer’s life. It is critical to the success of your business. When you introduce a new product, service, or feature to the market, your main goal is to get customers to accept and buy it.
Basically, customer adoption is the process by which a customer learns about a new product/service, expresses interest, evaluates it, and then finally buys and uses the product/service. It is similar to the buyer’s journey in marketing. It’s not much different from the product lifecycle, but it’s customer adoption for the customer success team. It closely parallels the buyer’s journey from a marketing perspective. It encompasses the process by which a customer learns about a new product/service, expresses interest, evaluates, evaluates, and finally buys it. Will adopt to purchase and use.
The diffusion of innovation theory works hand in hand with understanding consumer adoption. In this theory, ideas and products gradually gain traction and spread throughout society. Eventually, people adopt this idea and start buying or using it more.
However, this process will require multiple customer services like Business Process Outsourcing Company. A potential buyer’s needs during the awareness stage differ from those during the adoption stage. As a business principle, customer adoption is related to the ‘diffusion theory of innovation,’ which explains the process. Where an idea or product slowly spreads throughout the world’s social systems and is adopted for its superior features, it eventually becomes a part of our daily lives.
So if we talk about these five key stages of customer adoption (awareness, interest, evaluation, evaluation, and adoption), the next question that comes to our mind is: How does an organization achieve customer adoption? Does it increase? Let’s consider some essentials:
1. Beta Testing
Beta testing is essential if you want to introduce a new product or feature. It is where you’ll get to learn a lot about how this feature works in action. You can take feedback and work out kinks before launching a new product or tool. When you do beta testing, you will only have the tool/feature available to specific users.
2. Reach Loyal Customers
Another way to increase your customer adoption numbers is to stay in touch with your loyal customers. If they are interested in any of your new products, you can earn their trust by giving them special offers or exceptional customer support. Providing first-class service is the best way to convince your customers to continue adopting new products or features.
3. Evaluate Feedback
Trust your users to drive the process after beta testing. Have them complete a survey to get feedback on how it works, what they like, dislike, and what they think?
4. Improve the Customer Experience
Finally, another way to increase customer adoption is to provide a great customer experience by providing your quality product. If your product or service is easy to use, this process will add value to your customers. Along with quality products and a seamless customer experience, users will want to adopt new features and tools as they are released.
5. Be Strategic About Your Onboarding Process
In most companies, onboarding customers is either a high-touch or a low-touch process. High- value customers should access high-touch customer service to increase their adoption rate. Your customer success team might create customized onboarding documents and give personalized tours of a newly added feature until the product is fully implemented.
What is an Adoption Strategy?
A user adoption strategy aims to help users reach their destination. That means researching to understand users’ motivations, needs, environments, beliefs, complaints, and, most importantly, why users don’t adopt.
How Do You Measure Customer Adoption?
The adopt rate is measured by the number of customers using a feature. Specifically, you’re looking at the total number of users for that feature as a percentage of your product’s total number of users. This metric helps you identify elements that suffer from adopt friction.
What Are the Five Stages of the Consumer Adoption Process?
The 5 stages are product awareness, product interest, product evaluation, product trial, and product adoption.
Final Thoughts
Increasing customer retention can boost revenue by 25-95%, and customer adoption is the other side of customer retention. Provide excellent customer service through your customer success team to increase customer adoption.
