Katherine shares four ways to personalize and scale customer adoption: use customer data and in-app guidance for onboarding, track health metrics to measure progress, automate programs with Marketing Cloud, and create tiered success plans tailored to each customer's needs.
Hey everyone, I'm Katherine and I'm here to talk to you about customer adoption. More specifically, how to deliver personalized, seamless adoption experiences so that your customers can realize value quickly with your products or service and keep coming back for more. I'll even share some tips on how we've done it here at Salesforce using our own technology. Ready to get started? Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce an inside look at our sales, service, marketing and IT businesses with helpful how to tips you can use for your business. As always, you can learn more about these topics at Trailhead, Salesforce's online learning platform, which is linked in the description below. And don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode. Making sure that customers see real value with your products or services is at the heart of customer success. That's where adoption comes in. It's about offering the right resources at the right time to help our customers resolve real world challenges and achieve success now. But how do you create those experiences? Let's dive in. Personalize the Onboarding Experience Onboarding is how you help your new customers get started with your products or services. It's your golden opportunity to establish a trusted relationship with each customer and set them up for a long term success. From day one one, we've learned that the best customer onboarding experiences are ones that are tailored to their specific business goals. In fact, 73% of our customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. But these personalized moments aren't possible without reliable customer data. Think about all the customer data your business captures in the sales cycle, like how do they intend to use your products, what goals are they trying to achieve, and so on. Onboarding is where you put your data to work. At Salesforce, we use surveys and other feedback methods to help us understand a customer's business goals and preferences. We take into account things like industry, business size, products they're using, and more. Once the data is collected, we use it to create highly personalized onboarding journeys, meaning our customers onboarding experience could look totally different from another's. And we're working on getting all of this information into our Salesforce data cloud, which will give us a unified view of each customer in real time so that we can personalize and scale our onboarding efforts even better. Another action that contributes to the success of an onboarding program is where a customer accesses it. At Salesforce, we've noticed that customers usually look for help when they're in the product trying to get something done to help them be more productive in those moments. We deliver much of our onboarding guidance directly in the app. As a result, we've seen a 50% increase in global usage for customers who engage with in app prompts compared to those who do not. In App guidance is just one way to meet customers where they are. You can also use email, text or web. Just make sure you're using data and customer feedback to guide your channel communication strategy. Tip Number two Define Customer health metrics. You can only improve what you can measure, so we approach adoption by measuring customer health. A customer who is taking full advantage of the products and features they've invested in, they're considered healthy. A customer with low use of their investment? Less so. So what goes into our Customer Health Score? Well, we've been building a trusted relationship with each customer from day one, so we rely on data we' collected during the sales process, onboarding, and at other points in their journey. We also take into account each customer's goals, their usage levels and feedback they've given us directly. We use this health score to confirm a customer is hitting their goals and identify where there are gaps or opportunities. We then provide adoption resources and recommendations they can take to meet their goals. For your own adoption metrics, follow the data and think about the core ideas behind customer success. Are they using your products or services? How can you help them get added value out of it? As your customers face more unique challenges on their adoption journey, you can learn how to better help them along the way. Remember, this is all about building a trusted relationship and focusing on customer success. Tip 3 Scale with automation. No matter what size your customer base might be, your adoption experiences should be repeatable, dynamic, and require a minimal amount of manual effort to run. That way you have a great foundation to scale without having to spend more money and resources. How do you do that automation? At Salesforce, we use Marketing Cloud to make sure that each customer enjoys a personalized adoption experience. This allows us to set rules for what communication a customer gets and when they get it. We can also set up simple protections that ensure positive experiences, like allowing only one email to go out in a given time period. For us, using automation tools like Marketing Cloud means we don't have to sacrifice customer satisfaction in order to scale. Automated adoption programs also boost customer success overall. If your customers get only what's relevant, they start to get that connection experience they're looking for. So as you're building out your own automated adoption program, keep these two key principles in scalability and the customer experience. Make sure your experiences are repeatable and scalable so you can iterate quickly as you grow and always consider the customer's need. Using data and feedback to improve TIP Number four Tailor Offerings to Customer Needs Customers tell us time and time again that they want to help drive adoption of their products, but they want to choose how much support they need. Some customers want a self service option with clear step by step recommendation. Others tell us they want a hands on approach with the ability to call in an expert. This is where our success plans come into play at Salesforce. Success is at the heart of everything we do. That's why every customer is on a success plan that is designed to help them realize value from their Salesforce technology quickly. Each plan offers a different level of expert guidance and support tailored to meet the unique needs of every customer. We follow a good, better and best model for our success plans. The standard success plan helps customers adopt at their own pace, providing self guided and on demand resources they can learn from. Our premier Success Plan empowers customers customers with guided onboarding, expert coaching, actionable insights from personalized assessments and expedited support and our signature Success Plan delivers a more proactive long term partnership with a designated technical account manager who's there to help customers drive adoption efficiency and cost savings. By giving customers a choice on the level of support they need based on their goals, we're helping them define success on their own terms. And there you have it. Four tips on how you can personalize and scale adoption experiences that empower customers to achieve long term success, including examples of how we've done it within our own customer success organization. Be sure to check out our Salesforce360 blog, trailhead and other episodes in this series to learn how we use Salesforce products to deliver amazing customer experiences. Thanks and we'll see you later.
