In episode #2, Leyla Bambury and Rishabh talk about strategies that Hootsuite uses to improve Product Usage and Improve Customer Retention.
One of the key issues with SaaS founders and Customer Success leaders as they have told me is the trial conversion and it’s a symptom, actually, the issue is that the product usage is really poor. How does Hootsuite handle this?
We have a lot of systems in place like user adoption is one of our like within Customer Success core KPI. So, for I guess just speaking on behalf of like the CS department specifically it is a focus of ours to drive user adoption.
And of course there’s different ways we drive that but typically we have data sources that we look to help us understand how user adoption is progressing, and of course have our ideal. We use like a health score of our ideal state of where we want customers to perform.
And this score is basically what like your monthly active users or daily activities or something like that?
Yeah, it’s a score that internally, we’ve had to work and validate, and we’ve sort of defined as important milestones or important events in a user’s journey with our product right so, for sure, like logging in, posting content, you know, for us right again specific to our products but having active social networks connected etc.
So there for our like health score, there’s very poor metrics. And then of course we do have other data points beyond that are just wrapped other features and functionalities that support, typical customer outcomes and adaptive and feature functionality, so the house score is something that internally, you know, must have alignment and validation on but it is kind of almost what we would say is the series of events that are like critical for our customer success and adoption.
Do you guys use product training content, as one of those activities to improve the health score, I mean, how do you bring people on the Hootsuite product, I know who should have an academy. But is there something else apart from the Academy which you guys regularly use?
So CSM can sometimes perform training sessions. We do leverage just pre-recorded videos, of course there’s the academy, that’s like, you know, the intention is to get certified, but we also have this pre-recorded video that we have, and then we also have a professional services team. So, with most packages that is purchased with the customer with Hootsuite.
It includes training. So, whether you know, expert hours training hours, basically hours dedicated with a trainer, and typically there is a focus so ideally, it’s to, you know, of course there’s always sort of basic on boarding training. But from there, once you sort of were on boarded after your path, onboarding phase right then that first 90 days of your journey with us as a partner.
It’s kind of like where the data is showing us that you’re not quite adopting the product, like we know you need to achieve your business outcomes so that’s where we can use these dedicated sessions with a trainer to walk through, learn how to use the product and ideally create that stickiness.
Hootsuite sets the training specifically by CSM team to conduct training or is there a separate training team who does training and training content?
Yeah, so they’re called trainers, and they sit on our professional services team, which is under our customer success department, our academy is also under our customer success department and Academy as part of our professional services so it’s all sort of trying to again, drive user adoption.
Do you ever feel that the product training content sometimes lags the training product, I mean, products’ new feature would have launched but the content is coming slower. Have you felt something like that before?
No not really, not in the last few years we’ve properly been resourced and staff to you know typically, especially for our product where there’s a lot of third-party dependencies, with changes, right, like if Facebook changes, we must update all our information.
So typically, we have a pretty good operational process of communications knowing when information or things change, whether it’s coming from, you know, our partners, the product team gets communicated to all the right channels to update resources or just yeah keep we have pretty good ownership of sort of all the resources to make sure it’s up to date.
For sure, I think sometimes that can happen, especially when we’re caught off guard with changes, but typically I would say we’re good at, at keeping our materials up to date.
And one last question, what else are you doing to give your users a moment in the early stage, I know you’re monitoring the health score on a continuous basis for the first 90 days but what do you do if something doesn’t work for you, what change do you do for that user. Like you see the high school isn’t growing, as you want it so what actions do you take?
So our engagement model is pretty hands on, so we try to just understand why, right, and that’s part of the kick-off is, you know, understanding, like in our kick off process always talk about sort of what to expect, and what are some of the shared responsibilities right like, we can only train you so much, but you have to actually, you know, go in and connect and do take all these steps.
So, this is a healthy conversation to have around, well what are the challenges that you’re seeing, is it just you know, simple changing habits, right.
A lot of times people are just still so used to doing it one way and can’t quite yet adopt new way so it’s just having a discussion to understand what are the challenges or barriers that you’re having, that’s really prohibiting you to obviously get to where we would like you to see you with that healthy adoption.
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