Customers are crying out for help. Overwhelmed by the deluge of information thrown at them the moment they sign up with you — links, documentation, downloads, how-to’s, videos, and guides; they also face a constant barrage of emails, texts, chats, phone calls, and notifications in both professional and personal lives. The strain leads to poor onboarding, unused products, and ultimately churn. Rather than inundating customers, deliver the steps needed to transform users into heroes
The costs of information overload.
According to McKinsey and IDC, people spend about 20% of their workdays searching for information, costing even small companies over $200 million dollars a year in wasted time and efforts. When people are confused and tired from hacking through jungles of overlapping and conflicting content they rely on expensive technical experts to guide them to the right path. Content jungles lead to high costs for both you and your customers due to wasted time, duplication of efforts, overlapping tools and systems, and high support tickets.
Action leads to transformation.
Imagine wanting to learn how to ski for your next family vacation. You watch videos, read books, and explore the resort website. You analyze the functional specifications of the skis, the gradient slope of the mountains, the moisture level in the snow, and the number of chairlifts at the resort. Does this make you a great skier? No. You might have a lot of compelling information in your head, but that doesn’t translate into new behaviors in your body.
Similarly, your customers possess fundamental information about your product, from the benefits and features they gain during the buyers’ journey, to the documentation, support articles, and self-paced training videos once they sign up with you; but without proper guidance they won’t know how to incorporate your product into their daily lives and businesses. The key to lasting change, or transformation, is behavior modification.
Cultivating behavior change
Customer Success Expert, Greg Daines states that, “Customers succeed when they change behavior in ways that lead to results.” You need to focus on the key behaviors required, especially at the beginning of the customer journey during onboarding and initial user enablement. “Don't waste precious customer time and attention on anything else,” Daines emphasizes. Otherwise, it’s like launching out on steep black diamond runs when grasping how to ski and ending up in a tangle of skis and limbs. You limp down the slope discouraged and injured, unlikely to attempt skiing again. Similarly, overwhelming customers with a “fire hose approach” that includes everything about your product results in frustration and abandonment.
Five steps to transform and empower customers.
Transformation requires action, time, patience, and muscle memory. When you start new users with the basics like snowplowing down the bunny slope, they master the foundational skills and change their behaviors for the long term. Leverage these five steps to foster behavior change with your customers: Listening, Defining, Prescribing, Measuring, and Scaling.
Listen to your customers. It all starts with understanding your customers. Schedule time with individual customers to learn from them. Identify their “aha” moments and discern how they want to be enabled. Use this information to define the specific behavior changes required. Another approach is to see what product usage data reveals about customer actions in your solution and how they correlate with higher usage, adoption, and retention.
Define the required behavior change. Once you listen to your customers then create a prescribed journey to ensure their actions follow the route to safely reach their goals. Be specific and stay on topic.
Embrace a prescriptive approach. Embrace a prescriptive approach by sharing best practices and clear steps. Create meaningful content that drives behavior and delivers value for each persona, rather than an everything-for-everyone approach. For example, while marketing professionals tend to appreciate hands-on and highly produced enablement content, developers often prefer documentation and videos to access on their own time. Use learning management systems, learning pathways, and in product guidance, tailored to each persona, and then deliver the right content to the right user at the right time, to drive the right behavior that creates meaningful results.
Measure the impact. Track product usage, retention, and other metrics to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Use this data to continuously refine your approach and ensure you are delivering transformation
Scale the delivery. Apply the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the “80/20 Rule.” With a less is more approach show users the main routes, or “highways,” they need to reach their goals. Once you know what is working for you and your customers, experiment with one-to-many approaches like live online workshops, self-paced learning academies, and office hours to see what has the most impact.
Value is delivered once transformation occurs
It’s time to stop the deluge of information. Start by listening to one or two customers in the next week. Find out what makes a difference for them. Empower customers to take ownership by offering the tools they need. When you help customers reach their next level, you ensure your company reaches its next level as well.
DONNA WEBER is the world’s leading expert in customer onboarding. For more than two decades, she has helped high-growth startups and established enterprises turn new and existing customers into loyal champions. Her award-winning book is Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions. Learn more at donnaweber.com.
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