Measuring Adoption - what is your early warning system?

  • 28 April 2023
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Userlevel 4
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  • Gainsight Employee: Veteran Rookie
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So exited to see the great turnout on Tuesday for the Day in the Life of a Gainsight Enterprise CSM session! We had tons of great questions but one that I wish we had a bit more time to go deeper on was “How does Gainsight measure adoption?”

 

There is absolutely a wrong way to do this. Any time you are asking a CSM or other user to either calculate or speculate on what the customer adoption is you are: 1. Leaving room for subjectivity 2. Leaving room for manual error 3. Taking away time they could be spending driving value with customers 4. Your health score will not be predictive. 

 

At Gainsight this is all automated so I (as a CSM) do not have to take any manual action to get this insight. Our adoption health score is 50% adoption depth (how often are people logging into Gainsight) and 50% adoption breadth (are they using top sticky features). Trends using this data fire off CTAs when adoption depth declines with playbooks to take proactive action. Adoption is leading indicator to renewal (GRR) so make sure to do something before it’s too late! Being surprised by losing a customer that has not used your product in 6 months is no longer acceptable

 

We measure this all using our own product PX. Learn more here! 

 

Depth Score = HAU (Healthy) Active user %

  • Green User 10+ logins in the past four weeks
  • Yellow User: Less than 10 logins in the past four weeks
  • Red User: no logins in the past four weeks 

Green Score: at least 50% or more HAUs (user with logins of 10+ in last 4 weeks)

Lime Score: 35% HAUs

Yellow: 20% HAUs

Orange: 10%

Red: 0% HAUs

 

Breadth = use of top features 

Measured by # of the top features that are in Green or Lime health (Timeline, Cockpit, Email Assist, Gainsight Email Plugin Success Plans, C360, Dashboards, Journey Orchestrator, Surveys)

Green Score: 4 or more top features in Green or Lime health

Lime Score:  3 top features in Green or Lime health

Yellow: 2 top features in Green or Lime health

Orange: 1 top features in Green or Lime health

Red: 0 top features in Green or Lime health

 

I’d love to hear, how is your organization measuring adoption today? 

Please share your learnings/thoughts with us. 👇🏻


2 replies

Userlevel 3
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Hey @Ahunt,

 

Thanks for sharing, this is really insightful!  I’m currently exploring health score strategy for our org.  The steps you’ve outlined here would work great for our online products and where we’re collecting PX data. 

  • I’d be interested to understand how Gainsight would recommend measuring adoption of a product which, by design is offline at all times, and unable to collect any usage metrics?
  • To the name of your post ‘what is your early warning system’, would you advocate an approach of ‘early warning’ when usage is showing decline, and actually registering a ‘churn risk’ against the Company if the decline in usage continues, ie. the risk of churn is real and persists, or would you keep the CTA for risk open until the product usage improves?

Thanks!

Userlevel 4
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Hi @Stuart! For on prem products we have some proxies we would recommend when you cannot collect actual usage data. Support tickets are a good place to start. If they are not submitting any support tickets this could be a sign they are not using your product. See some other recommendations below. 

On your second question we use CTAs to trigger if a customer’s usage declines over a certain period of time to alert the CSM there may be an issue. This CTA type is a risk CTA and the CSM would follow up with the customer using a playbook with recommended steps. A decline in usage is usually not a churn risk right away but it’s a sign things might not be going in the right direction.

Sometimes after the follow up the CSM may find it’s an ed tech client and that decline is expected for seasonality or some reason that is not actually an issue and they could close the CTA out, and other times it can open up a conversation with a customer about adoption challenges. If it is an issue, you would keep the CTA open until the adoption improves. I recommend checking out this webinar which goes into both health scoring and risk: https://info.gainsight.com/no-surprises-how-cs-can-minimize-risk-webinar.html

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