It’s a show about many things—love, drama, hot tubs—but most of all, it is a show about getting someone to notice you in a crowd. Ultimately, The Bachelor is about engagement, in more ways than one!

Product and customer success managers often find themselves in the same position as a Bachelor contestant, trying to get the attention of an eligible product user in the hopes of getting an elusive renewal or upsell. The kind of engagement they’re looking for doesn’t lead to marriage, but it does lead to a successful customer relationship, which means sustained recurring revenue and higher profits. 

The problem is that it’s not always easy to know whether users are actually engaged with your product. Product experience (PX) professionals don’t have the luxury of one-on-one dates with their customers. To find out how they’re doing, they need to gather data and then interpret it using metrics that tell the user engagement story. 

What Is User Engagement?

Put simply, user engagement measures whether users find value in a product or service. How you define value will depend on the product, but typically it is based on how frequently the product is used and for how long. User engagement is highly correlated with the likelihood of renewal and thus profitability. If customers are not using your product, that usually means they don’t see the value of it, and will probably cancel (churn) when they get the opportunity to do so.

How Measuring User Engagement Helps Your Product

User engagement metrics can give you invaluable information on how users engage with your product. Selecting the right user engagement KPIs will let you know what features are working, which ones are going unused. You can also determine trouble spots in your product that are causing friction and possibly churn. 

The insights you gain from user engagement metrics will help you improve your product, gain visibility into the customer journey, and identify opportunities for expansion. But because there are so many different ways to measure user engagement, choosing the right metrics can be a daunting task. That’s why we’ve put together a list (by no means exhaustive) of important metrics for you to consider when measuring user engagement.  

The Top 10 User Engagement Metrics

User activity will vary greatly depending on the product. For example, some products are used every day—think Microsoft Office or Google Docs. Other products, like billing software, might only be used once a month. The key is to determine what kinds of user activity signify that your users are finding value. 

But user engagement is more than simply using the product. You also have to understand how customers are interacting with specific features and functionalities. The goal is to get a clear picture of your product from the user’s perspective.

1. Daily/Weekly/Monthly engagement (user activity)

Daily Active Users (DAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), or Monthly Active Users (MAU) measure how many unique users are actively using your product during a particular time period. The definition of “active” will vary based upon your product. For example, for some products simply logging in is an acceptable proxy for activity, but for others you may need to see specific actions performed.

2. Time in product

Another core user engagement metric is how long users are active in the product, on average. If a user is really getting value, they will use it for longer—though of course, that will depend on how the product is used. Once you have a significant data set, you can create a benchmark to compare with individual users. 

3. Stickiness

“Stickiness” is a measure of how indispensable your product is for your users. In other words, how often does a user keep returning to the product? This is a powerful indicator of value. Typically this is calculated by dividing your Daily Active Users by your Monthly Active Users.

4. Retention

Retention rate measures what percentage of users in a certain cohort are still users after a certain time period. For example, for all the users who began in May 2021, how many are still using it six months later? This metric can help you determine big-picture trends in product usage. 

5. Churn

Churn is the inverse of retention and measures the percentage of users who stopped using the product. Not that with B2B products, user churn is not the same as customer churn. But high churn among a customer’s user base is a sign that the customer could be in danger of dropping your product.

6. Feature usage

Feature usage is a pretty self-explanatory user engagement metric: which features are users using? Seldom used features may not be valuable to users and might be candidates for elimination, while frequently used features may be ready for expansion or price increases.

7. Week 1 engagement

Week 1 engagement is sort of a subset of DAU or MAU that focuses on adoption. If a user isn’t engaging with your product within the first week, they are likely to churn. This could be because of issues with the onboarding process, or could be a sign of a more fundamental problem.

8. Exit page (contrast with bounce rate)

Exit page is a drill-down metric that can help you understand how customers are using your product at a more granular level. This user engagement metric tracks the last page or screen that a user accessed before leaving your product. This is interesting because it can tell you whether the user leaving after completing a certain task or perhaps out of frustration due to a friction point.

9. Ticket volume by support channel

Ticket volume by support channel is an interesting user engagement metric that can help you identify the best ways to communicate with users about updates, fixes, and new products. For example, do users seek support via phone, email, or in-product chat? Understanding this metric will help you build a stronger relationship with users.

10. Feedback response rates

User feedback is a core component of optimizing your product. The best way to understand what customers want is to hear it straight from the source. But beyond the feedback itself, the feedback response rate is a good measure of overall user engagement and enthusiasm for the product. 

Powering User Engagement Metrics With Gainsight PX

Gainsight enables you to collect and visualize user engagement data from your products in one central platform. And once your data is aggregated in Gainsight, you can leverage our powerful rules engine to evaluate positive and negative trends in behavior, proactively notify team members when action should be taken, and quickly prepare for customer and internal meetings.

Learn more and take Gainsight for a Joyride today.

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At Gainsight’s Pulse Everywhere 2021, I had the opportunity to bring my event planning background together with my current product experience design role. When people look at my LinkedIn, they’re often surprised to see that I was an event planner before I worked in a more technical role. However, the longer I stay in tech, the more I see the parallels between the two professions.

As a product experience designer, my time is now spent creating seamless in-app experiences using Gainsight’s own PX tool. Much like my previous role as an event planner, I am thinking about what exactly users will need to see, learn, and experience while in the product. This was exactly the mindset I brought to the table when collaborating with our events team to make the virtual experience a success.

While we’re slowly starting to see events return to an in-person format, it’s likely that some form of a hybrid event will become the norm. Check out 7 ways I used Gainsight PX to make our virtual event feel more engaging like a true, in-person event!

What is Gainsight PX?

Gainsight PX is a usage analytics and product engagement platform that helps you drive superior product experiences. With Gainsight PX, you can deeply understand how users are engaging with your product, collect feedback, and drive adoption with in-app engagements like guides, walkthroughs, and more. In this blog post, I’ll share how we used Gainsight PX to drive event engagement but if you’d like to learn about other use cases, check out our product page.

1 – Make attendees feel welcome

At an in-person event, I think about creating hype as soon as the attendee walks through the door. Usually, this means music, lighting, banners, etc. to make the attendee realize they’re walking into an experience separate from their day-to-day. Of course, our amazing event planners had the incredible DJ Skemaddox, puppies of Pulse, top-notch swag, you name it—to set that tone of excitement, we wanted attendees to feel welcome from the moment they opened the virtual event platform.

We made three welcome video pop-ups, one for each day. As soon as attendees entered the event, they were greeted by our CEO Nick Mehta, CCO Kellie Capote, or Sr. Director of Corporate Events Lauren Olerich. Every virtual event platform experience varies so we wanted to make sure our attendees were confident right out of the gate. The videos provided a warm welcome and helpful tips for navigating the virtual platform to make the experience as frictionless as possible.

2 – Check-in attendees and orient them

One of the features Gainsight PX offers is the ability to create in-product walkthroughs. I picture this set of guides as the virtual equivalent of a check-in booth where attendees would normally get their lanyard and name tag, then be directed to the first session. The key thing here is to keep the instructions as short as possible—only tell the attendee what they need to know right away.

3 – Answer common questions

At an in-person event, there’s usually some way to answer FAQ’s—whether that’s signage or someone on a mic with a talk track that proactively addresses those questions. One of the most common virtual event questions our events team gets is, “How can I find this amazing content later?” Anticipating the question, I made a tooltip engagement pointing to our On Demand tab to show attendees where to find the content later.

4 – Announce when something is starting

At Pulse Everywhere 2021, our incredible events team incorporated a new live element called, “Pulse Unplugged” sessions. These were interactive sessions where attendees could actually raise their hands and participate in the conversation. Once inside, the Pulse Unplugged sessions were a hit—the problem was getting people to navigate to these in the first place. Since these were a new addition, we needed to make sure attendees were well aware of this option.

At an in-person event, you’d usually have an emcee or mobile app push notifications telling attendees when something special is starting. To help drive attendance to Pulse Unplugged, I made tooltips that only ran for one hour (15 minutes prior to the session until 45 minutes into the session). Having this narrow window of runtime was crucial to ensure attendees knew there was still something to attend despite the other sessions being over.

That’s great, but did it help? Well, using Gainsight PX’s impact analysis capabilities, I determined that attendees who saw the tooltip above were 129% more likely to attend the promoted session.

5 – Show attendees how to connect with each other

You might think networking happens naturally at an in-person event, but maybe you’re just overlooking the sneaky magic of event planners. In real life, you’d have sessions paced out such that there were “natural” moments for people to meet each other. Seating spaces are arranged to facilitate conversations. Happy hours allow for mingling. You get it—event planners are wizards.

In a virtual event, our events team mimicked that feel with a “speed-dating”-style networking option. However, knowing that this was a new experience for our audience, I made a single tooltip to encourage attendees to try it out. The tooltip launched once for each user after they had seen a welcome video and the welcome guide.

Even more amazing – because I can measure adoption trends with Gainsight PX, I saw that attendees who saw the above tooltip were 46% more likely to use the Networking feature.

6 – Request feedback from attendees

Capturing attendee feedback is super important to continuously improve the event experience. This is typically done via email or a hard copy survey, depending on the type and scale of the event. By integrating Gainsight PX into the virtual platform, we were able to supplement our survey strategy with an in-platform survey option. Survey best practices stress the importance of survey timeliness. Having a survey trigger right after an important moment provides more accurate sentiment data as the experience is still fresh. These tooltips appeared 10-15 minutes into the targeted sessions so attendees had enough time to view the session content and provide adequate feedback.

Even better than just looking nice – these tooltips resulted in 6x the number of survey responses once launched!

7 – Get them excited about next time

Last but not least, event planners always want to get attendees excited about the next big thing. Using Gainsight PX one last time, we made a quick plug for Pulse 2022. This pop-up only appeared halfway into the final day. The open rate on this one was ~50%, so that tells me this message was in the right place at the right time!

The Future of Hybrid Events

As the world shifts to hybrid events, I can picture an even more sophisticated event experience. Imagine being able to create hybrid event experiences based on which persona the attendee is, if they’re a speaker, and even whether they’re a customer or prospect. Theoretically, it’s all possible with the combined power of Gainsight PX and other tools—it’ll just take the magic crossover of creative PX-perts and event planners to make it a reality.

The post 7 Ways Gainsight Used PX to Make Pulse Everywhere More Engaging appeared first on Gainsight Software.

Have you ever heard the saying, “There is no ‘I’ in team?” Companies with well-built solutions are discovering when they partner with equally good and complementary products; the results are outstanding. That happened when Adobe’s top-performing Product Adoption Team combined efforts using their Audience Manager with Gainsight’s PX solution. The synthesis delivered a powerful outcome. 

Recently, Jackie Chevallier, Senior Product Manager for Adobe Audience Manager, and Connor Hatfield, Senior Customer Marketing Adoption Specialist at Adobe, sat with Gainsight’s Harshi Banka, Customer Success Director, Gainsight PX Team. They discussed how they partner closely with their teammates and create in-product guides that make product adoption successful. They also spoke about what insights they gathered from customers, key internal stakeholders, and Adobe’s in-product framework where they build out their guides. Finally, they shared their success stories, best practices, and recommendations using Audience Manager and Gainsight PX. 

Internal Team Alignment

Jackie does not consider herself a typical Product Manager. Her focus isn’t necessarily on feature development but preferably on retention. Product adoption and customer success are core pillars of her role. Jackie found that internal alignment must occur across the organization, especially on the CS practices of adoption and retention. That is why Jackie coordinates her efforts with PMs to regulate in-product guide releases for optimal customer base success. She also works closely with field teams, including CSMs, to drive retention and bring their insights back to the Product Management team to improve the product. It is a robust full-circle effort.

Alignment practices continue to be critical in the roadmap and feature development prioritization for Adobe. “We rely heavily on qualitative and quantitative metrics when focusing on retention and prioritization of our efforts,” Jackie explained. “Because of these efforts, it continues to be so critical in roadmap and feature development.” To hit their established metrics and by leaning into alignment, Adobe has created practical product guides through Gainsight PX.

In PX, there is customer communication support that aid in product adoption, which is vital for Adobe. “We’ve had great success with customer adoption programs in person and through some of our broader enablement teams and programs,” Jackie shared. Due to COVID-19 circumstances, getting in front of customers is more important than ever before. Adobe found that in-product messaging is the best way to engage customers. As customers navigate the product, many elements and features are top of mind. Through Gainsight PX, Adobe raised the visibility of those components. As a result, they improved and drove their product strategy, produced better adoption with customers, and created a cohesive partnership between the Customer Marketing and Product Management teams.

PM and CM—Perfect Partnering

Blending Customer Marketing and Product Management processes is an art for Adobe. It enabled them to deliver content at the right time and every stage in their customers’ journey by aligning both processes. Conor stated that their focus is “to help them [the customer] achieve success and uncover the true value of the products they purchase and ultimately remain Adobe customers for life.”  

Conor’s team brings a deep understanding of the customer, expertise in developing omnichannel programs, and a high product guide knowledge level. The product guides they create specifically focus on a developed overall guide strategy. The strategic guides bring together the “how and why” to drive value realization. Often, users need to know more than just what a button means or how to accomplish a particular motion in the product. According to Conor, knowing the why and the how, along with best practices, the customer adopts and deeply engages the product. It’s critical to value realization. 

Adobe discovered that the success of the Customer Marketing team is partnering with the Product Management team. By bringing together the different areas of expertise and creating a customer-centric strategy for increasing product adoption, they are ultimately helping their customers become successful. Besides the alignment and process developed by aligning the Product Management and Customer Marketing teams, Adobe added the Customer Analytics team and the Product Guide Governance Team. In the Adobe cross-functional environment, it is pivotal to be in lockstep. The product guide initiative is making a difference with end product guidance. 

Analytics-Driven Success

Adobe is a data-driven organization. Because of their use of data and analytics, they have a dedicated product and customer analytics team. The teams have developed product adoption scores to identify their product’s successful use through defined expected behaviors. These behaviors are weighted and ranked based on a maturity scale and then combined into an overall customer score. By identifying monthly expected behaviors based on the front and back end metrics, the teams can set target goals for customers and improve scores.

The progress scores are monitored monthly and shared with customers. It opens the door for conversations, such as why and how they are using the product, leading to meaningful feedback. This information drives value and business objectives. It’s important to note that the product adoption scores are not the only indicators used to gauge customer products. New feature tracking and measurement are established ahead of all new feature releases, and products are not launched without this critical step.

There are two other vital factors that Adobe’s teams review when looking at product usage adoption. They examine the exposure of features and compare them to utilization frequency. Suppose a customer sees features regularly but does not utilize them. Adobe questions if there are issues and usability or enhancements to make this feature more useful. Perhaps customers are just not aware of a feature? Once again, it is a trigger for a meaningful customer conversation.

Since product adoption scores and expected behaviors are evaluated and adjusted annually, basic feature tracking helps product managers gauge the success of a release and prioritize future enhancements. None of this would be possible without the alignment of the product and customer analytics team.

It All Starts and Ends With the Customer

For Adobe, the customer is at the center of every process, motion, and product. Their programs, no matter the channel, are developed through the eyes of the customers. That is why every adoption program starts. 

Directly conversing with customers helps a business understand onboarding and ongoing challenges, and overall product pain points. You can then establish what made them successful. You can also explore their needs with specific questions about what their ideal in-product guide experience. There are options in Gainsight PX, such as in-app surveys, that give insight into customer sentiment. Adoption is only part of the process. All data must include indicators, especially if the customer is not getting to their outcomes. Knowing the customer intimately, through various mediums, can help reveal the guide style and the touch cadence to deliver the best experience. However, that does not mean you abandon the rich quantitative data gained through your analytics.

Every customer feedback source becomes the heart for everything you develop within product guidance, experience, and best practices. This process’s core is looking for common themes across the customer data, using analysis and feedback to help drive your strategy and increasing customer-centricity in all you do. That is what Gainsight does best. It has three key components, starting with analytics. Next are in-app product guides, both templates, and the ability to form from scratch. These are what Jackie and Connor used to drive their programs and engagements. There are also in-app surveys and feedback. All of these integrate with Gainsight’s customer experience platform to create the customer experience you want and believe your customers deserve.

Five Steps to Build an In-Product Guide 

With a firm foundation set, here are five steps to creating an In-Product Guide. 

• Set goals and KPIs: Many might be tempted to begin with onboarding guides because that comes first in a customer’s lifecycle. However, look at areas that can address the more extensive needs of your customer base. You can make a more contextual guide that can be up to 50 percent more successful by addressing these.

• Determine the guide type and the experience: Experience encompasses cadence, timing, location, and recurrence based on the goal. The topic determines if it should be a walkthrough, a tooltip, a dialog, or a banner. Look to customer research to determine how to best serve that guide to your users. Ask your customers what they prefer, and then test that preference first, especially cadence preference. Adobe recommends using Gainsight PX and its A/B functionality to test delivering guides at different cadences to see which drives the best results.

• Develop or Deliver Content: There are three tips for developing and delivering content to your customers.
  • Tip 1: Revisit the goals and purpose of the guide. This action can be asking the right questions. Do you want to raise awareness? Do you want to show users how to do something? Do you want to promote a new feature? Answering questions will dictate how you structure your message and focus on your goal. 
  • Tip 2: Keep your message clear and concise. Do not deliver too much information or too many messages at once.
  • Tip 3: Keep your users in the product. If you do have to take the customer out of the product with a link or Call To Action (CTA), be strategic as possible.
• Building Your Guides: Adobe recommended Gainsight’s PX for more in-depth documentation for this step and provided three main tips for building out guides for your customers.

• • Tip 1: Use developed templates. Instead of starting from scratch, use developed templates. They provide consistency to customers across the segments and helped scale. For Adobe, their governance team created templates that deliver similar experiences in both their Audience Manager and Analytics.
  • Tip 2: Use segmentation to deliver timely and relevant content. While sometimes a broader segmentation is necessary, Adobe suggested using Gainsight’s segmentation capabilities to produce content useful to users’ needs for a particular stage in their journey.
  • Tip 3: Deliver user guides with proper throttling. Don’t bombard users with guides or create guide fatigue. Adobe suggested one guide per day and no more than five per week. However, know your customer and what is best to make that ideal in-product experience. 

• Reaching established KPIs: Measuring yourself against KPIs indicates you are attaining your goals. Do not be discouraged if you don’t get them all. Learn to optimize campaigns and relaunch. You may find the relaunched campaigns are the most successful.

Success and Learnings

There were significant wins this year with the unified use of Adobe Audience Manager and Gainsight PX.  At the beginning of 2020, Adobe’s focus plan was to increase adoption and awareness of new features and their more complex sticky features, especially a feature called Predictive Audiences. To accomplish this goal, they needed to drive users to the feature by incorporating a clear CTA that would redirect the user to the page where it lived and highlight it. Rather than using a banner or dialog announcement, Adobe utilized a tooltip with incredible success.

Adobe also engaged in customer testing. Through an A/B test, a Gainsight PX functionality saw a significant difference between the test and control group. The test group had a 70 percent lift compared to the control group.  There were two main takeaways from this in-product guide experiment. First, incorporate a clear CTA and make the guide for a new feature release action-oriented. This action will lead to increased awareness and adoption of the new feature. Second, it proved that in-product guidance for a new feature is highly effective and ultimately changes user behavior because of the experiment. 

Adobe realized that by combining PX with their Audience Manager tool, establishing team alignment, developed best practices, and product guidance is how they deliver world-class levels of customer experience and success. Learn more about how in-product guides can guide your product through a demo. 

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In the digital world, given how much data surrounds our every interaction, we expect products to deliver a relevant experience based on our uniqueness when we receive digital messages. Providing in-product guides and journeys contextualized or personalized based on the current user (their attributes or previous product behavior) becomes especially crucial when users are more dependent on technology with the accelerated shift to the cloud.

Here are the three fundamental reasons why context matters for in-app engagements in your product:

1. Personalized onboarding
2. Engagements based on customer health
3. Engagements based on feature usage/adoption

Personalized Onboarding

Onboarding is critical to the user experience of your product. This is the first introduction to your product and can define how the user feels about the experience you deliver. An executive using your product to look at high-level metrics weekly or monthly needs a different onboarding experience than a user who will spend the entire workday in your product. The ability to customize the onboarding experience is not available in many in-app engagement platforms. 

One of our large enterprise software clients assessed two Gainsight PX competitors over a four-month proof-of-concept. They determined that contextual targeting based on customer health, usage, user, past behavior, and support calls was instrumental in their platform choice. This client also integrated Gainsight PX with their in-house data platforms to better inform these engagements to create a 1:1 experience for all users. 

The results speak for themselves. They saw a 70% lift in new feature adoption for users who viewed the personalized in-app guides and a 305% overall adoption lift in previously under-adopted features, resulting directly from contextual, personalized engagement.

Health-Based Engagements

The last thing an unhealthy customer wants to see is an upsell message when they don’t feel they are getting value from their existing package. Using a combination of usage, sentiment, support tickets, etc., you can quickly gauge customer health and determine if an upsell or new feature message is appropriate. 

For healthy customers, this is an opportunity for them to get more of what they are already using and accelerate their value with new features and functions. One of our enterprise financial data clients had a challenge where only 5% of their new users participated in live training resulting in low adoption and eventual churn. They looked at their product and identified several ‘golden features’ that could drastically improve their retention if adopted. Using contextual engagement, they were able to drive the other 95% of users to live training on specific features based on their usage to positively impact retention and increased adoption of these ‘golden features.’

Usage and Adoption Based Engagements

We all have products we can navigate by memory without sight. Imagine your favorite feature moved, and instead of being able to find it, you simply found a workaround (perhaps in another system), which diminished your happiness with the product. Imagine being a new product manager at a company. The other PMs navigate the company road mapping tool quickly; however, you are overwhelmed during onboarding, so it takes you some time to adopt the company’s tech tools. Adoption-based engagements can help in situations such as this. 

Gainsight PX’s in-app engagements can be segmented to address a specific cohort of users (for example, all users with the same title) so that new employees in a similar role can receive tips based on their particular job function. For users who have been using the product for some time but seem to have difficulty adopting a useful feature (or finding a feature that may have moved during an upgrade), you can also serve up engagements to drive them directly to that feature. For one of our enterprise data analysis firms, contextual engagements were critical for their tech touch segment users. Also, since using Gainsight CS alongside PX, they can deliver a hybrid approach—tech touch coupled with the appropriate human outreach, depending on user adoption. 

With many teams under pressure to do more with fewer resources, having this level of context can free up human intervention to focus on other aspects of the customer journey. These three capabilities have allowed Gainsight PX to stand out when put head to head with the competition. If you need more guidance about best practices for in-app engagements, start here to see our kit as well as get 30 days of free in-app engagements using Gainsight PX. 

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All retro gamers know that you can’t just be dropped into a video game without any instruction. Instead, nearly all games begin with what’s known as an opening sequence—an 8-bit video that sets up the story followed by an easy level where you can practice. Product leaders should all take note.

In-app engagements are like opening sequences for applications, and a fantastic way to familiarize users and decrease churn. Today, they’re basically expected and can have a huge impact on revenue. When Sarah Anderson, Head of Product at Email on Acid, ran a test with a sample group, they found that in-app engagements led to 15% higher retention. Yours can too.

What Are In-App Engagements? 

It’s a rare software these days that’s built to explain itself. It isn’t part of the product design workflow. But when application developers and designers assume that users know what they’re looking for, how to find it, and how to use it, it creates spotty experiences that cause frustration and lead to churn. Those first days and weeks of a new user’s journey are crucial—it’s where the real first impression is made. 

To bridge the gap and educate new and existing users, there are in-app engagements. These are notifications, badges, guides, walkthroughs, and takeovers that explain how the application works, sort of like someone leaning over your shoulder and pointing. 

Sample Gainsight PX Engagements

Creating engagements is easy. But creating useful ones? That’s a bit more difficult. Many product teams tend to overdo it, and that can have the opposite effect. “You have to ensure customers come away from in-app engagements saying, ‘Wow, that was valuable,’” says Sarah. “We put our customer at the core of these decisions 100% of the time, and that’s how we get engagements that make people say, ‘I’m going to pin this for later.’ Otherwise, the danger is your risk of becoming a distraction.” 

If your notifications and guides are seen as a distraction, it can do long-term harm. The most important channel for communicating with customers is often the product itself. With all the digital noise, you can’t assume your emails are opened and read. The best place to reach people is right in-context, with a pop-up or notification. If you build in-app engagements that are tone-deaf or unhelpful, you teach people to ignore this channel, and close pop-ups without reading them. 

To avoid this fate, there’s in-app engagement segmentation. That’s when you target someone with engagements based on who they are and what stage of the journey they’re in.

“Customers don’t care about what your data models look like,” says Sarah. “They care about whether you’re hitting them where they’re at in the journey. If you send a power user a ‘Use this new feature’ notification and they say, ‘Hey, I’m one of your people. What gives?,’ you’ve lost them. But if you send the notification only to those users that want to hear it, you create an invisible hand that guides everyone to their value action. That’s the power of segmentation, and that’s the power of Gainsight PX.”

What Are You Waiting For?

Sign up for a free trial of Gainsight PX and select from a series of in-app engagement templates you can start sending today. And even better, sign up for Gainsight PX to see how we use PX to onboard people onto PX. You’ll be guided in ways that might give you new ideas for your own customers. 

Like video game opening sequences, in-app engagements are helpful, expected, and necessary. But unlike video game sequences, they don’t take weeks to code. Spin one up today and see for yourself—it’s one of your best tools for increasing retention.

Level up your product strategy—Try Gainsight PX free!

The post How to Create Powerful and Memorable In-App Engagements appeared first on Gainsight Software.

Amidst the end of the school year, graduation chaos, and planning for the next school year, educators have not only been bombarded by every email subscription list they’ve ever signed up for but also marketing campaigns from new and old EdTech companies. Inboxes are ticking higher and higher as different states, districts, and schools message how they will accommodate educating students during COVID-19, and every other business rushes to send communications on addressing this “new normal.” If you needed to get important information to your users, it was likely buried under all of these communications.

As the situation surrounding COVID-19 continues to evolve, companies need to be prepared to keep all their end-users informed. In this guide for EdTech products, we’ll show you how to use in-app engagements to cut through the noise and effectively communicate information to all your end-users when time is of the essence.

What Is an In-App Engagement?

In-app engagements are outreaches from your company to your end-users that happen within a product. In times like these, they can be used to:

• Provide critical updates
• Enable quick onboarding
• Drive ongoing product education that evolves with current events
• Capture user sentiment
• Examples of in-app engagements include onboarding tours, new feature releases, content announcements, and surveys.

An in-app engagement strategy requires two things: structure and technology. Technology is necessary to deploy the in-app engagements and the processes below will help you map out when, where, and how often your engagements should occur.

Why Are In-App Engagements so Important Right Now?

We’re experiencing something we never have before—coronavirus, global quarantines, social distancing, and the economic impacts that come with them. This has affected everyone, especially educators, and the technology they use every day.

Your product is the best way to share important information with your users. In-app engagements allow you to create hyper-targeted messages so you can inform students, parents, educators, and administrators.

What Your End Users Expect: Students and Parents

You need to provide a smooth experience for these users and help them get the information they need.

In industries like education, you’re getting a lot of new people signing up to use your services. Simultaneously, you need to relay important updates surrounding COVID-19 and share what to expect right now and in the future. Set up expectations upfront to make the experience more positive for everyone. Creating excellent COVID-related copy templates is the first step toward communicating with your students, parents, teachers, and administration.

What Your End Users Expect: Teachers and Administrators

You need to create a quick, efficient experience that allows teachers and administrators to complete their workflow. It’s critical that the engagements going to them are concise and hyper-relevant.

They are busier than ever, so providing in-app documentation and ways for them to find the information they need quickly is paramount. In-app onboarding guides are also important so new users can ramp up ASAP. If there are new protocols, this is also a time to provide in-app tours to keep educators up-to-date with the necessary workflow.

Creating a Compassionate In-App Engagement Strategy

Before you start sending out in-app engagements left and right, you need to be able to triage all the high-priority information and make sure the most important, relevant information reaches your end-users.

The keyword here is “compassionate.” In reality, we’re not just reaching out to “users,” we’re reaching out to people. These people are busy or anxious or stressed or all of the above. Your actions and communications are a positive, proactive way for you to help users through it all.

The processes below are intended to put humans first—it’s about what the end-user needs to see, not what will most benefit the company’s bottom line. However, doing one will impact the other. Use these best practices below to set up in-app engagement processes that will create long-term value for your users and your company.

Creating a Hierarchy of Importance

When you’re behind the product trying to help your users achieve success, it seems like every in-app message is necessary. But no matter how relevant and perfectly-timed they are, send too many in-app comms and your users are going to get fatigued. You can’t risk this when there are so many changes going on in the world that affect education, your product, and your users.

At Gainsight, we have a hierarchy for our in-app engagements. This helps avoid the “loudest voice wins” dilemma. Now if a department requests an in-app engagement (i.e. webinar promotion, event registration, feature announcement, etc.) we can definitively say which one takes priority. We’ve modified this to include situations that might occur in a time of crisis.

In-app engagements in order of priority (highest to lowest):

• Critical Health/Wellbeing Announcements
• Product Announcements: Specific to Current Events
• Product Adoption: Specific to Current Events
• Content Announcement: Specific to Current Events
• Product Adoption: General Usage, Onboarding
• Education
• Product Feedback

The TRUSt Framework for In-App Engagements

Every in-app communication must have a purpose. When things are business-as-usual, each in-app engagement needs to inform the user of important product information and/or help them get more value out of their partnership. In times of crisis, you also need to make sure that you’re getting time-saving, and potentially highly impactful information to people that need it.

At Gainsight, we created “The TRUSt Framework” to ensure that all in-app engagements are done with intention. As you create and schedule each engagement, ask yourself:

Is It Timely? Engagements are presented based on the user’s timing, not ours. This is especially critical in education where you don’t want to disrupt educators during critical workflows.

Is It Relevant? Engagements must be triggered based on clear use of our product (or lack of use within a reasonable amount of time) and related to a user’s role in our products. In education, a single user can play multiple roles such as teacher, administrator, and parent. Consider segmenting by district or school size to ensure these types of users don’t get inundated with engagements meant for the many roles they play.

Is It Useful? Engagements must help users in some way, such as learn something new or complete a task faster.

Is It Straightforward? Be clear and concise—“Verbosity is the enemy.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IN-APP ENGAGEMENT KIT

Creating an In-App Engagement Approval Process

You need a tight approval process if you want in-app engagements to be published swiftly and accurately. The optimal in-app engagement approval workflow will include all of the following components. However, there are moments in time where immediate action is needed. We’ve included suggestions for ways you can expedite this process in times where messages are urgent and must be streamlined.

Step 1: Initial Review

To avoid a negative user experience, engagements at Gainsight follow a defined approval process. Only certain teams (i.e. Customer Success Operations, Marketing Operations, and Product Documentation) have access to the in-app engagement creator in Gainsight PX. All submissions require the following components for initial review:

• Content (message, text, and graphics)
• Target audience
• Type of in-app engagement (lightbox, survey, tooltip, etc.)
• Business use case
• Desired outcome
• Desired start date
• Duration of campaign
• Frequency of appearance
• Having a dedicated group with members from different departments adds checks and balances.

Expediting the Review Process

Narrow down the number of stakeholders involved in the process to the most relevant teams and make it clear to them that reviewing/approving in-app engagements are a high priority.

Step 2: Establishing an Approval Committee

At Gainsight, once a teammate submits a request for a new in-app engagement, it’s reviewed by our In-App Engagement Steering Committee. The departments represented in your committee should be the ones who have the most accountability for the success or failure of these engagements. Our internal steering committee is composed of a member from each of the following departments:

• Marketing: They are well aware of the demand generation content calendar and upcoming events, webinars, and blog posts, as well as brand voice and guidelines. They help align in-app engagements with campaigns they may be running during the same time period.
• CS Operations: They have deep customer insight and have access to immediate customer feedback. They’re responsible for an in-app engagement content calendar that tracks all approved engagements, the audience, and durations. This calendar helps avoid messaging conflicts and audience fatigue from too many engagements.
• Product Operations: This member can give insight on upcoming features, keep everyone aligned.
• Documentation: A key part of customer communications, they should have visibility on what sort of guides and walkthroughs are being shared with customers to ensure consistency.
• Once an engagement is approved and added to the calendar, account managers should be informed of the campaign so they can follow up with their accounts. This helps ensure that your in-app engagement reaches maximum effectiveness.

Expediting the Committee Approval Process

If you’re optimizing your process for urgent communications, you’ll want to narrow this committee down to just a member of Marketing, a member of Product, and the operations team in charge of deploying the engagement. Depending on the size of your team, you could even put this in the hands of a marketing team member that has the ability to deploy the engagement.

How Are You Communicating With Your Users?

In-app engagements are incredibly powerful tools. They’re an important part of driving adoption and can have a serious impact on retention. The more people find value from your new and existing features, the more they’ll return. They also boost confidence and create healthy habits in your users. But unless you are able to properly prioritize engagements, they’ll hurt more than they help.

The frameworks and processes that you put in place now to address the sharing of critical information, will provide ongoing value. The best practices in this article will help you build a solid foundation for your in-app engagement strategy this year and beyond. Please reach out to us here for more resources as you continue to create a compassionate product experience for your students, teachers, administrators, parents, and staff!

The post EdTech Series: PX Strategies to Power In-App Engagements appeared first on Gainsight Software.

Remote work isn’t new. The products we create have fueled telecommuting ever since the inception of software-as-a-service. However, we’ve entered a time where work-from-home is more prevalent than ever and the global environment we work in is like nothing we’ve ever experienced.

Maybe you’ve noticed an influx of users with the shift to remote workforces. Or maybe you’re doing all you can to ensure your existing customers will continue to use your products. Whether you’re focusing on adoption or retention, your product needs to be able to provide value when your customer-facing teams cannot.

We can’t rely on our customer-facing teams to do the heavy lifting. Products need to step up and become more functional in an isolated environment if we want to succeed in the long-term.

Product experiences in an isolated environment

Let me begin by clarifying what I mean when I say that products should function in isolation. Here is a personal example. When my son was born one month ago, I went through all of the fun paperwork to get his birth certificate, social security number, insurance, etc.. To be honest, with all the craziness, I may not have entered all the information correctly. I didn’t have a coworker next to me to ask for their advice. I couldn’t walk down to People Success to get help in person. And it was tough coordinating a call with the vendor while taking care of our newborn and our rambunctious toddler home from school.

At my son’s next doctor’s appointment, low and behold, the insurance info was unavailable and I had to scramble. I did wonder though, what did I do wrong? Was it human or product error? Could my insurance product portal have been easier to use, especially when we’re so isolated?

In this new world, digital products are now the primary option for getting things done. It’s no surprise then, that since the outbreak of COVID, our customers have seen a 50% increase in Monthly Active Users.

Product management in an isolated environment

So what are the new considerations you have to make as a product manager?

Extreme Self Sufficiency: We need our products to enable people to do what they need with no help from their peers or internal champions. No “over-the-shoulder” guidance. No checking in with the local champion or administrator. Is your product easy enough to use upon first login?

Easy-to-use in an “at-home” context: People are at home right now with their kids, parents, and pets, managing multiple needs at every second. We don’t have time to call support and wait and our touchpoints with Customer Success need to be extremely efficient. This context raises the “self-sufficiency” bar higher. Does your product reduce the need for support and make customer success touchpoints more effective?

Making your product and users successful in the new normal

Test #1: How easy to use is your product without any guided help?

We’re all under a lot of pressure, especially our customer-facing teams. Whether they’re dealing with an onslaught of new customers or doing all they can to keep existing customers afloat, they’re incredibly busy.

Provide ample materials for users to access directly from your product. An in-app widget can be incredibly useful in this scenario. Gainsight PX provides a Knowledge Center Bot that we use in our own products. It gives users access to documentation and other helpful resources, as well as the opportunity to provide feedback, without them needing to leave the application.

Your product needs to be able to carry the weight of onboarding and support. It’s not just smart for your product, but it’s the right thing to do for your teammates. Here are some resources to help you make your product more self-sufficient without sacrificing the human touch they need to succeed:

• 3 Tips for Onboarding New Users Quickly in a Crisis
• 3 Best Practices for Combining Human and In-App Communications
• How to Provide a High-Touch Product Experience While Social Distancing

Test #2: How quickly are users adopting new features without any guided help?

Onboarding is a critical part of the customer journey and the more a user can do without outside help, the better.

In-app engagements, communications that occur inside your product, are incredibly helpful when guiding a user through the onboarding process. We utilize guides and hotspots to lead users through workflows.

It’s also important that you measure the success of these workflows. Use product analytics to keep an eye on the path your users are taking as they travel through your product. Where are they dropping off? How are they getting from Feature A to Feature B? Are they missing out on a valuable, helpful feature?

Investing time into a product-led adoption strategy will not just help you in the current situation, but promote long-term growth.

Test #3: How are you meeting the needs of users holistically?

At this point in time, communication is everything. You can only get part of the picture from usage analytics—you need to be asking your customers for feedback in a strategic way. This way you can take their answers and sentiment and use it to quickly pivot on your roadmap planning.

Give users the chance to fill out a survey at key moments in their user journey. This can include after onboarding, upon completion of a new feature, or after resolving a support issue. Use all the different survey types out there to get richer, contextual feedback.

Most importantly, you need to close the loop. Don’t let them think that their feedback is falling into a black hole. Champion your product team within your product with in-app dialogs saying “we’ve improved this feature based on your feedback.”

Conclusion

In this new world, it’s no longer enough to make the product “usable.” The bar has been raised. In a way, this is a noble calling for product managers, to deliver solutions to people when they are most at need. For me, it was accessing health insurance. For others, it’s collaborating with colleagues, sharing files, ordering food, supporting their customers, or remaining close to friends and family. We need our digital products to serve us more than ever before.

The post How to Prepare Your Product for Use in Isolation appeared first on Gainsight Software.

Over the past few weeks, you’ve probably been reminded of every email subscription list you’ve ever signed up for. Your inbox number ticking higher and higher as COVID-19 (a.k.a. coronavirus) became part of our everyday vocabulary and businesses rushed to send communications to address this “new normal.” If you needed to get important information to your users, it was likely buried under all of these communications.

As the situation surrounding COVID-19 continues to evolve, companies need to be prepared to keep users informed. In this guide for healthcare products, we’ll show you how to use in-app engagements to cut through the noise and effectively communicate information to your end users when time is of the essence.

What Is an In-App Engagement?

In-app engagements are outreaches from your company to your end users that happen within a product. In times like these, they can be used to:

• Provide critical updates
• Enable quick onboarding
• Drive ongoing product education that evolves with current events
• Capture user sentiment

Examples of in-app engagements include onboarding tours, new feature releases, content announcements, and surveys.

An in-app engagement strategy requires two things: structure and technology. Technology is necessary to deploy the in-app engagements and the processes below will help you map out when, where, and how often your engagements should occur.

Why Are In-App Engagements so Important Right Now?

We’re experiencing something we never have before—coronavirus, global quarantines, social distancing, and the economic impacts that come with them. This has affected everyone, especially healthcare workers and the technology they use every day.

Your product is the best way to share important information with your users. In-app engagements allow you to create hyper-targeted messages so you can inform your patients, providers, and non-clinical staff.

What Your End Users Expect: Patients and Community

You need to provide a smooth experience for these users and help them get the care that they need.

In industries like telehealth, you’re getting a lot of people signing up to use your services which results in longer wait times. Your messages to them will need to relay important updates surrounding COVID-19 and share what to expect for their experience. Set up expectations up front to make the experience more positive for everyone. Telehealth provider American Well created an excellent resource with COVID-related copy templates to communicate with your patients and community.

What Your End Users Expect: Healthcare Professionals

You need to create a quick, efficient experience that allows healthcare professionals to complete their workflows efficiently. It’s critical that the engagements going to them are concise and hyper-relevant.

They will be busier than ever, so providing in-app documentation and ways for them to find the information they need quickly is paramount. In-app onboarding guides are also important so new users can ramp up ASAP. If there are new protocols, this is also a time to provide in-app tours to keep healthcare workers up-to-date with the necessary workflow.

Creating a Compassionate In-App Engagement Strategy

Before you start sending out in-app engagements left and right, you need to be able to triage all the high-priority information and make sure the most important, relevant information reaches your end users.

The keyword here is “compassionate.” In reality, we’re not just reaching out to “users,” we’re reaching out to people. These people are busy or anxious or stressed or all of the above. Your actions and communications are a positive, proactive way for you to help users through it all.

The processes below are intended to put humans first—it’s about what the end user needs to see, not what will most benefit the company’s bottom line. However, doing one will impact the other. Use these best practices below to set up in-app engagement processes that will create long-term value for your users and your company.

Creating a Hierarchy of Importance

When you’re behind the product trying to help your users achieve success, it seems like every in-app message is necessary. But no matter how relevant and perfectly-timed they are, send too many in-app comms and your users are going to get fatigued. You can’t risk this when there are so many changes going on in the world that affect your product and, in turn, your users.

At Gainsight, we have a hierarchy for our in-app engagements. This helps avoid the “loudest voice wins” dilemma. Now if a department requests an in-app engagement (i.e. webinar promotion, event registration, feature announcement, etc.) we can definitively say which one takes priority. We’ve modified this to include situations that might occur in a time of crisis.

In-app engagements in order of priority (highest to lowest):

1. Critical Health/Wellbeing Announcements
2. Product Announcements: Specific to Current Events
3. Product Adoption: Specific to Current Events
4. Content Announcement: Specific to Current Events
5. Product Adoption: General Usage, Onboarding
6. Education
7. Product Feedback

The TRUSt Framework for In-App Engagements

Every in-app communication must have a purpose. When things are business-as-usual, each in-app engagement needs to inform the user of important product information and/or help them get more value out of their partnership with us. In times of crisis, you also need to make sure that you’re getting time-saving, and potentially life-saving, information to people that need it.

At Gainsight, we created “The TRUSt Framework” to ensure that all in-app engagements are done with intention. As you create and schedule each engagement, ask yourself:

Is It Timely?

Engagements are presented based on the user’s timing, not ours. This is especially critical in healthcare where you don’t want to disrupt providers during critical, patient-facing workflows.

Is It Relevant?

Engagements must be triggered based on clear use of our product (or lack of use within a reasonable amount of time) and related to a user’s role in our products. In small healthcare practices, a single user can play multiple roles within a practice. Consider segmenting by practice size to ensure these types of users don’t get inundated with engagements meant for the many roles they play.

Is It Useful?

Engagements must help users in some way, such as learn something new or complete a task faster.

Is It Straightforward?

Be clear and concise—“Verbosity is the enemy.”

Creating an In-App Engagement Approval Process

You need a tight approval process if you want in-app engagements to be published swiftly and accurately. The optimal in-app engagement approval workflow will include all of the following components. However, there are moments in time where immediate action is needed. We’ve included suggestions for ways you can expedite this process in times where messages are urgent and must be streamlined.

Step 1: Initial Review

To avoid a negative user experience, engagements at Gainsight follow a defined approval process. Only certain teams (i.e. Customer Success Operations, Marketing Operations, and Product Documentation) have access to the in-app engagement creator in Gainsight PX. All submissions require the following components for initial review:

• Content (message, text, and graphics)
• Target audience
• Type of in-app engagement (lightbox, survey, tooltip, etc.)
• Business use case
• Desired outcome
• Desired start date
• Duration of campaign
• Frequency of appearance

Having a dedicated group with members from different departments adds checks and balances.

Expediting the Review Process

Narrow down the amount of stakeholders involved in the process to the most relevant teams and make it clear to them that reviewing/approving in-app engagements are a high priority.

Step 2: Establishing an Approval Committee

At Gainsight, once a teammate submits a request for a new in-app engagement, it’s reviewed by our In-App Engagement Steering Committee. The departments represented in your committee should be the ones who have the most accountability for the success or failure of these engagements. Our internal steering committee is composed of a member from each of the following departments:

• Marketing: They are well aware of the demand generation content calendar and upcoming events, webinars, and blog posts, as well as brand voice and guidelines. They help align in-app engagements with campaigns they may be running during the same time period.
• CS Operations: They have deep customer insight and have access to immediate customer feedback. They’re responsible for an in-app engagement content calendar that tracks all approved engagements, the audience, and durations. This calendar helps avoid messaging conflicts and audience fatigue from too many engagements.
• Product Operations: This member can give insight on upcoming features, keep everyone aligned.
• Documentation: A key part of customer communications, they should have visibility on what sort of guides and walkthroughs are being shared with customers to ensure consistency.

Once an engagement is approved and added to the calendar, account managers should be informed of the campaign so they can follow up with their accounts. This helps ensure that your in-app engagement reaches maximum effectiveness.

Expediting the Committee Approval Process

If you’re optimizing your process for urgent communications, you’ll want to narrow this committee down to just a member of Marketing, a member of Product, and the operations team in charge of deploying the engagement. Depending on the size of your team, you could even put this in the hands of a marketing team member that has the ability to deploy the engagement.

How Are You Communicating With Your Users?

In-app engagements are incredibly powerful tools. They’re an important part of driving adoption and can have a serious impact on retention. The more people find value from your new and existing features, the more they’ll return. They also boost confidence and create healthy habits in your users. But unless you are able to properly prioritize engagements, they’ll hurt more than they help.

The frameworks and processes that you put in place now to address the sharing of critical information, will provide ongoing value. The best practices in this article will help you build a solid foundation for your in-app engagement strategy this year and beyond. Here are some more resources for you as you continue to create a compassionate product experience for your patients, providers, and non-clinical staff:

• The In-App Engagement Starter Kit
• Healthcare Edition: 3 Reasons Why Customer Success is Existential Right Now
• Healthcare Edition: Success Stories From the Field

If you would like to see how Gainsight PX can support your in-app engagements, we’d love to show you. Click the button below to connect with an expert today.

The post Healthcare Edition: How to Get Information to Your Users Quickly appeared first on Gainsight Software.