🚀Building Your Adoption Process
Operationalize your approach to adoption, rollout & change management
About
This use case walks through how to build out your adoption process in Vitally. There will be nuances specific to you, but there are foundational approaches and best practices you will want to apply. If you have built out your adoption process before, you will notice the steps are very similar, but there are some subtle nuances.
Use Case Overview
At a high level, any adoption process should look to accomplish the following:
Get the entire intended audience into the tool
Focus on change management
Increase usage breadth (number of users) and depth (number of features)
Watch the video below to see the entire build-out:
How to Build It
Step 1: Define your Audience
The first step is to identify who needs to be involved internally (who will own adoption) and externally (which accounts are in adoption). To make this simple, we will create an adoption segment to track accounts going through adoption and set up a key role to identify who on the team owns adoption.
Segmentation
Create an account-level segment called "Adoption" (or something similar) to group customers in this stage together. If you haven't already, you can also add additional segments for your other stage in the customer journey or to signify the plan or tier of a customer.
You can also create user segments - a common use case is to group users by persona or permission level
Key Roles
If the individuals on your team who manage adoption are not called CSMs (i.e., Implementation Specialists, Onboarding Managers, etc.), we recommend creating a custom key role. This allows you to set up a more seamless assignment strategy.
There are multiple ways to assign key roles, but there are two primary strategies:
Assign via Trait Mapping - use this when you have already assigned the key role in another system like your CRM
Assign via Playbook automation- use this when you want Vitally to assign
Step 2: Collect the Datapoints
You will need several data points to apply the adoption process to accounts. Most of them should already be in the system, as they likely come from your connected integrations. However, some may not be, so you'll want to create a custom trait for those.
The following are examples of what you will need to access that is likely already integrated:
CRM Data: Anything that indicates who to bring into adoption & when to bring them in (Ex. Closed Won Date, Plan Type, Service Model)
Revenue Data: Anything to indicate what path to send them down based on value (Ex. ARR, Total Spend)
Product Data: Anything that tracks the key milestones and product events that need to be activated during adoption
The following are traits you will likely need to create in Vitally if you have not already:
| Datapoints | Use |
|---|---|
Adoption Completion Date | Updated with the day adoption is completed |
Customer Journey Stage | String trait with "Adoption" as option for reporting |
Lastly, it is important to consider the impact that these data points should have on the customer's Health Score during the adoption stage. It is common to index on usage metrics like Monthly Active Users or tracking the overall increase in usage of core feature sets, and the best way to track this is with success metrics.
Here is an example of how you might layer in those success metrics into your health score:
Watch these use case videos on building success metrics and health scores
Step 3: Templating your Activities
Any adoption process requires some type of cyclical engagement, whether that is in a scaled motion that relies on asynchronous & automated messaging or in a high-touch motion that requires many 1:1 interactions. In either case, it is important to define and templatize those touch-points. Below are the typical activity templates we recommend creating:
Projects - what work needs to be executed
Create an adoption project template to make the repeatable and prescriptive tasks that are required more accessible. This should include the activities the team is driving, but you may also create a milestone and tasks related to the product achievements the customer needs to experience throughout adoption for your team to easily identify where a customer is. You can also create playbook automation to auto-complete those tasks once the required criteria has been met.
We recommend creating an "Adoption" project category to house all of your project templates related to adoption.
Conversations - what needs to be communicated
Create conversation templates for messaging that you need throughout the adoption process. Typically, we see three types of conversation templates use in the adoption process:
Kickoff / Call Followup messaging
Un-engagement & unresponsive follow-up messaging
Product education messaging
Docs - what needs to be shared
If you need to share any info with the customer throughout the adoption process, you will want to create an "Adoption" doc template. You can even embed your adoption project template to the doc if you wish to give customers visibility into their progress.
Consider creating a "Team Training" doc that links out to relevant resources like:
Thought leadership content
"Quality of Life" product education articles
Relevant Use-case content
Notes - what engagements need to take place
For any calls you conduct throughout the adoption process, you will want to create note templates to capture that those calls took place and provide a summary of what occurred.
Step 4: Automating your Process with Playbooks
The process can now be automated with playbook automation since templates have been created and data has been identified. Below are the steps to build the playbook automation and additional complexities you can add to your process.
Triggers
First, choose if the playbook automation trigger should be at the Account or Organization level. Next, build your trigger criteria to enroll accounts into the playbook automation.
The trigger logic may be unique to you, but we recommend using the "Adoption Completed Date" trait you created earlier. You can retroactively set a date for all customers that have already completed adoption and leave it blank for anyone who still needs to. This way, your playbook automation trigger logic can be: "Adoption Completed Date" = is not set.
Critical Actions to Add
Below are key action items you will likely want to add (in order) to your playbook automation:
Optional Complexities to Add
Split - create separate adoption paths by tier or plan
Wait - until product events have taken place or based on conversation engagements
Auto-Complete Tasks via Playbook automation
If you are tracking product events as milestones within a project, you can create playbook automation to auto-complete those tasks once the required criteria have been met.
Step 5: Report & Visualize
The last step is to provide visibility into progress and performance throughout the adoption process. The goals & KPIs during the adoption stage will differ from what was being tracked during onboarding (overall monthly usage vs. initial activation, for example), which impacts how you might choose to visualize this. Here are several things to consider:
Hubs
While many customers choose to create an "Onboarding" specific Hub, we usually do not see the same for Adoption. This usually is because the individual owning adoption is also on the account in perpetuity, and it is more straightforward to lump in adoption tasks alongside the rest of the work.
Dashboards
Regardless of how you track adoption progress, you will want to report on performance and Time To Value with Dashboards. If you are tracking adoption via projects, we recommend building widgets using projects as the data object.
Cards & Decks
Like Hubs, we usually don't see dedicated cards and decks for the adoption stage. However, consider adding key Success Metrics like Monthly Active Users to a general deck to ensure easy access to those numbers.
Last updated
