Why don’t users adopt the features you have so painstakingly built for them?
One of the most frustrating things about building products is to learn that usage and adoption is low or non existent. There are multiple reasons for that and understanding the root causes is critical before you create a plan of action.
A knee jerk reaction is to find some tactics like customer marketing or in app hacks to promote the usage of features by your users.
But let’s take a more thoughtful approach.
I am going to assume that you have a robust usage measurement system and instrumentation in place and that you are able to measure usage across customer types, personas, segments. In addition to application behavior (logins, features used, clicks), you should also have volumetric analytics (number of records created across your various modules). Most B2C companies live and die by metrics but sadly many B2B companies are not well instrumented.
I will also talk about adoption from a customers perspective and not individual users. When I say low adoption for the purposes of this article, I mean the customer is not using and not specific users. If some users are using but not others, thats a different problem and not in scope of this article.
Given that assumption, you may have done some analysis that some features have low usage.
Before you start any tactics to improve usage, you should first understand the root cause.
In general, there are three levels to why user adoption is low.
Level 1 – Lack of need
As product managers, our customer discovery and validation should uncover the most pressing needs of customers and biggest value they can derive. Unfortunately, many teams skip or skimp on this step and end up building “something”.
You may have decided to build a feature based on a stakeholder input or perhaps it was this one customer who demanded it. Maybe you are reacting to competition. But what if this is not a customer need at all. Or maybe it’s not a core use case for them. Or perhaps the pain point is really not a priority.
Now you have built something that no one or at least a majority of customers don’t care about.
The solution to avoid this situation is to be more thoughtful and diligent in your customer discovery and validation. Find out if this is something worth solving for the customer. Are they even motivated to solve this problem.
In B2B, customers have many pain points. But at a given time they are only focused on a few. The pain point your product is solving should be a priority for the customers. Otherwise they will invest any time on your product or the feature.
Another reason could be that the customers are already solving this problem in another tool. Maybe the curent solution is not the best but if it does the job, then your product is just a burden unless you have significantly 10x value proposition.
One of the modules in my previous CRM company was a marketing campaign management tool. It was the least used feature. The feature was created years ago to manage campaigns. Overtime more features were added on the sales side of the CRM and marketing was neglected. Turns out it was not enough. They still wanted to solve campaigns but they would do it other tools like Marketo.
Bottom line – solve this level by improving your customer discovery and validation. Find out what is a priority for customers and then help them obtain value.
Level 2 – Lack of awareness or not top of mind
The next level of reason why customers don’t adopt is they are simply not aware or this is not top of the mind.
There could be multiple reasons for this.
You have not clearly articulated this new value. When you release new versions, it takes effort to get the word out to customers. Remember, your product is not the only product your customers are using. On average a B2B customer has 10-15 product running to manage their day to day operations. So a simple email announcement could easily have been overlooked.
You will need to have multiple avenues and channels including social, in app announcements. Your customer success and sales teams can also promote your product features using an awareness campaign.
Even if the customers are aware, they may have not gotten around to using. They are likely still busy with other priorities. They may still be struggling to get the implementation up and running and are not yet ready to get start on any new features, and hence they ignore any such announcement. They may want to use your product or features but maybe they need it later.
When B2B customers implement your product, they also have to think about training, change management, learning curve, internal support readiness. And these take time.
One solution to this problem, is to focus on customers who are ready to adopt the new features. Find out a typical characteristics on when customer start using the new features. e.g. lets say in CRM, customers may start creating forecasts after they have implemented workflows. Now you can focus on customers who have created workflows and announce them the new capabilities.
How do you know if the low usage is due to lack of awareness? You can talk to a sample of customers and ask them. I once asked a few customers but a feature we had released 6 months ago and none of them were aware of it. Or at least it was not top of mind. But when informed, they were excited and jumped on using them.
You can check usage data to see which customers have not even started using the feature and how many tried it. If no one has even tried, then you know it could be an awareness issue.
But some tried but never continued, that might point to something else. That would be the next level.
Level 3 – Solution does not work
Even if customers have a high priority pain point and they are fully aware of your product, they may be finding it hard to use it. There is friction in using your product or perhaps there is a learning curve. Or too much hassle.
Using your product is likely causing more downstream problems. Thay may be used to using their status quo process and habits are hard to beat.
In B2B, many solutions require integration with other apps such as ERP or CRM. If the integration is not working, then they may not use the features of your product at all. Even if your product as a standalone works for them, they will not adopt if it is not integrated.
As a PM, take a look at the before and after process and remove any sort of friction. Make it super easy to use your features including any integrations.
It’s also possible that your solution is not relevant anymore given technological changes. In one company where I worked, we had a feature for managing social media pages of company. Turns out when the feature was built social media was all the rage but not anymore. Hence customers decided not to use this feature as it was not relevant.
Beware
Not everything is used frequently
In B2B, not all features are to be used frequently. At an extreme, features like restoring from backup, forgot password are rarely used. Similarly, other functionalities are also not used commonly. For example, in a financial app, setting forecasts is done maybe once a year.
You need to know the natural cadence of usage of your features and benchmark against that. Don’t take absolute numbers.
For each of your features, you should have an expected usage pattern. e.g. create at least 1 record per day, or be a active user 3 days per week.
Only some customers need it
At my previous company I implemented GDPR controls for our EU customers. So obviously it was meant for them. Other regions would not care about it. So I should measure usage just for EU customers, not all.
In B2B, all customers are different. Some will use Feature A,B,C and some will use Feature A,B,D and so on.
So make sure the denominator on calculating adoption % is appropriate.
Conclusion
Understand the root causes of lower adoption before you take any action. Otherwise your attempts to solve the problem will create even more problems. And you will never be able to get to the root causes and fix those.
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