What do you think you’d do when you first use any product? Everything but read the instructions. Right? And how do you react to products that are complicated to use? Probably just move on to a better option. That is what happens to any digital product upon its launch. This is what makes smooth product adoption a challenge for businesses and marketers.
Interestingly, Customer experience is the greatest force that lies behind the smooth adoption of any new products no matter whether it is digital or not. Customer delight, to be precise, has a very important place in the entire customer experience journey.
However, delight isn’t limited to a polite customer care or a great promotional offer. It expands to exceeding the expectations of customers. If a business needs to find out the mantra to making new product adoption a delight for customers, it needs to understand the importance of CX (customer experience). The entire concept of brand adoption, in fact, depends so much on the CX that businesses can never afford to ignore it.
And behind this CX lie some well-timed, sound UX (user experience) decisions that anticipate and predict what a customer wants. Yes, the secret of friction-less adoption doesn’t lie in getting the customer to like your product. Instead, it lies in building a product that the customer likes and then, with aids, making it even easier for them to use it.
Behind Great CX is Focused UX
Fortifying your UX efforts can lead to a desirable level of customer experience, and ultimately customer delight. And for that, companies must focus on internal and external factors affecting new product adoption. If you succeed in creating a wonderful UX, you are likely to achieve the necessary differentiation that defines the success of your product in the market.
Your UX efforts must focus on creating a product that is based on your business idea and your customers’ journeys. The product must fulfil their expectations in all aspects, including usage, their cultural values, their environments, etc.
To make is easier for you, here are 4 few steps you must take to ensure new product adoption. Evidently, they are a mix of user experience and customer experience.
Build Products based on Customer Journeys
Consumer delight is possible when the product not only caters to their needs, but also far exceeds their expectations. For this, you must study the right market, see who your target audiences are, what locations they are based in, what your customer personas’ pain points are, what values do they want, what devices they use, what features and functionalities they find useful, what digital interfaces they prefer, what sort of purchase and usage behaviors such personas exhibit, besides many more UX metrics.
Tracking the customer journeys of your target audience is a step of great importance in creating a product that offers customer satisfaction and delight.
Create In-Product Walkthroughs
Your product’s interfaces needs to be intuitive and not static. UI design as well as UX design, here, will matter immensely. Since there is no perfect user, given the heterogeneity of human intelligence, you will find it very useful to provide prompts for new users who may not have used any software of this kind before.
I still remember using Headspace app for the first time, 3 years ago, and loved how it led me by the hand to understand each consequent step with the help of simple but beautifully instructive animation. No wonder why the app boasts of more than 31 million users and more than a million premium members today.
Watch the amazing Headspace tutorial here:
In-product walkthroughs help new users accomplish a specific goal, even if it is that of creating a profile. Visual walkthroughs, especially aid users in getting a practical understanding of your product and helps them adopt it and adapt to it with least effort.
Publish Videos and Tutorials
Akin to visual walkthroughs, it is never a bad idea to embed videos and tutorials on how to use your product. The beauty of the videos is that in a short span of time, you can demonstrate even the most complicated (though I urge you to follow the KISS rule) feature and functionality most lucidly.
Here’s a promotional video from Nintendo for Pokemon Go
Free distribution of this content, whether within the product or a part of email marketing campaigns can simplify things for your users. YouTube is full of such videos and they happen to be one of the most used sources of information for users.
It is highly unlikely for an average user to keep trying after they have struggled with a product for more than 1-3 minutes to find out how it works. And calling the customer support is not something that occurs on top of the probable solutions list, at least for the millennial who make up such a large client base for most B2B and B2C products. So, give them the support they want.
Informative Content Pushes Product Adoption
The power of content marketing can never be undermined. Distributing content about your products by way of blogs, articles, even social media posts, is a very subtle yet effective way to train your new users to adopt your product in the easiest possible manner.
A great example here is that of Hubspot. While I learned to manage my content with Hubspot, it was none but Hubspot that taught me how to do it: host my website as well as the blog, track my content metrics, social media accounts, leads, email interactions, and just about anything I wanted to know I could do with Hubspot.
Here’s an example of how well Hubspot leads its users to adoption
Moz follows just about the same strategy when it comes to easing the burden off the user’s shoulders.
The Takeaway
The onus of the adoption of a new product must never be put on the customer. Placing the burden on the customer’s shoulders not only makes it difficult for them, but suicidal for your product.
Vouching for customer delight can lead you to make the adoption absolutely friction-less for the user. This is why before you head for it, it needs you to take some sound lessons in CX and use them in your strategy for building a product that will be accepted by the customers, and not building a product and then get the customers to accept it.
