A consumption gap is a very serious issue for a company, and for its customers. Daniel Quick, Senior Director of Product Experience at Thought Industries explains:
“A SaaS company experiences a consumption gap when their customer, and their users, are not tapping into the full power of the solution they bought and are paying for, and thus not realizing their full return on investment. The persistence of these gaps, and there may be many, ultimately impacts the likelihood of contract renewal.”
The truth is that in most SaaS companies, customer education is a highly valuable but not always highly leveraged program. Customer training, which begins with onboarding, is all about increasing the value that users get from using your product in 3 ways:
In a recent webinar, Todd Boes, Chief Product Officer at Thought Industries, suggests the problem begins with the onboarding process:
“Onboarding touches administrators, contract signers and account owners – maybe 5% of an organization. We can’t leave these additional hundreds or thousands of users to figure it out by themselves. It serves no one’s purpose.”
Poor onboarding is the leading cause of consumption gaps. The problem escalates as new features are released, and many SaaS companies, Thought Industries included, are on a fast-track for releases. Last year alone, Thought Industries released 175 new features.
With so many new features, it’s understandable if customers aren’t aware of them. However, these consumption gaps are ubiquitous and pose a serious challenge to everyone’s goals.
Bridging the consumption gap requires an in-depth analysis to determine which product features lead to customer successes. This analysis is likely to take several forms:
These 3 sources of information will give you an excellent view of the existing consumption gaps. In fact, they might virtually “leap off the page.”
Lastly, you need to prioritize for two good reasons:
Here are the 4 tactics to deploy to minimize or eliminate consumption gaps:
Daniel provides some advice in closing:
“If you’re serious about identifying and minimizing these consumption gaps to increase engagement and reduce churn, you’ve got to be clear about how you’re measuring success. The ideal scenario is to create baselines around product engagement and course content consumption and use these as key indicators. Deploy your tactics and measure again. Did the in-app microlearning increase consumption? Did the certification deepen product usage? You’ll shrink these gaps through increasingly successful tactics."
Learn more about reducing consumption gaps and more customer education program advice from experts and peers at COGNITION.
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