What does repeated product usage tell you about customer confidence?
The truth is, repeated product usage isn’t directly indicative of customer confidence. It may sometimes be, but not totally. If there’s no other player in your space, people may use your product despite many bugs because they have no other option. Or the alternative is too expensive.
So it’s not necessarily confidence in your product. It could simply be that you are what works. You can have daily active users who are not confident, and if an alternative that serves them better arrives, there could be an immediate switch.
Product usage is product usage. Product confidence is a different metric, measured in a different way.
Someone can have confidence in your product and not use it every day. In my opinion, you should separate these metrics.
How can onboarding and product education make adoption easier?
They are everything. The way you enter a building, the way you’re welcomed into a new church, that first experience can be very indicative of how long you’ll stay, whether it’s a product or an organisation.
People aren’t going to adopt something if you make them work too hard to find the value. People adopt what they understand. They adopt what feels easy. And when you welcome them, whether through incentives or simply an experience that feels intentional, they feel welcomed.
A product, just like a tech solution, is also a feeling. If you can product-engineer that feeling into onboarding, adoption becomes much smoother.
What makes a business trust a product enough to rely on it?
It starts with value. If I’m experimenting with a product and I see that it works, I’m more likely to stay. But another thing is time. The longer I spend with a product, the more it becomes my source of truth. After two or three years, all their business data is with you, and their customer lifecycle has grown with you.
Value: they test the product and see that it works.
Time and reliability: you show that value over and over, until the product becomes their source of truth.
Customer experience: when issues arise, how quickly do you solve them, and do you seem to care?
Over time, the business starts to see you as something they can depend on, not just something they’re testing.
Final notes for product teams
Because of my background working fully in tech, I’ve come to understand the impact of data and community building in how people adopt and perceive products. When you build a tech product, you’re solving personal and very context-specific problems. The logic of the code can run and your automated lifecycle campaigns can be flowing, but there still needs to be a bit of human touch. It could be in your tone, the way you look out for people, or the trust people have in your brand.
If I were advising someone in a similar role today, I’d say: look at the data. Don’t just rely on the generic “This is my target customer, women between this age and this age.” Look at the data you have internally. Is it accurate? Are your events running? What’s your ideal customer profile?
Get your data right. The data tells you the truth. You can figure every other thing out with your years of experience in the field.
However, beyond the data, you also have to humanise it. People can fill out a survey with their third brain, and not necessarily concentrate. Until you speak with someone over the phone or have them in front of you, you don’t understand the context of their problem.
Get your data right, whether through scalable surveys, past usage or whatever else it shows you. But also, get in touch with your customers.