PRODUCT UNDER-UTILIZATION IS AN EPIDEMIC. GET VACCINATED.
Under-utilization is a sneaky disease. One minute, your enterprise software business is doing well. You've sold a ton of product to many of the Fortune 100. Product sales are growing and your portfolio is more powerful than ever. A core group of your customers are singing your praises for the value they've gotten.
Then, slowly, you start to see the symptoms. Stories of customers who can't get the product "fully rolled out." Top accounts who "aren't getting the full value" from their purchase. Your sales team starts struggling with renewals and account expansion. Suddenly it hits you... this is a product adoption problem. Your business has been infected with under-utilization.
Here's the bad news: Product under-utilization has evolved into a new strain over the years. It used to be an installation disease. Customers struggled to get enterprise software installed properly, resulting in low quality implementations of the technology that were simply unusable. So, we figured out a way to attack that problem by SaaS-ifying and injecting armies of professional services folks into the post-sale mix.
It seemed to work for awhile. But, under-utilization was quickly evolving into a much more insidious strain that couldn't be attacked with technical prowess. This strain didn't root itself in the usability of the installation wizard or the simplicity of the APIs or the integration of critical data sources. On the contrary, this strain seemed to be more about a lack of customer knowledge about users, use cases and the full capability of your product. Not only were customers failing to understand their own users and harness the full power of your technology, but they didn't seem to know how to go about
lack of awareness of the full power of the technology,
fed on mysterious factors like human behavior, needs and emotions. Even pristine technical installations were not being utilized for their full value. And, in the worst cases, users hated it.
Here's the good news: A new, cutting edge vaccination is proving to be highly successful at fighting this new strain of under-utilization. It's called design thinking, and it is based on a human-centered approach to innovation first introduced by IDEO and Stanford University. Design thinking works by helping your customers to more deeply understand their users' needs and journeys. It inspires enterprises to uncover new, real use cases and business challenges across their organization and address them with your software.
Want to vaccinate your customers (and your products) against Shelfware? Speak with the experts who have been in your shoes. Justin Zacks and Saul Gurdus founded the customer experience company Method Garage after successful careers as Services and Design executives in large, technology companies.
Their rapid, customer facing 1-day utilization design sprints help customers uncover opportunities and deeply understand the full potential of your products in their environment. It's an experience your customers won't stop talking about.
