Post by Allocadia’s Chief Product Officer Katherine Berry: No matter the size of your company, it’s important to have a pulse on user activity to be able to act quickly on opportunities and risks that you see. As CPO of Allocadia, user engagement is always top of mind for me and my team.
User stats provide visibility into critical usage metrics which can help you better understand your customers (allowing your customer team to pro-actively engage with customers), your product (helping product management prioritize product priorities), and your value (helping all teams to articulate and communicate the important message of ROI on your solution – to read more on this topic read my earlier blog post “The tool every marketer should create: the ROI calculator“). It can also help you understand your prospects if you have an infrastructure that allows prospects to try out your product (allowing sales to prioritize follow-up).
So how do you approach better managing your user stats? Here are some tips:
- Use the “Lean” approach: We approach everything we do here with the lean approach, whether it be the development of a feature, the release of a marketing campaign or any other project (such as a user stats tracking project). A core component of the lean approach is to get things out quickly, gather feedback early and adjust as need be. Ultimately, it allows you to work smarter, faster. Some examples of using the lean approach include:
- Share mockups: When Kristine and I first started Allocadia, we went to a tradeshow armed with only mockups to capture user feedback on our idea. We asked people, “Would you pay for this product, and if so, how much?” Having someone tell you they will buy your idea when it’s at this stage is often the best indicator of if you should move forward with this idea. (As a side note, we are proud to say we STILL have our very first customer from that tradeshow, Fallon Community Health Plan.)
- Build a prototype: Build a version that mimics the main workflows but does not have to be fully functional. Get users to test drive and watch their behaviour closely. Monitor which functionality they gravitate to and listen to what questions they ask. Alternatively, send the prototype to key power users and collect feedback from them with a survey and a conversation afterwards.
- Release a minimum viable product: Release a base version early. Ensure you have built in a foundation to be able to measure (namely, the ability to track usage metrics, see next bullet point) to learn quickly and fine tune as need be. Read “The Lean Startup” to learn more.
- Track usage stats early: Make sure to start tracking usage stats as early as possible. You may not know all the data points you will want to measure but start with the basics; for example, number of logins, first login, last login, number of users per customer, clicks to main tabs, etc. These basics can show you user activity percentages, such as users vs. active users in the last month, and show general usage splits by main product area.
- Take regular snapshots of your database: Once you are tracking these usage stats, try to do a regular snapshot extract of your database. This will allow you to do more historical analysis and reporting on data such as a customer’s natural account user growth over time. Trust me, you will be happy to have this historical data when you start to build out usage stats dashboards.
- Visualize and share your data. We use a BI cloud provider, and have a daily scheduled upload of our extracts to a global stats project. You will have to work with a team member that is familiar working with BI tools and data models as well as your specific data structure.
- Create meaningful dashboards: Identify what stakeholder groups would benefit from this data and create dashboards by audience. Think about what they need to see in order to help them do their job better. Ask yourself (and them) what information would allow them to take actionable steps in their daily tasks as well as weekly meetings. Remember, a stakeholder group could be your customers or one of your OEM partners after the same insights into their customer base. This stage will likely involve building on the base metrics in the project to get the answers you need. We created the following dashboards in our first release:
- Sales: Trial Usage metrics to help Sales prioritize follow-up. Specifically, most active trial organizations and users by number of logins and number of budgets.
- Customer Success: Engagement metrics for all customers. Particularly active user percentage in the last 30 days per customer (users that have logged in in the last month vs total users by customer). We identified particular percentages for “Sweet Spot”, “Optimize”, “At Risk” and “High Risk”.
- OEM Partners: Engagement metrics for all partner customers as per above.
- Company: Global usage metrics. Specifically — number of customers, number of users, percent of active users (within last 30 days), most active customers, high-risk customers, customers with the largest data volume, most active users all-time and more.
- Share! Invite stakeholders to your dashboard project for a real time view into user stats. If one of your stakeholder groups is the entire company, use your dashboard in your quarterly company update meetings. Additionally, look to auto-schedule your dashboards to your stakeholder groups as an alternative and easy way for them to access their data.
- Analyze trends with reports: As you collect more data over time, start adding some trending reports that show change over time.
- Continually Improve: You can build upon this foundation and start to track and integrate further elements such as logging login vs. log out time in order to track time spent in the application. Or, if your BI tool accepts external data sets, look to bring in data from your CRM (such as revenue or organization attributes) in order to track metrics such as Churn by Revenue (a key SaaS company metric that investors will ask you about). Additionally, look to potentially aggregate this data anonymously and present it back to users as benchmarks. You will likely see a future post on this latter item from me.
Allocadia Co-founder and Chief Product Officer shares her insights about designing software for marketers. Katherine shares the product vision and progress about the Allocadia product and how her team is working to provide customers with the best user experience an enterprise marketing solution can offer.
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