Able to Do This Themselves

Every Customer Success team eventually writes the same line in an account's notes: they all need to be retrained. A champion leaves, a team of new managers arrives, the logins thin out, and the product the customer paid for sits unused. In 2018 my team wrote a better line under it, and it is the one that matters: the customer should be able to do this themselves. That line is the heart of the play now on the shelf as The Adoption Workshop: a manual, and a planner that runs it.

The play starts with why, not with training. Lost adoption comes from one of three causes. The customer bought the wrong thing, they use it but don't see the value, or they simply stopped using it. Only the last two are a workshop's to fix. Then come one to three objectives, each one something the customer will be able to do. "Know," "learn" and "understand" are never allowed; it has to be something you could watch them do. Each objective is tied to a usage signal and a result their business cares about. The workshop is sixty minutes with the customer driving the screen, and homework is set before anyone leaves. Seven days later there is a check-back, validated three ways. The play ends when their use is back to normal and holding, within thirty days, or the account escalates. Like every play where a customer is waiting on us, it runs on One, Three, Seven.

I used to put the stakes to my team as an equation: no adoption means no value, and no value means churn, the kind we control. Twelve pages, free to use with attribution, with the planner beside it.