● Customer Success · Play 02 · v1.1.1
The Adoption Workshop
When a customer's use of the product weakens, find out why, train to one to three actions tied to a business result, and check that they're back within thirty days. The manual, and the planner that runs it.
Why it matters
No adoption means no value, and no value means churn: the kind we control. The Adoption Workshop is how you control it. When a customer’s use of the product weakens, Customer Success finds out why, runs one short workshop that trains the customer to do one to three specific things, each tied to a result their business cares about, and stays with them until their use is back to normal and holding. On the Operating Model’s grid it is strategic and reactive: a signal calls it, and what is at stake is the value of the whole investment. On the Customer Journey it is moment 21, touching milestone 07.
What’s inside
Defined. What an Adoption Workshop is and is not, where it sits on the grid and on the journey, and the one sentence it comes down to.
When to call one. Four triggers: use weakens, the people change, a restart, a campaign. When to run a different play instead.
Diagnose: evaluate, analyze, synthesize. The three causes of lost adoption (improper solution, incomplete value, inconsistent adoption), and why the first one is not this play.
Design: objectives tied to results. Digestible, relevant, actionable. “After this workshop, the customer will be able to…”, never followed by know, learn or understand. Each objective is linked to a usage signal and a business result.
Deliver: sixty minutes. The agenda segment by segment, with the customer driving the screen and homework set before anyone leaves.
The clock: 1-3-7, and the thirty-day exit. The same day, three days, seven days; then the signal back at its normal and holding within thirty days of the workshop.
Validate: the check-back. Seven days after the workshop, each piece of homework is validated three ways and a missed one is re-set once. How it ends: restored, escalated to a Success Initiative, or handed to a Business Review.
Who does what, at every tier, and is it working. Success responsible, with specialists assisting. The play at the dedicated, shared and digital tiers, and train-the-trainer. Four measures and the checklist.
How to use it
Read the manual once. When a trigger fires, acknowledge it the same day and open the planner. Fill the Diagnose tab: the signal, its normal and the cause. Write one to three objectives on the Objectives tab and send that tab to the customer. Run the hour from the Run Sheet. Record the homework and the check-back on the Homework tab, and read the exit there at thirty days. Log every workshop on the Book tab so the four measures add up across the year.
Provenance
Run as the Adoption Workshop in 2017 and 2018 as Senior Director of Customer Success at a hospitality-software company in the Vista Equity portfolio. It began as a proactive adoption checkpoint on the customer journey. Later it was assigned automatically when seven days passed with no daily digest opened and no login. It was carried to the customer journey of a managed file transfer and network management software company in 2018, and written into the partnership framework of a financial services software company in 2020. Rebuilt here as a Juan.co play. The triggers are generalized and the diagnosis is set on three causes. The agenda, the link from each objective to a result, the homework check-back and the thirty-day exit are written out.