You must have heard that the total number of active users is the truest measure of your product’s impact. But I think that the percentage of features used by a customer should be the key to measuring the product. Now before we talk about how do we measure it, let’s try to understand- what is product stickiness, why does it matter, and how to measure stickiness?
Measuring Transaction Usage Vs Measuring Number of features used by customers
Let’s take an example, where you are a CRM company and assuming that you’ve got two customers -Customer A and B. Customer A is using a high volume of transactions and is producing lots of leads. Say 100 leads coming in every week. A is essentially converting them into opportunities and closing them and that’s the primary use case. Now that’s a large volume of leads.
Now to take a contrasting scenario of Customer B, which is a smaller customer, it gets about 20 leads a week. But in the case of Customer B, they are not just using leads and opportunities but they’re also using forms. They’re also using:
- inbuilt chat,
- reporting,
- dashboard,
- also automating using campaign features and
- a few more other features as well to make it a long list.
Now, Who do you think is a more sticky customer – Customer A or Customer B?
Obviously, Customer B, because although the number of transactions is less compared to customer A, the depth in which they’re using their product, which I call product stickiness is comparatively higher. Many times higher.
Actually, why do I call this product stickiness versus transaction? The reason is, what is that one thing that’s going to keep them sticking to your product. What will hold them back from churning away from your product and that fundamentally is going to be the reason that if they’re ever going to move away, either back to their Excel sheets or to a competitive product.
Suggested Read: 7 Data Points That Drive Customer Retention For SaaS Business
So you have to make sure that they don’t miss out on maximum features, and the only way you can do that is by increasing their product adoption by making sure that they’re using maximum features of your product, in turn, solving multiple use cases, using your product for themselves and hence, getting an enhanced value which in turns, translate into them being a lot more sticky.
Check out the – Best practices for configuring a customer health score (and why a single health score fails)
Final Thoughts
The traditional method of measuring product stickiness by ( DAU) Daily active users & MAU (monthly active users) method doesn’t make much sense to me. But the way I would like to measure product stickiness is- by measuring the percentage of features used by a customer, and that according to me, is the key product stickiness, and that’s how product stickiness should be measured.
To drive product adoption Aka stickiness, use an actionable customer success software with features like Account 360, playbooks, milestones, and alerts to help your customers fall in love with your product.
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