A customer freshly approaching their first day on your product and a long-time user are going to use your product differently. And as a result, the support that they need will also vary.
This is where the concept of customer maturity comes into the picture.
Customer maturity refers to the level of expertise and familiarity that a customer has with your product. Recognizing these varying levels helps you customize your level of assistance to each customer to ensure that you’re providing them with not too little but not too much information.
Understanding customer maturity
Customer maturity is all about a customer’s journey from being a novice to becoming an advanced user.
Typically, you can break it down into three key stages, but depending on the complexity of your product, there could potentially be more stages under these broader umbrellas:
- Novice: New users with little to no experience.
- Intermediate: Users with moderate experience and understanding.
- Advanced: Highly experienced users who fully understand and utilize the product’s capabilities.
Understanding where your customers fall within these stages is essential for several teams across your organization to understand, affecting anyone from the product team to the support team to sales.
Aligning support and messaging with the current level of maturity in your product can:
- Increase customer retention by boosting satisfaction and loyalty.
- Enhance customer experience by helping you provide personalized assistance.
- Improve product usage and adoption since customers are more likely to use and adopt advanced features when they receive relevant support.
Identifying customer maturity metrics
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to “how mature your customer is in their product journey.” But there are several key metrics that you can use to determine their level of savviness and investment.
Usage frequency and patterns
Regular and varied usage typically indicates higher maturity since it shows that users are attempting to explore the full potential of the platform and have likely adopted it as a part of their regular routine. Some specific metrics that you can track for this are log-in frequency or feature usage patterns.
Feature adoption rate
High adoption rates of advanced or new features points to a higher level of customer maturity. You can get more granular with this by identifying certain features that are more valuable or involve more complex interactions to give you a better proxy for maturity.
Support ticket volume and type
Mature customers likely have fewer but more complex support requests. They should have a solid grasp of most of the key functionalities of the product, so they’re more likely to submit support tickets on advanced features. You can analyze the frequency and types of tickets to identify patterns that align to maturity.
Customer feedback and satisfaction scores
Customer maturity also typically correlates with high satisfaction scores and more positive feedback, because of the simple fact that there has to be something that keeps them coming back. Things like Customer Satisfaction score and Net Promoter Score are key metrics to track for customer maturity.
Training and certification completion
More mature customers are also likely to complete more advanced training modules and certifications to help them continue to hone their skills in your product.
Collecting and analyzing these metrics is easier with the right tools. Analytics tools, like Google Analytics or Command AI, can gather the most relevant data on usage patterns and feature adoption.
Supporting novice customers
Novice customers are at the very beginning of their journey with your product, so they require a little more handholding to get up and running in your product.
There are a few key considerations that you should keep in mind when supporting these fresh users:
- Give clear, concise instructions. They’re already brand new to the platform, so you don’t want to cause any overwhelm that gets in the way of their adoption. Providing easy-to-follow tutorials, walkthroughs, and user guides can help them get started. Video tutorials and interactive demos can be particularly effective in demonstrating how to use key features.
- Optimize the onboarding experience. A structured onboarding program can ensure that new users are introduced to your product in a systematic way. This might include a series of emails, guided tours within the product, or scheduled onboarding sessions. The goal is to help them understand the value of your product quickly and efficiently.
- Create accessible support resources. You want to create a comprehensive library filled with a variety of support materials to give new users the power to find answers to any FAQs. Interactive features, like chatbots, are really helpful as a navigation aid here to give users access to this data automatically, without them having to dig through pages of your knowledge base.
Customizing assistance for mature customers
The needs of mature customers often look very different from those of newer customers. While they may need less day-to-day support, their needs are likely more complex.
Let’s take a look at some of the unique needs that mature customers have:
- They need more assistance in maximizing advanced features, including deep-dive tutorials and best practice guides.
- They may also want broader strategic guidance on how your product fits into the rest of the space, which they can get through content like expert webinars or detailed whitepapers.
- Mature customers may also be interested in the opportunity to get involved in beta testing to help shape ongoing product developments.
And of course, because of the investment (both financially and mentally) that mature customers have made in your product, perhaps the key need that they have is continuous engagement. The importance of regular check-ins can’t be overstated. These proactive reach-outs for feedback and support are critical to keeping these valuable customers engaged on all fronts. Some teams have dedicated account managers on these accounts to conduct quarterly or monthly reviews.
Another component of this ongoing engagement is offering opportunities for continuous learning. You could even make some content exclusive, enticing people to reach a certain level of engagement to “unlock.” These could be exclusive webinars or advanced training sessions for your group of experienced customers.
Engaging mature customers with new use cases
One of the main goals of continuously engaging with mature customers is to keep expanding their usage of the platform. The way you do this is to present them with new use cases. This keeps their interests piqued, which prevents stagnation, and gives them more opportunities to integrate your product into their everyday workflows.
Some great ways to present these new use cases include:
- Case studies that share success stories from other customers with a similar or slightly elevated maturity level. For example, you can highlight how advanced users solve specific problems that this user may also have by using the product.
- Webinars and workshops that act as interactive learning sessions to introduce and explain advanced use cases to mature users.
- Personalized recommendations that suggest new use cases based on customer data. This could be presented to users through a variety of means, like email, in-app announcements, or a chatbot message. These suggestions help users double down on the actions that are most valuable to them by showing them how to use advanced features or integrations to boost their productivity even more.
Soliciting feedback from customers
Gathering feedback is critical from users of all maturity levels, whether they’re first-time or long-time users. But the strategy surrounding that feedback changes slightly depending on their maturity.
With new users, feedback is valuable to identify any sticking points that could be sabotaging your early-days retention. You can use feedback channels, like surveys, interviews, or an analysis of support tickets, to find the biggest opportunities for improvement in getting users acclimated with the platform.
Mature customers, on the other hand, provide more in-depth feedback that your product team can use to continuously refine the more specific or advanced layers of your product. Because of the demonstrated investment by these users, they’re likely to provide extremely valuable and thoughtful feedback about feature usability and enhancements they’d love to see in the future. This gives you a treasure trove of information for short- and long-term improvements.
Scaling personalization to adapt to individual users, regardless of the “group” they belong to
As important as it is to identify maturity metrics so that you can be strategic about how you approach these groups of users, not every mature customer is going to look like other mature customers. And same with novice or intermediate users. That’s why you need to implement personalization whenever possible.
If you bake real-time personalization methods into your product, you’re ensuring that every single user, regardless of a predefined maturity level, is always receiving the most relevant, timely support or engagement that seems to anticipate their needs as soon as they arrive.
