Effortless Enterprise Software
I've been thinking about my favorite Enterprise Software tools over the past five years and what I like about them the most. After much thought, I concluded that it is all about ease of use and low barriers to adoption. In other words, is it effortless?
Successful Enterprise Software
In many cases, Enterprise tools for work are not a personal choice for the end-users but rather a tool picked by a department head or adopted widely by the whole company as the standard. Some examples include:
- GSuite (Gmail, Calendar, Docs) for productivity
- Slack for instant messaging and collaboration
- Salesforce for sales management
- Figma for design creativity and deliverables
For company-wide tools, there is not much choice if the tool sucks. Sure, after enough pushback and consensus, the team in charge of the software procurement and maintenance team's team might consider a replacement, but for the most part, users have to adapt to it, learn how to use it with their caveats, and keep on rolling.
But what about those that don't suck? What makes these stick around and have a high amount of daily usage and value realization?
From 0 to 100 in under 10 minutes
As an IT Services frontend contractor, I worked on many UI features for companies like Wells Fargo, Google, LendingClub, and Pluto TV. Throughout those engagements, I never considered the barrier to adoption for first-time users of the products we were building until we were tasked with creating an onboarding wizard for Goggle's Shopping List.
Our mobile web app was a shopping list for Google Shopping, where users could create a list of items they wanted to shop for later. It had features to check off purchased items, delete them, and add more items. Because it was a mobile web app, we used swipe gestures to make it easy for users to perform these actions. However, after a few months of user testing, our usage analytics showed few users were using swipe gestures.
The in-product onboarding wizard aimed to show the user how to interact with some UI components that had power-user gestures. We were thoughtful about providing this onboarding experience in a way that wasn't intrusive by only showing it to users signing into the web app for the first time and respecting their choice to dismiss it to not annoy them by presenting the flow a second time on subsequent logins. We launched this experience in an A/B experiment and measured the use of the touch gestures. In just 2 months, it showed a 60% usage increase. We graduated the experience to the full cohort of customers and observed how our users completed and deleted more tasks than before, especially during the first 10 minutes of using the product.
This is why your onboarding and adoption metrics are so important. It's key to define a target time frame for how long you want your users to find value in the platform when they sign up for the service. Any strategies and experiments you put out there should always measure how they are shortening the time it takes for your users to get productive and get value out of their time investment with the tool.
In-product or live enablement? Or both?
Some companies that build Enterprise Software prefer a team of post-sales reps (CSMs, Technical Account Managers, Field Enablement Specialists, etc.) that work closely with customers to provide live enablement sessions. There is a heavier lift in this approach as there are teams that need to be staffed, managed, trained and coached to nurture relationships with the customer's program managers or system owners who are in charge of the Enterprise Software tools to coordinate live enablement sessions, either on-site or through conference calls or webinars. Ultimately, most successful live enablement sessions are as frictionless and effortless as possible for the end users while providing the value they expect.
Lately, I've observed more customers opting for async enablement activities such as short enablement videos, drip marketing campaigns, in-product enablement, knowledge bases and chat forums like Discord because these don't require teams to agree to join set live enablement sessions; this especially more prevalent with highly distributed teams across multiple time-zones.
There is no single answer regarding what will work best for Enterprise Software customers. Whether it is live or in-product enablement, it'll likely be tailored to what will require the least effort from the end users.
Anticipate customer feedback
As you build more product analytics that let you measure time-to-adoption and value realization, you'll likely be able to start watching friction point trends that can help you anticipate customer frustration. Doing this will solve problems proactively and make progress toward offering an effortless experience for your end users. That is how you can tear down the barriers to adoption that prevent your users from going from 0 to 100 as quickly as possible.
