Introduction

The previous sections of this wiki focused on establishing a robust and efficient process to meet your activation target and laying the foundation to adoption.

This wiki section is about building on this foundation to nurture, retain and potentially grow your customer.

🗺️ Engagement Process Overview

The purpose of an engagement strategy is to ensure client satisfaction, adoption, renewal, and potential expansion. We recommend having a clear process to engage with your customer at key milestones. You should have an engagement process for all types of customers.

📈 The Adoption Dashboard is a highly valuable tool to make this engagement process as effective as possible. In using the Adoption Dashboard, you can make sure your teams focus their time and knowledge on the customers who need it most in the most efficient manner.

Here is an example of basic engagement model with a "Share and Markup" adoption level type of customer:

• Kick-off meeting (within 1 week after order)
• Continuous usage data analytics to spot and act early on clients who suddenly drop. easier to fix an issue early before the client gets used to not using the platform at all
• Expansion engagement

🎬 Kick-off meeting

As we explained in the "Activation Best Practices" section, aiming for customers to activate early is the best strategy to meet your activation target.

Your Sales representative should schedule a "kick-off meeting" within a week of the order with the clear expectation for the customer to activate before.

Who should be present at this meeting

On the Partner's side: the Sales representative and the Customer Success Manager for your client.

On the Client's side: the Admin and eventually other users.

Meeting Preparation

At the time of the order:

The Sales representative should have asked the customer to activate before the kick-off meeting and provided them with documentation to go through activation on their own.

The Sales representative should do a "hand-off" meeting with the CSM to give them crucial information (more information in the "Pre-Sales" wiki section)

One day before the kick-off meeting

The Sales representative checks if the customer has activated, using the Adoption Dashboard.

• If the customer has activated, no action is needed.
• If the customer hasn't activated, the Sales representative should send a reminder to the customer to activate before the kick-off meeting so they can take full advantage of the kick-off call.
  They should retrieve the OTT link from the Adoption Dashboard and share it in this email for the Admin to take action straight away.
  
  
  
  

Meeting topics

1. Introduce the CSM to the customer and explain how to contact them.
2. If the customer hasn't activated yet, walk them through it so they can access the value of "Share and Markup" whenever they need it
3. Demo of "Share and Markup"
4. Your usual SOLIDWORKS Desktop installation/onboarding

It is important that your client has activated by the end of the meeting. It will be more efficient for you to develop strategies to convince these last few customers who haven't activated yet to activate during this call than to chase them up later. That's why you should make sure that you include Cloud Services in your training demo to get them started.

📞 Regular check-ups with your Customers

Your customers and you will highly benefit from regular check-up engagements. Not all customers will reach out to you when they have an issue, but these issues will most certainly cause damage to their adoption of the solution.

That's why you should always ask your customers if everything is working well for them and if they are achieving what they wanted to achieve.

We believe that the Adoption Dashboard will help you on two levels:

• Prepare for a planned check-up call with your customer
• Bring forward a check-up call if your customer data is showing some concerns

📈 Leveraging Data to Engage with Customers

Activation rate <100%

Looking at the User Activation Ratio, you will be able to identify if all purchased licenses have been assigned and activated.

Activation is a prerequisite to Adoption, so an activation rate lower than 100% is going to be an added challenge for you to get your customers to adopt the solution (and renew).

Usage ratio

You should make sure that a high percentage of the licenses bought are used regularly. Licenses that don't get used will lead to partial churn, or full churn if the usage ratio is low.

Monitoring the active weekly users' data will help you spot the customers who don't fully engage with the solution and are at risk of churn.

Here are 4 scenarios and recommended strategies to make the most of the data available to you and allocate your time and resources where most effective:

📉 Low Monthly Usage and 📉 Low Weekly Usage

It is a sign that the customer hasn't been using the solution for a long period of time. You should re-engage them as soon as possible, and involve your Application Engineer as it is likely that your customer will need some help to overcome the challenges that are preventing them from taking benefits of the platform.
The earlier you address their challenges, the better they will adopt the solution as they won't have had time to settle into new workflows avoiding the platform.

"High-touch" type of engagement work best in this situation.

📈 High Monthly Usage and 📉 Low Weekly Usage

It means that your customer might start moving away from the value of the platform. It may also be a sign that they are simply on vacation.

We recommend you monitor their situation and engage with them before they reach that point where their monthly usage dips.

You can re-engage them with marketing content (tailored to their needs) that will encourage them to use the solution again.

Your CSM should keep track of their trend in the following days/weeks and connect more personally with their customer if, despite the marketing emails, they don't increase their usage.

The danger for this type of customer is to not recognize their falling trend and act on it too late.

A mix of "low-touch" and "high-touch" engagement is appropriate for this situation.

📉 Low Monthly Usage and 📈 High Weekly Usage

This is a sign of a customer re-engaging (or starting to engage) with the platform after a long period of low activity.

It is a positive trend that you should monitor until in reaches their monthly usage reaches a high level.

📈 High Monthly Usage and 📈 High Weekly Usage

• It is still important you engage directly and ask these customers if they are achieving what they wanted to achieve.
  ⚠️ High and stable usage data doesn't necessarily mean that your customer has achieved all their goals and are on the safe path to renewal. The best way for you to make sure that they are is to ask them.

The Onboarding Crimes 3DEXPERIENCE World presentation explains in more detail why you should always engage with your customer, even if they don't contact you first.

• If your customer confirms that they are happy with the solution, you can initiate talks to deepen their engagement with the solution.

For example, a customer at a "Share and Markup" adoption level who keeps using the solution for weeks will be at some point hungry for more. It's a good opportunity for you to engage with them through either Marketing communication or personally (in involving Sales).

It's a Best Practice to "Expand" before "Renew": a customer who invests in the solution before the end of their subscription is more likely to renew.

More on the topic of "Expand before Renew" in this 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023 presentation.

Here are some potential "Expansion" leads:

• any "potential future outcomes/needs" identified by Pre-Sales (and passed on from Sales to CSM)
• training/certifications/services: your customer happily uses the solution, they will be eager to get better, more productive, and become "experts"
• gauge the customer's interest in "Store and Revise" and "Data Management" . This content will help you support your customer on this path.

Conclusion

The Adoption Dashboard is a highly valuable tool for CSMs to engage with their customers in an effective manner.

Looking at their usage trend, the CSM will be able to notice trends: customers moving away from the solution or customers engaging strongly with the solution. And the CSM will be able to define a process to re-engage with their customer with the support of the right person in their team.

The Adoption Dashboard makes high-quality engagement available to all customers and gives you the tool to successfully nurture efficiently all your customers to adopt the solution.

However, you won't be able to confirm that your customer has achieved all their outcomes and are effective adopters just by looking at the Adoption Dashboard. Only in directly engaging with the customers, the CSM - who has the skills and experience - will be able to make this diagnostic.