For technology companies that employ a subscription-based business model, sustained product adoption by customers is vital to long-term success. While many new operational capabilities have been developed to drive consumption, including the rapidly growing Customer Success discipline, many firms struggle to achieve desired adoption and retention levels in a sustained, profitable way. As companies look for methods and strategies to address this challenge, there are four practices from the healthcare industry’s approach to treating chronic illness that have applicability to tech adoption:

1.      Simplification of the Regime

In healthcare, making it easy to adhere to a prescribed therapy can have a profound impact on the resulting patient adoption. Adoption programs must strive to be elegant and intuitive, with simplicity built in across the entire journey, from awareness and onboarding through initial adoption and usage maturity.

2.      Multifaceted Behavioral Interventions

Multifaceted behavioral interventions employ a systematic pattern of reminders interwoven with messages of reinforcement to drive adoption. Adoption programs that employ regular customer reminders highlighting various moments to engage with the product will result in increased understanding, adoption, and usage.

 3.      Tailoring the Adoption Path

Tailoring the adoption path based on practices that are proven to have a positive behavioral impact can have a long-term positive effect on adoption. Providing users with recommendations for best practices (ways to use a feature or an informative instructional video) along with peer-group data can have profound impact on adoption.

 4.      Social Support

Support from peers, coaches, and other social relationships is essential to achieving long-term adoption, and is ranked as a key component of a successful adoption-path program. Here, a mix of larger community interactions as well as smaller, more intimate and personalized connections should be fostered.

Tech companies that embrace these four practices will be well on their way to achieving effective customer-centric adoption programs. To learn more,  please read our whitepaper Driving Subscription Adoption: A Prescription for Success.

Today’s guest post was contributed by John Zuk, Partner at Waterstone Management Group, a boutique management consulting firm that helps technology companies and investors create measurable value by identifying and capitalizing on disruptive growth opportunities and by driving excellence in Services, Cloud and Customer Success. Follow Waterstone on twitter @WaterstoneMG, or sign-up for their quarterly newsletter to receive visionary insight.

Jennifer Carl is the Director of Software & Services Division Programs. Follow the Software team on Twitter at @SIIASoftware @SIIAJennifer