 And thank you so much for joining in today's webinar. My name is Tori Jeffcoat. I'm a product marketing leader here at Gainsight. And I've had the honor of working with Product School for a few webinars in the past, as well as helping to author the Product School and Gainsight PLG or Product Like Growth Micro-Certification course. So I'm excited to be back presenting on a really compelling and timely topic of how product teams can drive digital user journeys and how they can influence business success, including adoption and retention for the organization. So over the next 20 minutes or so, we'll cover why digital journeys are so critical, especially today. What elements and considerations need to go into building a cohesive journey? How cross-functional collaboration not only leads to success in your digital journeys, but also improves business outcomes? And finally, a few tips to ensure your experiences are effective at driving adoption and retention. To give you some context about where Gainsight fits in and who we are, we offer an integrated tech stack that includes key tools to build a complete digital customer journey, including helping customer teams to scale CS programs, delivering a centralized digital destination to build community, and creating a single spot for self-serve resources. And with our Gainsight PX product, we offer the digital product engagements and analytics to deliver compelling digital product experiences. These tools all come together to deliver cohesive digital journeys, supplemented by Gainsight's extensive integration and platform power. And today I'll talk about how and why we've seen tremendous interest from all teams, product, CS, and community, in addressing and improving the digital user journey. Should be no surprise that SAS today is facing a lot of challenges. Economic headwinds, increased scrutiny and sales cycles, and ongoing efforts to consolidate technologies have really made it more and more critical to improve the way that your customers and users interact with your products, especially as the barriers to entry for making new products continue to shrink with technologies like AI, making it so much easier to enter the market. The good news is a positive digital experience can dramatically improve your business standing with your customers and even achieve greater profitability when putting efforts into optimizing the user's product and digital experiences. And part of the reason that user experiences are so critical is the effect that B2C technologies have had on how B2B customers prefer to engage with software. Customer expectations have shifted and grown, and we now expect all products to be like Amazon or Apple. We want them to give us personalized, even predictive experiences that are not only cohesive within the application, but deliver multi-channel experiences that tie email, chat, and person-to-person engagement into one cohesive format and experience. And as a result, the emphasis organizations are placing on digital experience programs is expanding, and it's all these factors that contribute to AI. First, organizations are looking to scale their resources, either because they're looking to consolidate or trying to automate different processes with new technologies. They're also trying to meet those expanded expectations of their users and deliver more value and deliver that value continuously over time. Crest functional teams are also looking to do more digitally and break down common barriers to see how they can meet their own goals through channels like the product and PLG motions. And ultimately, cohesive digital experiences, boost retention, product adoption, and overall product and business success. So the importance of creating those end-to-end personalized experiences is just becoming more and more critical. Now, as digital programs expand and the focus on digital user experiences increases, there's a few things that organizations today are really trying to overcome. First, just to level-set what the digital journey is and what I'm talking about here, really talking about all the interactions, milestones, and guidance that your users go through digitally when they're interacting with your products or business. I'll refer to this as the digital journey or digital experience, because some of these elements included here go a bit beyond what you might think of with the product experience that your users have and kind of up-level that a little further. So today, the digital journey is not what most would call cohesive. There's a good chance your organization already does some of the things along the journey are all of the things that I'm about to talk about. Maybe you promote your self-serve knowledge center or portal during onboarding for your users. And then maybe you use in-app guides to drive adoption for those same users. It's possible you seek product feedback in-app as users adopt and move into their retention phase and consult product usage data over time to see how your users are acting in product and if they're still achieving ongoing value. For most, these tools are fragmented and they may even be delivered via separate programs with possibly different owners and no cross-functional collaboration in between. What's more, you probably have separate touchpoints for your standard or average user than you might for an admin user or perhaps a novice less experienced user in your product. And you probably have teams like Customer Success contacting your users at different points in their journey completely disconnected from what you may be building or delivering in your product experience programs. Now, I hope this slide looks a little complicated because it is. And when you start to layer on more and more technologies in that journey, your user journey probably looks a little bit like this. Squiggly lines all over, lots of disconnected tech and ultimately confusion when it comes to where your users should be going and when. But product is really well positioned to drive the digital journey and connect a lot of those dots, pushing in-app guides that help users adopt features, delivering onboarding checklist that streamline users time to value, using those in-app dialogues to promote upcoming webinars even or push users to community channels and using feedback collected in-app to trigger things like support tickets, collect sentiment and more. So as you start to think about building a cohesive digital journey that really moves the needle on adoption and retention, it's important to think from your customer's point of view. The end user doesn't know when it's product, post sales or marketing sending them an email or orchestrating an in-app communication. And it's important to your experience being optimized and effective that these communications, no matter who's sending them, all feel really cohesive and don't feel like different departments are not aligned or toned up to what each other is sending your customers. Now, as you start to look at building a cohesive journey, this may sound a lot like product-like growth or PLG strategies. And it should. PLG is about using your product to influence the larger customer lifecycle and making your product that's central access around which your customer and user journeys grow. Now, one of the first steps to building a cohesive user journey as you start to kind of execute on a lot of these strategies is to figure out what your journey is today. How do users navigate your product? How are they finding your features and what are their expected paths or how would you want them to engage with those features? Using things like path analyses or funnel reports, like the ones shown here from Gainsight PX, are great ways to capture and analyze that data. And as you determine which actions users are taking and navigating to, you can figure out what your key or aha moments are that you should be driving more users to and lay out the preferred path to get them there in something like a Lucidchart or a Miro, which is the far-eye image here on your screen to help visualize that ideal path for your users. This is also a great place to consult your larger organization to see what other journey touchpoints may exist between customer success, support, account management or other teams depending on how your business is structured. So once you map that journey and know what milestones each user and customer should reach, you can then build out the touchpoints along that journey and which team should own what. You can see in this example here that each lifecycle stage is listed. And while this is a very simple version of what a full journey map might include, there's some key moments that occur in product via sales and via CSM teams that place different emphasis on different parts of that customer journey. In each phase, there are different needs your customers have to touch on. Acquisition, for example, is really about getting users into your free trial or premium experience to sign up and involves both your product team and sales organization. The adoption phase is after someone converts and when you're trying to get them in-app to see value and reach that value quickly, success of those actions could involve product, sales and customer success as they become a customer. The retention and expansion phases are really about sharing best practices and providing personalized experiences to differ between an active customer, a new customer and an existing customer or a long-time customer, really connecting those success metrics for both product and CS teams. And then advocacy, your best customers should become loyal advocates and finding ways to alert them about upcoming releases, get them involved in beta programs and really analyze the paths that those successful customers have taken to guide future users on a similar path. And as you understand the map out that ideal journey, you wanna incorporate user inputs to make sure that the journey you've decided on actually helps them reach real value. You can always collect persona or objective information, super helpful to customizing user experiences, again, to make sure they reach their specific value needs. And you can do that in-app via dialogues or guides that then automatically update user parameters based on their selections. So it's a great way to help fine-tune the content you then send in product and beyond. The examples here are from Gainsight where we actually collect user roles and objectives to help match the user type to the right journey in our product. Now, once you have that ideal journey in mind and you know what your users are looking to achieve, you then need to curate how you're going to get them through that experience. To do so, a great way is to create an onboarding and adoption checklist, depending on the journey stage you can surface one or the other, using something like a Knowledge Center bot to help guide users to key aha or value moments where they're really reaching their ultimate objective or value in your product. And they can do so in an order that makes sense to how your product functions. This example is actually from our own free trial and you can see we've called out just three main moments we think are most important for users to experience. We've also included a yellow box here that highlights two main CTAs. Again, this is our trial. So our goal here is to push users to convert to paying customers. This onboarding space, though, is really critical to create either conversion opportunities for trials or to help existing customers submit support tickets or highlight product needs when those are concerns. Adding these CTAs and that key resources section you see here means we're leveraging this space as effectively as possible to create a really great and compelling self-serve and self-guided experience for customers to make that really, really scalable and really, really personalized. As you identify what should go on your onboarding checklist, you'll need to build out content that then fits within it. So guiding users in and out via dialogues, tooltips, and embedded video content should help them get to key value features faster and help them get to specific actions, those key milestones aligned with their objectives and needs really quickly. Making the digitally journey cohesive also means using a multi-channel approach. So your touchpoints and guides should combine email, in-app content, embedded knowledge centers with onboarding or adoption checklist, and really be orchestrated cohesively to trigger at the right time and in the right channel based on your targeting parameters. One important aspect of guiding users to value is leveraging email. This really helps keep users engaged in achieving those value moments. And I know many of you may think of email as something that marketing or customer-facing teams or maybe another department owns, but tying your email programs for customers to your product data and needs helps you to really target those emails more specifically. Maybe reaching users as they complete certain milestones or, and this is a great use case, triggering re-engagement campaigns if your users are not active in your product. No way to reach them with an in-app guide if they're not using the product, right? So email is a great way to get in touch with those users. Working cross-functionally on how your emails look and feel is also a great way to infuse some of that organizational strategy and cohesiveness into your branding and look and feel and really keep that product experience and emails really cohesive for the end user. So we've covered at a high level a few key ways to build and deliver a cohesive digital experience. One big piece of that is making your efforts really, really cross-functional and addressing the entire customer and user journeys and life cycles. One big way to make cross-functional efforts really effective and cohesive is to align teams around a key metric or objective, your North Star as a business, to optimize your journey around. For example, as a startup, you may be focused on driving new user signups, but if you're a more established business, you may be focused on lowering customer acquisition costs or CAC. Whatever you decide to make that North Star, make sure you focus on both leading and lagging metrics that align to that so you can track progress and improvements over time. As you operationalize your North Star and build programs around it, a great way to move fast and effectively is to establish a cross-functional tiger team of representative stakeholders that can make decisions and execute on new programs really quickly. And as part of that tiger team or even beyond it, it's really important to set clear expectations across departments on who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed, the racing model if you're familiar with it, to make it clear when and how handoff should occur and avoid uncertainty around project ownership. As you align around that North Star, you're also going to want to make sure your systems are set up to track your metrics effectively and to share out that data among different stakeholders. So connecting marketing tools, sales tools, and CS tools to your product experience toolkit will let you seamlessly pass information back and forth and get really targeted and granular as well as effective in measuring that full user journey. The more natively integrated your tools, the more effective you can be at building dashboards that with more complete metrics and aligning those dashboards to key stakeholders' needs. You might consider creating an executive dashboard, for example, maybe separate from a dashboard you designed for your CS team or separate from something you as a product manager may be looking at to focus on the parts of the journey that each team member might own. Now, product can do more than just share out data with other teams, right? It's really a cross-functional collaboration and it's a great opportunity to partner with customer-facing teams, such as CSMs, for example, to gather more user feedback and share those insights back out with product and development. You can also have CSMs flag customers as good prospects for betas, for example, or good customers to get early access to features and UCS teams to try and reach customers when they're not responding to those digital communications. And the last bullet point here, incorporating customer health and CS data can really help you target customers in and out more effectively and improve how you're personalizing and capitalizing on those digital experiences, which again, ultimately drives better adoption and retention as a result. The last big benefit of cross-functional collaboration efforts I'll touch on here is leveraging existing content and resources to avoid reinventing the wheel. If you have a community forum or support documentation, for example, you can use your existing content in these areas to build an in-app embedded knowledge center and help users search for key content so you don't need to start building from scratch. And you can even encourage them to sign up for marketing webinars and events to really maximize the value they're achieving from your product and business. And as an added benefit, if you have a community forum or a community team, you can then give them prompts for topics that you're missing content around and let your community and peer-to-peer support to build knowledge to address those gaps and user needs. So naturally making your journeys cross-functionally and delivering that complete and cohesive experience should set you up really well to drive adoption and retention. But what are a few key ways that these types of journeys can really move the needle on these metrics? The first step, address both the customer and user. Customers or accounts have some bigger milestones that differ from a standard user. Installing your product, for example, usually only happens once. Make sure you account for both the customer needs independently of user ones and you're not rehashing the same content that's already been taken care of by other users, for example, when you're building those in-app digital journeys. You may also find that customer touchpoints are well-scoped for another team, like CS. And you can help them to promote specific needs and align with those milestones in-app as well. It's also important to iterate and refine journeys over time. So testing your in-app communications, leveraging ongoing feedback from customers and doing analyses around successful and unsuccessful behaviors to better understand how you can meet your customer's needs and help them to continuously improve the user experiences over time. Another key point here is that it's okay to start small and build on. Cohesive journeys don't happen overnight. So consider launching chunks of a journey or improving a specific subset of a larger journey as you look to implement these strategies effectively. And finally, continuously surface value, especially as SaaS technologies are under the microscope, it's critical to help your users not only achieve value quickly, but also remind them of what they've done with your product. Consider automating reports that show tasks completed, time savings, or other improvements to reinforce this. And since some of your key decision makers and executives are likely not in your products on a regular basis, make sure you surface these data points via email so that you can reach the right users and stakeholders. So I've done a lot of talking and hopefully some teaching today. The last thing I wanna leave you with is a chance to take the reins and teach yourself more about digital journeys, product lead growth, and driving business success via your product. We have a special code for all those attending today's event to sign up for the PLG or Product Lead Growth micro-certification course that Gainsight and Product School partnered on. And you can get this course, I think it's a $500 value for free, using the code PXVIPPLGC. So if you scan the QR code, it'll take you to that sign up page and you can use that code to register completely free, great hands-on, really valuable and quick course. And with that, thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you found this content really impactful and informative and definitely encourage you to connect with Gainsight or myself to learn more. Thanks so much and have a great rest of the day.