The Customer Success Playbook

CSP S3 E17 - Eleni Vorvis - Product Adoption Monitoring

• Kevin Metzger • Season 3 • Episode 17

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This episode dives deep into the intricate relationship between product adoption monitoring and customer success. Eleni Vorvis, a seasoned customer success professional, shares her expertise on implementing effective monitoring strategies and establishing robust feedback loops with product management teams. The discussion explores both quantitative and qualitative approaches to tracking adoption, emphasizing the importance of cross-functional collaboration and clear communication channels.


Detailed Analysis

The episode presents a comprehensive framework for monitoring product adoption and managing product feedback, highlighting several key strategic elements:


Strategic Approach to Adoption Monitoring

The discussion emphasizes the critical importance of a unified approach to monitoring product adoption. Rather than siloing this responsibility, organizations should foster collaboration between teams and establish clear ownership of monitoring processes. This includes leveraging various tools such as in-app analytics, Pendo, and BI tools to gather comprehensive usage data.


Data Collection and Analysis

A dual approach to data collection emerges as a best practice:

  • Quantitative metrics: Tracking user login frequency, feature usage, and engagement patterns
  • Qualitative feedback: Gathering user experiences, challenges, and success stories through direct communication channels


Communication Channels and Tools

The episode outlines various methods for managing product feedback:

  • Dedicated Slack channels for real-time feedback sharing
  • Regular cross-functional huddles with product teams
  • JIRA integration for structured feedback management
  • Customer portals for direct feature requests and voting


Product Development Process Understanding

A key insight reveals the importance of CS teams understanding the product development lifecycle, including:

  • Sprint duration and planning
  • Story point allocation
  • Epic creation and management
  • Feature prioritization criteria


Emerging Technology Integration

The discussion touches on the evolving role of AI in product adoption monitoring:

  • Custom GPTs for data synthesis
  • AI-powered BI tools for comprehensive customer insights
  • In-app guidance systems
  • Agentic AI for user assistance


Best Practices for Customer Communication

The episode emphasizes transparent communication with customers regarding:

  • Feature request processes
  • Roadmap expectations
  • Development timelines
  • Prioritization criteria

This comprehensive approach to product adoption monitoring demonstrates the evolving nature of customer success and its crucial role in product development and customer satisfaction.

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Kevin Metzger:

Hello, and welcome back to the Customer Success Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Metzger, alongside my co host, Roman Trebon. This is our Wednesday show. One big question, and we're here again, joined by our guests, Eleni Vis Roman. I'm excited about diving into one big question, but do you wanna start with some icebreakers? Yeah.

Roman Trebon:

Kev Wednesday's where we do the icebreakers, the really hard questions for our guests. One, these are the ones that really make'em nervous, right? Not, not the, not the number one tip, not the ai. It's these, these questions that make people the most worried. Soni, you ready for this? I'm ready. All right. What's your go to productivity hack when you have a really busy day

Eleni Vorvis:

Yeah, that's a great question. for me, I'm really meticulous with my calendar. I like to color code and that allows me to look across the week in terms of where I'm going to put my energy. So like my, the things that are. Personal to do's are like getting to the gym or in a specific color. My client facing calls are in another color. If I'm going to be doing any learning and joining webinars, That's a different color. That way you can at a quick glance know, is this going to be a heavy day in which I'm going to be talking a lot because I'm brainstorming and collaborating with clients, or is it going to be a day more that I'm going to be learning? And then you can take the rest of the time on your calendar and do the time boxing to get your to do items done.

Roman Trebon:

Oh, I love it. it's one of my favorite answers of 2025. Like I am OCD with color coding my calendar, keeping my calendar updated. So I love it. All right, Kev, what do you got?

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah, so you're in the Boston area. Where's your favorite place to eat up

Eleni Vorvis:

there? Great question. And it's so hard to just have one favorite, but I will give you a Greek place. So I'm a hundred percent Greek. My parents were both born in Greece and there is a place called Kava, but not the quick service Kava that I think might be in multiple States. That's C A V A. This is Kava. K A V A, and it's Cava Neo Taverna, and it's in the south end, neighborhood of Boston. Very authentic, the food that they cook tastes like the food that my mom and my grandmother make, so really good.

Kevin Metzger:

That's

Roman Trebon:

a high

Kevin Metzger:

Do they serve that, flambe cheese?

Eleni Vorvis:

The saganaki, yes. Saganaki. They have that, yep.

Kevin Metzger:

right before we sat down to record, I was watching, something on Food Network and they were showing the Saganaki. that looks so good.

Eleni Vorvis:

It's so good. I love cheese. My, favorite thing to eat.

Roman Trebon:

Yeah, we're down in Atlanta, Kat. We may have to hit Kima up for our next planting session. another great restaurant down here in Atlanta. all right, Eleni, last one here for you. Let's keep on the dinner theme. Let's do a little twist though. You can have dinner with one historical figure. Who are you picking out of the past to have dinner with?

Eleni Vorvis:

Another challenging question. there's so many people that come to mind, I've been watching a show lately on Netflix that just came out. they released all the seasons and it's about, a publishing company. So I've been thinking a lot about books and reading and I'm an avid reader. for me, I think it would be Charles Dickens. One, because he got paid by the word, right? And he would release his books in chapters, leaving that anticipation, he was one of the first offers to kind of set up that model. I think it just would be fascinating to hear about living in that time period. I also took a course when I was at Babson that was Victorian children's literature. one of my favorite courses, right? I went to a business school and entrepreneurial school, but I did love that they also had some very interesting liberal arts courses.

Kevin Metzger:

All right. Well, it's been awesome to learn more about you. Now, let's jump into our big question for today. What methods do you recommend for the CS team to monitor product adoption? And how do you communicate feedback on that adoption to product management?

Eleni Vorvis:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it has to be a joint effort. in a lot of cases, you can run into a challenge of a startup where somebody is saying, I completely own monitoring adoption and I'm going to come up with my own definition. I was mentioning in the first episode of this is how we're going to track usage. So one There needs to be a conversation around how are we going to leverage product adoption? Are we using in app analytics? Are we using a BI tool to pull that information out and then figuring out who is going to be responsible for it? If you have a CS operations person or an operations team as part of your post sales motion, That would be a great individual that holds that information together and you get to, report on it. So I think it's one that's defining where that sits, what it looks like, and making sure everybody has access to that information. you can report on that depending on the company and size. It could be. Automatic reporting that gets sent out. It could be slack messages that are delivered. It could fall into a tool where people, you know, log in to look at dashboards. I think product management is really going to be focused on the what are people doing when they log in and really monitoring that and their tools and AI to help them understand where people are going for us and customer success. There's also the Okay, they're going in there, but is what they're doing making a difference to their business? What is the outcome they're trying to achieve? And what is the use case they're solving by using the product? I think that's where CS can really help to drive home those examples. there's the quantitative data of, who is logging in, how often, and that will vary depending on the type of software that you have. If it's enterprise wide, some people need it. It's mission critical, and they're in it every single day. Other software may be more on a weekly. Or monthly basis. And so having those quantitative metrics are important, but then the qualitative feedback is important and being able to gather that information. It could be as simple as having a slack channel for that type of information to go out to the product team. I've done a lot of huddles with product management, so there will be the product team, the CS team, maybe somebody from ops, someone from product marketing coming together to discuss the feedback that's coming from customers. As you evolve from an early stage startup to more practices, there are other means of keeping product feedback in there to track it to make sure, okay, are we getting this request one time or are we getting it 10 times from 10 different customers who represent, say, 3 million of ARR versus the squeaky wheel that's a 40, 000 customer. So I've worked at organizations where that information goes into JIRA. Everybody is trained on here's the bit of information as a CSM. Here are the three questions to ask the customer. You put that information then into JIRA. that gets reviewed by product management, and then a conversation will happen for the things that we want to bubble up to be used for the roadmap. We all need to know how to talk to customers about that. It's important for CS to understand how the software is built, meaning how long are the sprints that the engineering team will go through. And how do things make their way into the development of a story within JIRA and EPIC, right, that then gets broken down into the things that will be worked on in Sprint. The more informed we can be, we can then help our customers understand that there is a process and that not everything they recommend Will make it into a particular, release or even into the road map at all. And as long as we can explain why those things may not make it in there, that's also important. Another thing to mention, and then I'll pause to see if you have any feedback or want me to clarify anything is there's also ways in which the customer can. Deliver that feedback directly, right? Some of these tools, you can just go in there. And as a client, I say, I would love this feature and then people can upvote it. everybody can go into this shared portal with the expectation that these are suggestions. It in no way is a commitment by the company. We've all seen that slide that pops up when we share the roadmap that says, this is not a commitment. This is a forward looking statement. We earn the right to be able to. Change our minds on what we do as a business with the road map. So I think there's a variety of tools, but just making sure people understand how that process works internally and to communicate the expectations externally to customers.

Roman Trebon:

you talked about the quantitative and qualitative feedback and mentioned tools like Slack and JIRA. is that from your experience, are there tools out there that do this better than others? Is it if you have the right process in place, you can be tool agnostic. You just need to have the right process in place to collect the feedback, analyze it, et cetera.

Eleni Vorvis:

Yeah, I think it's about having the process and then the data and people putting that data in some place. you also may not have the budget to pay for these tools. So what a lot of companies are doing is building, their own GPTs and taking that information and getting it synthesized, As long as you're adhering to the practice for leveraging AI at your organization. You know, why not just use that because that's able to analyze large buckets of data to be able to look at those insights and then having some sort of tool that tracks the usage or for you There's the BI tools that also have that information. There are also companies out there now, trying to disrupt the BI landscape and leveraging AI for you to be able to query on a variety of things that you want to know about a customer from usage to last conversation with an executive to where they are in their customer lifecycle. To being able to trigger off a playbook. I just had a recent, conversation with a co founder of a company at a dinner last week. I think every day new AI is popping up.

Kevin Metzger:

Yeah. We'll get to talk more about that on a Friday episode too. But you know, I think some of the other places where people do things from whether it's integrating, you know, Google tracking and stuff like that to get the data. what do you think you mentioned Pendo earlier? What do you think about Pendo?

Eleni Vorvis:

So I have not directly used it, but I've worked in organizations where the product team is using it right. Pendo app queues to provide insights. in app guidance, I think, is really important. We want to make it as easy as possible for someone to know what to do and provide that guidance in the moment. Because we also find that if we are bombarding our customers with all of this information on how to use the product, they get training, they're pointed to a wiki or a place where they can read about it. You're likely to forget that information or forget where to go. So it's great that you can go into the product and maybe have, you know, something pops up to prompt you to click here. Did you know that we now have released this thing? So I think that has been really popular. That's also now, shifting more to how do you leverage agentic AI to just have someone that you can interact with to say, here's what I'm trying to do, and just being able to query and get that information back. I think we're going to see. A lot of technology kind of shifting to the you don't have to really know how to use it. You just need to know how to ask the right questions or prompts to get what you need out of the software that you're leveraging or to be able to get the information out of a wiki or knowledge base just by asking.

Roman Trebon:

and that's a great segue because you joined us on Monday. You gave us not one, but 2 tips. You actually a 3rd one today, like an extra 1 even today. This was an amazing conversation. So we haven't scared you off yet. You're coming back Friday.

Eleni Vorvis:

Yes, I am.

Roman Trebon:

You're coming back Friday. We're going to talk about the relationship between product management and customer success and how you see that evolving with AI and new technologies, that are coming out. thank you again for joining us, our audience. Don't forget to subscribe, like us. You'll get notifications. You'll, you'll hear when this next show comes out. Until next time, Kevin. Keep on playing.

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People on this episode

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Kevin Metzger

Co-host
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Roman Trebon

Co-host
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Eleni Vorvis

Guest