The Mystery of Adoption (Part 1)
“The overall Customer Success Score is a weighted composite of three key categories. Typically, Product Adoption accounts for 50% of the total score, Customer Expertise 20%, and Technical Health 30%. However, when Technical Health data isn’t available for a tenant, the weighting shifts to 70% for Product Adoption and 30% for Customer Expertise.(1)”
“The overall Customer Success Score is a weighted composite of three key categories. Typically, Product Adoption accounts for 50% of the total score, Customer Expertise 20%, and Technical Health 30%. However, when Technical Health data isn’t available for a tenant, the weighting shifts to 70% for Product Adoption and 30% for Customer Expertise.(1)”
From this quote sourced in Trailhead, we see that product adoption plays a critical role — representing between 50% and 70% of the final Customer Success Score.
“Why is adoption so important? Because the success of any digital transformation ultimately depends on how well end users embrace the new technology. Even the most well-planned and executed projects can fail if users don’t adopt the product.(2)”
But what exactly is adoption? How does it work? And how can we help our users adopt our products more fully — not just immediately after implementation, but over the long term?
Is adoption a matter of behavioral science, psychology, or perhaps a creative endeavor? How do we get inside the minds of our users? Do we incentivize learning through tools like Trailhead? Do we involve users early in the process — and if so, how?
To better understand adoption, let’s explore an unusual but insightful analogy from the world of art and cinema.
The film Inception (2010)(3), directed by Christopher Nolan, offers a fascinating metaphor for adoption. In the story, Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled thief who extracts secrets from people’s dreams. But his latest challenge is something new: inception — the act of planting an idea into someone’s subconscious mind without them realizing it.
Cobb and his team are tasked with an adoption-like mission: to change the mind of a reluctant CEO, Robert Fischer Jr., whose father has recently passed away. This mission mirrors a classic corporate succession challenge.
To succeed, the team induces Fischer into a shared, layered dream state during a long-haul flight, carefully navigating his subconscious to implant the idea that he should willingly sell his company’s assets. Despite the complexities and obstacles within Fischer’s own mind, the inception succeeds — and when he wakes, his mindset has fundamentally changed.
This story illustrates the power of influencing adoption at a deep, subconscious level — not by force or coercion, but through carefully guided understanding and engagement.
How can this concept inform your adoption strategy? How can we “plant” ideas that lead to genuine acceptance and change among users?
I’ll explore these questions and more in Part 2 of this series.
Sources:
1: Trailhead: Customer Success Score
2: What makes User Adoption crucial in the Digital Transformation process?
3: IMDB: Inception (2010)
