Last week, I sat down with Chrissy Quiñones, Digital Customer Success Program Manager at Fullstory, and together we unpacked one of the most frustrating paradoxes in SaaS today: the teams responsible for user engagement rarely have the power to do anything about it.
If you've ever been the person held accountable for activation or retention metrics while lacking the tools to influence them, you'll recognize the feeling. It's like being the chef who knows exactly what the dish needs but has to fill out a form and wait three days just to add salt.
Our recent survey of hundreds of SaaS professionals revealed something many of us have suspected for years:
The disconnect isn't subtle. Companies know engagement matters—they just can't seem to execute.
On a call last week, I heard a prominent CX leader sum it up perfectly: "We have all these insights about what users need, but by the time we get the right pieces in place to deliver it, the moment's gone."
After digging through our research data and talking with dozens of teams, I've identified three specific barriers that keep engagement teams spinning their wheels:
Over a third of companies have prioritized personalization to drive engagement. Yet most still blast the same generic messages to everyone. Not because they want to—because they have to.
The problem is simple: the teams owning engagement metrics (usually on the go-to-market side) can't access the product usage data needed to personalize experiences.
I watched this exact scenario play out at a mid-sized SaaS company last year. Their lifecycle marketing lead pinpointed exactly which feature would help a specific customer segment succeed. But getting the list of users who fit that profile required three separate requests across two departments and took two weeks to fulfill.
By then, some the users had already churned.
Teams who've solved this data access problem report 40% higher confidence in hitting their goals. That's not a coincidence.
Ask yourself: are you proactively guiding users, or just responding when they get stuck?
Most teams know they should deliver timely guidance based on user behavior. Instead, they're stuck putting out fires—answering support tickets, sending reactive check-ins, and desperately trying to save accounts that are already halfway out the door.
Here's the truth: when a user signals they're ready to adopt a new feature, you have minutes—not days—to capitalize on that moment. If activating your marketing team and getting engineering resources stands between you and that opportunity, you'll miss it every time.
Our data shows teams who time their touchpoints based on user behavior are twice as likely to achieve their goals. Twice.
This one hits home for nearly everyone I talk to: 62% of respondents use three or more different tools to execute their engagement programs. And so few, if any, of them were actually built to do the job.
I recently watched a team go through the process of launching a simple onboarding improvement (without Appcues, of course). The process looked like this:
The result? A four-week project to implement something that should have taken two days. All while teams using three or more tools were 45% more likely to report underperforming on their engagement goals.
This brings me back to my conversation with Chrissy. Her team at Fullstory faced these exact challenges—owning activation and retention metrics while lacking direct control over the tools to influence them.
"We were primarily relying on our marketing team," she explained. "It was taking longer because we were asking them to do the designs... We didn't have access to the tools, so we really didn't know what was going on."
Sound familiar?
Everything changed when they gained direct ownership of their engagement through Appcues Workflows. The transformation wasn't just about new technology—it was about eliminating dependencies that slowed them down.
Their first campaign took a refreshingly direct approach:
"We're saying, 'Hey, we know you are a product manager, and this is a use case that we think is going to help you.' Here's a CTA that is sending you directly into our app."
No more generic messages. No more waiting on other teams. Just targeted guidance delivered at the right moment, by the people who understand the users best.
The results came quickly:
What struck me about Chrissy's story wasn't just the metrics. It was how gaining control shifted their entire mindset from reactive to proactive.
"There's so much more that we can do," Chrissy shared. "We can say, 'Hey, this person hasn't logged in in a while, but they never clicked this button or tried out this feature. Let's call it out.'"
It's a fundamental shift from waiting for problems to anticipating needs. From playing defense to running a strategic offense.
I've seen this transformation dozens of times. Teams who gain ownership over their engagement strategy start thinking differently—less like customer support and more like product experience architects.
For teams looking to break through their own barriers, Chrissy offered advice that mirrors what I've seen work across countless organizations:
"Zoom out and look at your customer journey... Figure out where you're engaging with your customers and where you have gaps."
Start by understanding the entire journey. It gives you the map for where targeted interventions will have the biggest impact.
Then, take the pressure off by starting small:
"When we launched the persona campaign, it was one email to product managers, then it was three emails, then it was multiple personas. You don't have to boil the ocean at once."
I can't stress this enough. I've seen too many ambitious engagement transformations collapse under their own weight. The teams that succeed start with focused interventions, measure the impact, and build from there.
And don't forget to maintain alignment while preserving your autonomy:
"We do send it through a review process. But in terms of coordinating, we teamed up with marketing to look at the customer journey and determine how often we're communicating with our customers and where it makes sense."
It's not about creating silos—it's about giving the right teams the right tools to execute quickly while staying coordinated.
Our research confirms what Fullstory experienced: teams who control their engagement destiny achieve dramatically better results.
Teams that have consolidated their user engagement tooling and addressed these three problems are 72% more satisfied with their engagement performance overall.
That number represents a fundamental shift in how teams relate to their metrics. When you're no longer dependent on other departments to execute your engagement strategy, you stop being measured on things you can't control and start driving real outcomes.
The frustration lifts. The results improve. The entire dynamic changes.
If you recognize your team in this story, here's where to start:
As Chrissy put it:
"In digital customer success, we're applying that human touch in a digital way. I love it because it gets to combine data-driven insights, analytics, and the creative side of the business."
That's exactly what makes great user engagement work—the perfect blend of data and creativity, delivered at exactly the right moment.
The future isn't about having better messages. It's about empowering the people who understand your users best to deliver the right experience at the right time, without running an obstacle course of internal dependencies first.
That's the new playbook for user engagement. And teams that adopt it first will have an enormous advantage.
Want to see more of our conversation with Chrissy? Watch the full webinar recording here or schedule a demo to see how Appcues can empower your team.
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