A glimpse of the product working demonstrates the features or the product itself. It is that first look that gave thought to the buyer’s mind to make a subscription. At this stage, it mattered how you allure the potential buyers with your product and the features it has. After subscribing, you need to track how things are going with the customer. For that, you need to know about the key Customer Onboarding metrics to track.
The following stage is to grab their attention to understand your product. It isn’t easy for humans to understand one another and it may take years to get there. But a product? Just in a few months! And to the earliest, within a month.
While acquainting them to the product is one of the things in focus, they didn’t purchase the product because they get to use it or learn it rather they get to use it for the value they think it will deliver for their business.
So onboarding is the first stage after a purchase, crucial to make customers have a better hold of your product and to showcase the first early value in less time possible to keep them using the product later on.
Simple to comprehend two agendas of onboarding? In order to measure the onboarding efforts, there is a need for customer onboarding metrics.
So let’s see what Customer Onboarding metrics at this stage can be used.
5 Customer Onboarding Metrics to track.
# Metric 1: Effort to Value
The key to the metrics is to use the existing tools to get things done rather than enabling new tools at the stage when reaching early value is most important!
What does the metric measure?
It measures the minimum effort required by the customer to attain maximum value.
Let’s say slack is the tool that the customers have implemented in their business processes for effective management and communication, using the same tool for effective handling and cooperation reduces their efforts.
# Metric 2: Time to value
As known, it is crucial to attain value in a limited time to meet their expectations. Like on the internet, it only takes a few seconds for customers to get attracted to the website and continue to stay.
What does it measure?
The time or the duration is taken by the customer to achieve value from the product.
A customer got the product and has completed the onboarding with data setup, and testing and readily started using the product to operate for their uses cases within April 31 from the day March 31.
Then the Time to value in this scenario is 31 days. So based on the industry and the complexity of their system, the onboarding time may vary.
# Metric 3: Customer Progression
Similar to the time to value, customer progression measures the duration taken by the customers to attain value but in smaller components.
What does it measure?
It measures the time taken to complete the individual steps in the training process.
The training contains several modules touching upon the product for their use case and in that, let’s say the first component is to back the platform with the historical data. The second component is to understand the working of the feature and its implementation. And so on. The time taken by the customer in finishing the first component is 2 days.
So this way one can measure and know if the expected delivery of learning is completed at each component to analyze if there are any delays. And to know how it could be resolved to make them finish the phase to early value.
# Metric 4: Product Stickiness
In the onboarding process, this metric aids in understanding if your new features were self-discoverable and that you are doing wonderful in introducing them to your toolset!
What does it measure?
The key here is to find the use of specific features and how do customers like it?
If the customers are getting what they look for in a product, they are most likely to stick to your product which is called product stickiness. The higher it is, the less they are likely to churn.
If a customer likes playbook features and is often using them in their processes, then they have an affinity towards the feature and will continue to use it in your product, thus indicating the efforts of onboarding in the process are being effective.
# Metric 5: Customer Engagement
What’s more realistic is the engagement with your brand and product. How well are they speaking your product language!
What does it measure?
It measures the customer’s engagement and interest in using your product.
If the customers are using your product then they are very well aware of the basics and are more engaged with you on all the platforms asking the queries. And in another case, if the customers are not engaging with you or asking queries then they don’t really understand your product and they need your attention to get them back.
What matters?
Plan customer onboarding realistically. As the goals here are realistic and you can’t get with it normally without a plan. Remember your product is new to them and they are not aware of it as well as you are. So, it must accompany by proper training in the specific use case of their requirement. Not boggling them with the entire product features which are unnecessary to them and that which abstain them from reaching early first value.
As well said, the point here is to make them acquainted with your product for the specific use cases to reach the first value earlier so that they can continue using it!
It as well reminds me, that to track the product usage, feature adoption, or their engagement with the touchpoints or give efficient training with playbooks, a customer success software is most effective. Let’s you understand their stage in onboarding, and close the phase as planned to move forward to the product adoption stage of the buyer’s journey.
CustomerSuccessBox as a tool reduces 50% of the onboarding time with the feature it has to offer. Get a free demo to see how that can handle onboarding!
