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It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped- Tony Robbins
The decisions that you make for customer onboarding set the tone for a customer’s future with your business. Sounds logical, right? Once you convert your leads into paying customers, the next step is to welcome them to join your business. Customer Onboarding refers to the process that clients go through when they commence their journey with your company.
The whole customer onboarding process is challenging. This guide will teach you everything from the definition of customer onboarding to creating a successful onboarding strategy!
Major reasons for customer churn are either:
Customer onboarding can resolve both of these issues. SaaS onboarding comes to foray any time a customer is new to your platform.
The whole idea behind customer onboarding is to ensure that your customers are engaged and they use your product for as long as possible. It is the nourishing process that gets new users familiarised with your product.
How you onboard your new customers determines your ongoing relationship with them. It also improves customer lifetime value (LTV), decreases churn, and turns new users into advocates of your brand.
If you still don’t see its importance then please check out the following stats. These should give you an idea of how crucial customer onboarding is to your business.
You know about the Pareto principle, right?
The Gartner Group studied that 80% of the company’s future income can come from 20% of the existing customers. However, it’s unfortunate that B2B companies put only 20% of their marketing efforts towards customer retention.
In other words, user onboarding is vital to customer retention and, in turn, your business growth.
If your business customer base has a high amount of churn, then you may have to reconsider how to approach your customer onboarding strategy.
Ensuring that clients have a great experience, right from onboarding them and providing a satisfactory journey to the ultimate point of retaining them, is a demanding task.
You wouldn’t onboard a customer without first creating an onboarding strategy; as without a roadmap, it would be difficult to know where to go next. You have to establish a goal and a plan.
Check out the 3 Onboarding Strategies to Spur User Adoption and Empower Customers!
It’s should be realized that customer onboarding is neither a one-time process nor a standalone process. It should be made an ongoing process. As and when new features are released for your product, the process or the strategy should be revised, and re-designed.
Let us understand some of the strategies which are adopted by many SaaS companies to streamline their onboarding process.
Both, you and your customer, need to have clarity on what the product/service can offer. Create specific buyer personas to understand the issues customers are facing, the problems they might have in setting up their accounts, and even their greater motivations. This will help you create a meaningful journey for each customer.
A recent survey from Harvard Business Review says an increased focus on onboarding achieves a crucial impact over the lifetime of the product.
Create a must-follow, step-wise customer onboarding process that constitutes the following elements (explained in detail later).
Explore your competitor’s content and capabilities before designing your customer onboarding process. This will be a nice strategy if you can reach out to your competitor’s support team to evaluate how they are onboarding their customers. Try signing up for free trials of the rival firm’s product and figure out what they’re doing differently.
Better to have an easy and simple product sign-up process for users. It will help them easily finish their registration and start using your SaaS product/service. A 2-step sign-up process for collecting basic level user info with an email verification process could get you more customers to onboard.
Okay, you might be tempted to showcase all of your product’s features once they sign-up. However, there is no point in introducing all the features at once, just to display your product strength. Since the new users can’t process them just right at their first interaction with the product, it will be intelligent to rather introduce the core feature first.
Train your customer support team on every product feature and release, so they can handle all sorts of technical and functional doubts from customers. Hence, round-the-clock support services must be an essential part of your onboarding strategy.
Studies have shown that successful customer onboarding will ensure long-term customer loyalty. Gaining customer trust is one of the most critical priorities of any SaaS company and this helps in building a loyal customer base.
Proper onboarding isn’t done to prevent churn; it’s done to ensure the customer achieves their desired outcome. Retention comes from that. -Lincoln Murphy
Put the following principles into action and see the clarity with which you’ll identify gaps in your system. If identified correctly, it will solve most of your onboarding issues.
Right customer onboarding is one of the important factors in determining whether the customer will be successful or not as the highest churn happens during the onboarding process.
Onboarding is complete when the customer achieves an early value. That is time the customer goes WOW and starts believing in the potential of your product.
Since many CSMs have to manage so many customers, they would not be able to properly onboard the new customers. This is where Onboarding Specialists play a crucial role Since their only job is to properly onboard the customer they’re able to help the customer achieve an early goal. Onboarding specialists make sure that they are always available to handhold the customer in case of any difficulties.
Understand why your SaaS might need an onboarding specialist?
Onboarding can be done by a customer success manager (CSM), an onboarding specialist, or some other department (sales, support, etc) depending on the specific requirements.
The key here is to identify the person/team who will be managing the onboarding.
Pro tip: Who should manage customer onboarding in a SaaS company?
This is relevant because each company is different. The goals, teams, customers, their desired outcomes will be unique. By creating onboarding goals, your team has a clear path in building the same for your customers. The important point to note here is you need to identify exactly what is your goal!
There are, mainly, 3 onboarding models. Pick one based on the profile of your customers and the complexity of your service.
There are, mainly, 3 onboarding models. Pick one based on the profile of your customers and the complexity of your service.
ModelCharacteristicSelf-service modelThis model allows customers to onboard themselves at their own pace. Ideal for small businesses with B2C products.Low-touch modelThis model, generally, involves chat support and automated email campaigns, but not dedicated success managers. Good for SaaS businesses with a little complex product.High-touch modelIt provides meticulous and diligent service of customer onboarding. This often includes customized onboarding strategies and a dedicated customer success team. It is suited for large SaaS companies with a huge customer base.
They need to understand customer expectations is important if you want to confirm which model would suit your customers the best. As you recognize their desired outcomes, you’ll develop a clearer sense of which model of onboarding they’ll need.
Onboarding success must be measured by relevant metrics which assist you in monitoring onboarding red flags and thus make modifications as needed.
The best approach to carry out this exercise is to collate data from multiple metrics. This will give you a holistic picture of your customers’ behaviors.
Continue using email and chat support throughout the onboarding process in addition to the tutorials and guides. At this point, email is probably your customer’s preferred channel of communication.
Your intention with every interaction is to create a similar positive experience that made your customers sign up in the first place.
Expectations aren’t easy to understand. It is a tough and demanding process that requires a strong focus. Understand that one size does not fit all. You have to first understand your customer. Once you do that, it will be a cakewalk for you to set the process accordingly.
Customers have their objectives to achieve and they’ll be unique to every everyone of them. Let them define success, then help them create quantifiable milestones to get there with touchstones to hit along the way.
Most of us face this, sometimes more so if your product is solving a complex problem and requires some education and learning at the customer’s end.
Know more about Customer Onboarding- How to prevent drop-offs.
Pro tip: Do check out the Secrets of successfully onboarding a B2B SaaS Customer
Customer Onboarding entails the process of proactively tutoring your new customers through your product to get them started and stay engaged.
Your goal, here, is to empower your customer by providing them with all the possible resources to onboard them. You need to pick and choose which tools and channels suit you and your customers.
You can follow these 5 Steps to defining a perfect Customer Onboarding process for a SaaS Customer.
If your firm just gained a new B2B customer, an unwavering focus on performance in the first days or weeks of serving that customer can boost the LTV of the relationship.
Here are the main elements of a user or customer onboarding you should focus on: it et us
You don’t want your potential clients to quit even before they sign up, right? Well, then ask only for relevant information. This will make the process simple and easy.
This is your first contact or touch-point after the customer signed up with your product/service. Congratulate them on choosing your product along with introducing yourself. This is not the right time to bombard them with too much information as it will overwhelm them.
A few elements to include in your welcome emails:
Once you’ve sent the welcome email, now you need to have a call with the customer to agree that both parties are on the same page with regards to the product expectations. You can discuss what the onboarding process will be like and what the expected timeline will be.
Once they have signed up, you need to create a guided tutorial to take them through the setup process, step by step. Tutorials are an important component of an onboarding process, especially if you have a product with tons of features.
These guides are kind of an interactive walkthrough because the user gets to interact with you at each stage of the process.
Product guides & tutorials are there to support your users during their whole journey with you. A few things to note:
This is a little self-help sort of a section. Documentation is a resource pool in itself. Customers can come and educate themselves if they feel stuck at any point before they reach out to you for help.
Educational emails, from your end, can be sent to the customers as an additional touchpoint, It can include information about the next step, a little guidance, etc. The following points, about documentation, can make a great impression:
This can have a significant impact on the overall onboarding experience of your customers. Why? Because it makes your customers feel valued.
A quick call or chat with your customer goes a long way in making his/her journey with your business remarkable! Feedback received in time is definitely worth the effort put in.
Next time, don’t hesitate to simply pick up the phone and connect.
Sending timely notifications to customers has a huge impact on the onboarding experience. This is the best way to re-engage the customers who’ve been disengaged with your offering for a while. Critical things to note:
Most of the B2B tools require customers to integrate their data with other third-party applications to optimize their usage.
In such cases, customers need to import their data to be able to connect with other systems. This could be a major blocker in the onboarding process.
Making it easy for customers to connect their data without much hassle will help them see value in your product.
Celebrate as and when your customers achieve their important milestones. This will make them feel valued, appreciated, and make them happy.
The celebration can be in the form of a congratulatory email, in-app notification, or a quick call.No no, metric, no trick, nothing is as important for you as a happy customer!
This element needs no introduction. One of the important building blocks to support the strength of your product in the SaaS industry is your customer service/support. Ensure your support teams are available round the clock with email support and call services, live chat to provide uninterrupted customer interactions.
Bonus tip: How can the right onboarding process increase the renewal rate?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”
– Peter F Drucker
Most of the SaaS products start as a trial version, but most of the customers drop off or quit after the trial period ends. Hence, you need to ensure the best product experience to customers in their first trial itself! Now, this is where the impact of onboarding can be significant.
Check out the 4 customer onboarding metrics for SaaS companies.
Customers who do not use your product regularly may have decided to stop using it as it doesn’t feel worthy! In other words, it is the rate of customers that cease their relationship with a company. The more indispensable you can make your product, the lower your churn rate will be.
The rate indicates the number of people completing the onboarding process. A low number may indicate a complex, lengthy and annoying signup process. Once you know the problem, you can work on a solution.
Similar to the metric mentioned above, completion time indicates the time taken by the customers to complete the onboarding process.
It is sort of ROI. The time or steps or clicks taken by a customer to obtain value from your product. Effective onboarding can help users achieve this value sooner.
This metric shows how long do the users use your application after being onboarded. Lower usage time may indicate that the customers do not derive any benefit from your product. A check-up call or an in-app message or notification might help get the users back on track.
No need to expand on this. The higher the number, the better your product is. This number should be growing, otherwise, you may need to re-energize your marketing efforts.
Turning new customers into promoters of your product is a great way to keep your customers paying and improving the possibility of making upgrades, upsells, etc. Adopting a user onboarding software can help you do just that.
You are selecting a user onboarding tool because you don’t want to automate the process. The tool that you are going to pick should be uncomplicated and anyone from any department in your firm should be able to create and edit tutorials as they see appropriate.
A user might have a different language, might have unique requirements, might be a different type of user in your websites with different permissions. The user onboarding tool, you pick, should allow the owner to choose what will work and what will not for different users. Personalization is a trait that should not be compromised upon as it can break or make your impression on users.
One of the great advantages to using an onboarding tool is that they offer ample features to make your job easy!. Checklists, Tooltips, Hotspots, Surveys, and Help Centers are some of the different features that help you optimally utilize various onboarding elements.
Every element in the onboarding process is important and personalization of each element is necessary to create a successful experience for users. The tool which can give this option, of course, ranks higher in terms of choice.
Customers need the help of guides and tutorials to understand the application or the product clearly. They should have access to the same as and when needed.
Data is the most important tool that gives you the measure of your product’s performance. Hence, it is vital for the tool that uses contain the analytics which provides you with the relevant data.
In the hyper-competitive SaaS world, no matter how high your growth is, if you are unable to control your churn rate, it is difficult for your company to sustain.
Customer Onboarding is nurturing your new customers, cultivating their friendship, and getting them acquainted with your product/service. This involves active guidance, user-friendly tutorials, and a great support system.
The whole purpose of customer onboarding is to get your customer accustomed to the product/service which you’re offering. Hence, it is important to emphasize the value it will bring to the table for the customer.
It becomes tricky here because different customers buy the same product for different reasons.
Once you know what value your customers are looking for, you need to find the shortest path to help them reach their goals as soon as possible. Hence, we need to ensure that each feature that we train our customer on is crucial to reach the goal
Yes, you read that right. This friendly approach of yours is going to take you a long way in your customer relationship journey. The earlier mentioned components of a customer onboarding checklist will help you with this approach.
You want your customer to come back to you to re-purchase the product., right?
After your welcome email, you must continue the bond through several other touch-points. This will help you to be in constant touch with your customer and any proactive support will ensure customer loyalty.
Usually, communications can be very challenging in any organization, and many
times what the customer wants at one level is not what they need at another. Hence, consistent and productive communication is imperative to resolve this recurring issue.
Pro tip: Designing a Customer Onboarding Framework for B2B SaaS
You can download a custom-made Onboarding Framework for your onboarding process.
Out of all the post-sales functions, customer onboarding is one of the critical functions that decides how fast your company will grow.
No matter how good your product or your sales team is if the customer is unable to gain value during onboarding, s/he is likely to churn.
Thus, to make sure that you provide proper onboarding, it is important to have a customer onboarding checklist.
A customer onboarding checklist will make sure that you don’t fail to recall anything as you welcome your new customers onboard.
The checklist should contain the components of the onboarding process based on your product features and your business goals. Remember to consider the following points when creating your onboarding checklist.
Pro tip: Why is it important to have a Customer Onboarding Checklist?
Businesses that optimize customer onboarding are more likely to encourage customer retention and brand loyalty. Let us understand the following points and know how to optimize your onboarding experience.
Customer Onboarding is the most important phase which has the potency to make or break your relationship with the customer. Hence success managers have a strong focus on the same.
Implementation, of your product or platform into the customer’s business, is just part of the onboarding process. It is most probably the biggest part and often the most complex but it is still a piece of the bigger pie.
Implementation is a specific, “technical” part of the onboarding process. In some cases, an implementation may require engineers or solution architects that would work alongside the CSMs.
The key takeaway is that you can easily get lost in the implementation phase but forget that you’re onboarding people, which is an entirely different skill.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is the difference between onboarding and training, as they are not the same thing.
Customer Onboarding is welcoming new customers, whereas training is to teach the new users about the product features. One of the best-kept secrets has been that you need to onboard your customers much before you train all the users.
Bonus tip: Can customer onboarding replace the training process?
Customer Onboarding if done correctly can be a game-changer for you and your business. Onboarding is your customer’s first hands-on experience with your products, so it needs to be a positive one. This is the reason why we’ve come up with such an exhaustive guide on customer onboarding.
Although creating a customer onboarding strategy is critical, it’s won’t work if you don’t have a reliable customer success manager (CSM) or an onboarding specialist to run the entire process. Check out our 10 Interview Questions to hire the best Customer Success Manager (CSM) to build a customer-centric onboarding team.
It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped- Tony Robbins
The decisions that you make for customer onboarding set the tone for a customer’s future with your business. Sounds logical, right? Once you convert your leads into paying customers, the next step is to welcome them to join your business. Customer Onboarding refers to the process that clients go through when they commence their journey with your company.
The whole customer onboarding process is challenging. This guide will teach you everything from the definition of customer onboarding to creating a successful onboarding strategy!
Major reasons for customer churn are either:
Customer onboarding can resolve both of these issues. SaaS onboarding comes to foray any time a customer is new to your platform.
The whole idea behind customer onboarding is to ensure that your customers are engaged and they use your product for as long as possible. It is the nourishing process that gets new users familiarised with your product.
How you onboard your new customers determines your ongoing relationship with them. It also improves customer lifetime value (LTV), decreases churn, and turns new users into advocates of your brand.
If you still don’t see its importance then please check out the following stats. These should give you an idea of how crucial customer onboarding is to your business.
You know about the Pareto principle, right?
The Gartner Group studied that 80% of the company’s future income can come from 20% of the existing customers. However, it’s unfortunate that B2B companies put only 20% of their marketing efforts towards customer retention.
In other words, user onboarding is vital to customer retention and, in turn, your business growth.
If your business customer base has a high amount of churn, then you may have to reconsider how to approach your customer onboarding strategy.
Ensuring that clients have a great experience, right from onboarding them and providing a satisfactory journey to the ultimate point of retaining them, is a demanding task.
You wouldn’t onboard a customer without first creating an onboarding strategy; as without a roadmap, it would be difficult to know where to go next. You have to establish a goal and a plan.
Check out the 3 Onboarding Strategies to Spur User Adoption and Empower Customers!
It’s should be realized that customer onboarding is neither a one-time process nor a standalone process. It should be made an ongoing process. As and when new features are released for your product, the process or the strategy should be revised, and re-designed.
Let us understand some of the strategies which are adopted by many SaaS companies to streamline their onboarding process.
Both, you and your customer, need to have clarity on what the product/service can offer. Create specific buyer personas to understand the issues customers are facing, the problems they might have in setting up their accounts, and even their greater motivations. This will help you create a meaningful journey for each customer.
A recent survey from Harvard Business Review says an increased focus on onboarding achieves a crucial impact over the lifetime of the product.
Create a must-follow, step-wise customer onboarding process that constitutes the following elements (explained in detail later).
Explore your competitor’s content and capabilities before designing your customer onboarding process. This will be a nice strategy if you can reach out to your competitor’s support team to evaluate how they are onboarding their customers. Try signing up for free trials of the rival firm’s product and figure out what they’re doing differently.
Better to have an easy and simple product sign-up process for users. It will help them easily finish their registration and start using your SaaS product/service. A 2-step sign-up process for collecting basic level user info with an email verification process could get you more customers to onboard.
Okay, you might be tempted to showcase all of your product’s features once they sign-up. However, there is no point in introducing all the features at once, just to display your product strength. Since the new users can’t process them just right at their first interaction with the product, it will be intelligent to rather introduce the core feature first.
Train your customer support team on every product feature and release, so they can handle all sorts of technical and functional doubts from customers. Hence, round-the-clock support services must be an essential part of your onboarding strategy.
Studies have shown that successful customer onboarding will ensure long-term customer loyalty. Gaining customer trust is one of the most critical priorities of any SaaS company and this helps in building a loyal customer base.
Proper onboarding isn’t done to prevent churn; it’s done to ensure the customer achieves their desired outcome. Retention comes from that. -Lincoln Murphy
Put the following principles into action and see the clarity with which you’ll identify gaps in your system. If identified correctly, it will solve most of your onboarding issues.
Right customer onboarding is one of the important factors in determining whether the customer will be successful or not as the highest churn happens during the onboarding process.
Onboarding is complete when the customer achieves an early value. That is time the customer goes WOW and starts believing in the potential of your product.
Since many CSMs have to manage so many customers, they would not be able to properly onboard the new customers. This is where Onboarding Specialists play a crucial role Since their only job is to properly onboard the customer they’re able to help the customer achieve an early goal. Onboarding specialists make sure that they are always available to handhold the customer in case of any difficulties.
Understand why your SaaS might need an onboarding specialist?
Onboarding can be done by a customer success manager (CSM), an onboarding specialist, or some other department (sales, support, etc) depending on the specific requirements.
The key here is to identify the person/team who will be managing the onboarding.
Pro tip: Who should manage customer onboarding in a SaaS company?
This is relevant because each company is different. The goals, teams, customers, their desired outcomes will be unique. By creating onboarding goals, your team has a clear path in building the same for your customers. The important point to note here is you need to identify exactly what is your goal!
There are, mainly, 3 onboarding models. Pick one based on the profile of your customers and the complexity of your service.
There are, mainly, 3 onboarding models. Pick one based on the profile of your customers and the complexity of your service.
ModelCharacteristicSelf-service modelThis model allows customers to onboard themselves at their own pace. Ideal for small businesses with B2C products.Low-touch modelThis model, generally, involves chat support and automated email campaigns, but not dedicated success managers. Good for SaaS businesses with a little complex product.High-touch modelIt provides meticulous and diligent service of customer onboarding. This often includes customized onboarding strategies and a dedicated customer success team. It is suited for large SaaS companies with a huge customer base.
They need to understand customer expectations is important if you want to confirm which model would suit your customers the best. As you recognize their desired outcomes, you’ll develop a clearer sense of which model of onboarding they’ll need.
Onboarding success must be measured by relevant metrics which assist you in monitoring onboarding red flags and thus make modifications as needed.
The best approach to carry out this exercise is to collate data from multiple metrics. This will give you a holistic picture of your customers’ behaviors.
Continue using email and chat support throughout the onboarding process in addition to the tutorials and guides. At this point, email is probably your customer’s preferred channel of communication.
Your intention with every interaction is to create a similar positive experience that made your customers sign up in the first place.
Expectations aren’t easy to understand. It is a tough and demanding process that requires a strong focus. Understand that one size does not fit all. You have to first understand your customer. Once you do that, it will be a cakewalk for you to set the process accordingly.
Customers have their objectives to achieve and they’ll be unique to every everyone of them. Let them define success, then help them create quantifiable milestones to get there with touchstones to hit along the way.
Most of us face this, sometimes more so if your product is solving a complex problem and requires some education and learning at the customer’s end.
Know more about Customer Onboarding- How to prevent drop-offs.
Pro tip: Do check out the Secrets of successfully onboarding a B2B SaaS Customer
Customer Onboarding entails the process of proactively tutoring your new customers through your product to get them started and stay engaged.
Your goal, here, is to empower your customer by providing them with all the possible resources to onboard them. You need to pick and choose which tools and channels suit you and your customers.
You can follow these 5 Steps to defining a perfect Customer Onboarding process for a SaaS Customer.
If your firm just gained a new B2B customer, an unwavering focus on performance in the first days or weeks of serving that customer can boost the LTV of the relationship.
Here are the main elements of a user or customer onboarding you should focus on: it et us
You don’t want your potential clients to quit even before they sign up, right? Well, then ask only for relevant information. This will make the process simple and easy.
This is your first contact or touch-point after the customer signed up with your product/service. Congratulate them on choosing your product along with introducing yourself. This is not the right time to bombard them with too much information as it will overwhelm them.
A few elements to include in your welcome emails:
Once you’ve sent the welcome email, now you need to have a call with the customer to agree that both parties are on the same page with regards to the product expectations. You can discuss what the onboarding process will be like and what the expected timeline will be.
Once they have signed up, you need to create a guided tutorial to take them through the setup process, step by step. Tutorials are an important component of an onboarding process, especially if you have a product with tons of features.
These guides are kind of an interactive walkthrough because the user gets to interact with you at each stage of the process.
Product guides & tutorials are there to support your users during their whole journey with you. A few things to note:
This is a little self-help sort of a section. Documentation is a resource pool in itself. Customers can come and educate themselves if they feel stuck at any point before they reach out to you for help.
Educational emails, from your end, can be sent to the customers as an additional touchpoint, It can include information about the next step, a little guidance, etc. The following points, about documentation, can make a great impression:
This can have a significant impact on the overall onboarding experience of your customers. Why? Because it makes your customers feel valued.
A quick call or chat with your customer goes a long way in making his/her journey with your business remarkable! Feedback received in time is definitely worth the effort put in.
Next time, don’t hesitate to simply pick up the phone and connect.
Sending timely notifications to customers has a huge impact on the onboarding experience. This is the best way to re-engage the customers who’ve been disengaged with your offering for a while. Critical things to note:
Most of the B2B tools require customers to integrate their data with other third-party applications to optimize their usage.
In such cases, customers need to import their data to be able to connect with other systems. This could be a major blocker in the onboarding process.
Making it easy for customers to connect their data without much hassle will help them see value in your product.
Celebrate as and when your customers achieve their important milestones. This will make them feel valued, appreciated, and make them happy.
The celebration can be in the form of a congratulatory email, in-app notification, or a quick call.No no, metric, no trick, nothing is as important for you as a happy customer!
This element needs no introduction. One of the important building blocks to support the strength of your product in the SaaS industry is your customer service/support. Ensure your support teams are available round the clock with email support and call services, live chat to provide uninterrupted customer interactions.
Bonus tip: How can the right onboarding process increase the renewal rate?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”
– Peter F Drucker
Most of the SaaS products start as a trial version, but most of the customers drop off or quit after the trial period ends. Hence, you need to ensure the best product experience to customers in their first trial itself! Now, this is where the impact of onboarding can be significant.
Check out the 4 customer onboarding metrics for SaaS companies.
Customers who do not use your product regularly may have decided to stop using it as it doesn’t feel worthy! In other words, it is the rate of customers that cease their relationship with a company. The more indispensable you can make your product, the lower your churn rate will be.
The rate indicates the number of people completing the onboarding process. A low number may indicate a complex, lengthy and annoying signup process. Once you know the problem, you can work on a solution.
Similar to the metric mentioned above, completion time indicates the time taken by the customers to complete the onboarding process.
It is sort of ROI. The time or steps or clicks taken by a customer to obtain value from your product. Effective onboarding can help users achieve this value sooner.
This metric shows how long do the users use your application after being onboarded. Lower usage time may indicate that the customers do not derive any benefit from your product. A check-up call or an in-app message or notification might help get the users back on track.
No need to expand on this. The higher the number, the better your product is. This number should be growing, otherwise, you may need to re-energize your marketing efforts.
Turning new customers into promoters of your product is a great way to keep your customers paying and improving the possibility of making upgrades, upsells, etc. Adopting a user onboarding software can help you do just that.
You are selecting a user onboarding tool because you don’t want to automate the process. The tool that you are going to pick should be uncomplicated and anyone from any department in your firm should be able to create and edit tutorials as they see appropriate.
A user might have a different language, might have unique requirements, might be a different type of user in your websites with different permissions. The user onboarding tool, you pick, should allow the owner to choose what will work and what will not for different users. Personalization is a trait that should not be compromised upon as it can break or make your impression on users.
One of the great advantages to using an onboarding tool is that they offer ample features to make your job easy!. Checklists, Tooltips, Hotspots, Surveys, and Help Centers are some of the different features that help you optimally utilize various onboarding elements.
Every element in the onboarding process is important and personalization of each element is necessary to create a successful experience for users. The tool which can give this option, of course, ranks higher in terms of choice.
Customers need the help of guides and tutorials to understand the application or the product clearly. They should have access to the same as and when needed.
Data is the most important tool that gives you the measure of your product’s performance. Hence, it is vital for the tool that uses contain the analytics which provides you with the relevant data.
In the hyper-competitive SaaS world, no matter how high your growth is, if you are unable to control your churn rate, it is difficult for your company to sustain.
Customer Onboarding is nurturing your new customers, cultivating their friendship, and getting them acquainted with your product/service. This involves active guidance, user-friendly tutorials, and a great support system.
The whole purpose of customer onboarding is to get your customer accustomed to the product/service which you’re offering. Hence, it is important to emphasize the value it will bring to the table for the customer.
It becomes tricky here because different customers buy the same product for different reasons.
Once you know what value your customers are looking for, you need to find the shortest path to help them reach their goals as soon as possible. Hence, we need to ensure that each feature that we train our customer on is crucial to reach the goal
Yes, you read that right. This friendly approach of yours is going to take you a long way in your customer relationship journey. The earlier mentioned components of a customer onboarding checklist will help you with this approach.
You want your customer to come back to you to re-purchase the product., right?
After your welcome email, you must continue the bond through several other touch-points. This will help you to be in constant touch with your customer and any proactive support will ensure customer loyalty.
Usually, communications can be very challenging in any organization, and many
times what the customer wants at one level is not what they need at another. Hence, consistent and productive communication is imperative to resolve this recurring issue.
Pro tip: Designing a Customer Onboarding Framework for B2B SaaS
You can download a custom-made Onboarding Framework for your onboarding process.
Out of all the post-sales functions, customer onboarding is one of the critical functions that decides how fast your company will grow.
No matter how good your product or your sales team is if the customer is unable to gain value during onboarding, s/he is likely to churn.
Thus, to make sure that you provide proper onboarding, it is important to have a customer onboarding checklist.
A customer onboarding checklist will make sure that you don’t fail to recall anything as you welcome your new customers onboard.
The checklist should contain the components of the onboarding process based on your product features and your business goals. Remember to consider the following points when creating your onboarding checklist.
Pro tip: Why is it important to have a Customer Onboarding Checklist?
Businesses that optimize customer onboarding are more likely to encourage customer retention and brand loyalty. Let us understand the following points and know how to optimize your onboarding experience.
Customer Onboarding is the most important phase which has the potency to make or break your relationship with the customer. Hence success managers have a strong focus on the same.
Implementation, of your product or platform into the customer’s business, is just part of the onboarding process. It is most probably the biggest part and often the most complex but it is still a piece of the bigger pie.
Implementation is a specific, “technical” part of the onboarding process. In some cases, an implementation may require engineers or solution architects that would work alongside the CSMs.
The key takeaway is that you can easily get lost in the implementation phase but forget that you’re onboarding people, which is an entirely different skill.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is the difference between onboarding and training, as they are not the same thing.
Customer Onboarding is welcoming new customers, whereas training is to teach the new users about the product features. One of the best-kept secrets has been that you need to onboard your customers much before you train all the users.
Bonus tip: Can customer onboarding replace the training process?
Customer Onboarding if done correctly can be a game-changer for you and your business. Onboarding is your customer’s first hands-on experience with your products, so it needs to be a positive one. This is the reason why we’ve come up with such an exhaustive guide on customer onboarding.
Although creating a customer onboarding strategy is critical, it’s won’t work if you don’t have a reliable customer success manager (CSM) or an onboarding specialist to run the entire process. Check out our 10 Interview Questions to hire the best Customer Success Manager (CSM) to build a customer-centric onboarding team.
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