Fundamentals of SaaS Customer Onboarding
“A successful onboarding paves the way to retention, renewal and even upsell in the future.”
Onboarding is a critical phase of the SaaS customer journey, setting the stage for your post-sales customer experience. It’s when customers form their first impressions of your product and decide whether it gives them value – or not.
Like any first impression, once formed, it tends to stick. This can set you up for long-term success or doom your relationship to short-term failure.
Time to Value is Key
Your customers have expectations about what they want to achieve through your product. Therefore, it’s critical to keep “time to value” as short as possible, especially during the onboarding phase. If customers don’t realize value quickly, they may form doubts about whether your product can deliver.
Check out this stat from Groove’s benchmark for early customer success.
“Free users who complete the onboarding email prompts within 24 hours are almost 80% more likely to convert to paid customers than those who don’t.”
In other words, the faster a customer has a rewarding experience with your product, the better your chances of keeping them for the long-term.
On the other hand, you might encounter customers who “buy then forget” about your product. They may have been highly engaged during the sales process but lost steam after the purchase.
While this may be out of your control, it’s important to engage with every customer as soon as possible to try to keep the momentum during onboarding.
Some of these methods include:
- One-on-one training
- One-to-many training
- Self-guided learning management
- In-app walk-throughs
- Self-service product knowledge base
In other words, grab and keep their attention from the start.
Stay relentless even if it feels like you’re herding cats, and don’t be afraid to hold customers accountable for doing their part.
Remember, if a customer loses interest in your product, becomes confused, or doesn’t get the early results they expect, you may never win them back.
Create Onboarding Milestones
Effective onboarding incorporates specific objectives that customers should achieve as they begin to use your product. These objectives should align with your customer’s goals, and be achievable and measurable within your product.
Think of these as “aha!” moments, when customers first experience your product’s core value proposition.
Of course, customers won’t realize all of your objectives right away.
To ensure your onboarding phase is successful, you need to break down the process of achieving these objectives into “milestones.” Using milestones, you can monitor customer progress and make sure that they see results within specific timeframes.
“Onboarding milestones should be measurable events, outcomes, or behaviors.”
At Freshsuccess, one of our most important onboarding milestones is data integration.
We capture customer interactions, support tickets, NPS, and financial information from leading solution providers, and our clients leverage this data to gain a 360° view of their customers. It’s a pre-requisite for success with Freshsuccess and a key part of our onboarding process.
We also “eat our own dog food” and use Freshsuccess to manage our customer onboarding.
Here’s how it works:
- We break each onboarding milestone into actionable tasks (e.g. obtain credentials, complete field mappings, etc.).
- We have concurrent milestones (e.g. data integration and training), and they can be triggered after other milestones.
- We define specific timeframes to complete each milestone, and Freshsuccess shows us if anyone falls behind. This keeps our process on-track and ensures that our new clients achieve their onboarding goals in a timely fashion.
What are good milestones to track?
Your milestones should be measurable events, outcomes, or behaviors.
However, some onboarding milestones may not be obvious at first. For behavioral insights, you can turn to product usage data about your healthy customers.
- Which features do they use?
- Does feature usage differ by tier?
The goal is to identify how successful customers leverage your product’s capabilities as compared to clients who struggle or churn. Then, create tasks that help guide new customers to adopt similar behavior.
Monitor Onboarding Progress
Milestones help you monitor your customers through every step of their onboarding stage. This will help you identify roadblocks and highlight unengaged accounts so you can reach out and help.
In many ways, these “engagement alerts” function as an early warning system for customer churn.
For high-touch clients, consider holding regularly scheduled meetings to keep everyone in sync and on track. Use these meetings to establish your desired cadence with high-touch customers from the start.
For low-touch customers, take advantage of email automation to help guide your users towards desired outcomes. Segmenting accounts using onboarding metrics lets you create highly targeted (and relevant) onboarding communications at scale.
Take the opportunity to gather valuable feedback as your customers make progress.
Surveys and check-ins can help you adjust your onboarding process over time. Depending on your onboarding cycle, it may even make sense to gather feedback at specific intervals (e.g. start, mid-point, etc.) or upon completion of milestones.
Ideally, your customer health score will also reflect the onboarding experience so new customers who are struggling won’t slip through the cracks.
Is there a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding customers? Probably not.
The path to success can differ among certain segments within your customer base. As you continue to expand and refine your onboarding milestones, you may find that different tiers of customers need different onboarding approaches.
Using these same techniques, you can construct different rules for these kinds of customers, thereby tracking separate milestones for each tier.
Knowing when customers miss critical milestones gives you the opportunity to reach out, understand their problem(s), and guide them back on the path to success.