The importance of customer onboarding cannot be disregarded for any SaaS company that hopes to have long-term customers. This is because proper customer onboarding is the foundation of customer success with your product. A customer onboarding process also drives user retention.
Read on to learn more about customer onboarding and the benefits of customer onboarding for your business.
What is Customer Onboarding?
A customer onboarding process is simply the process of familiarizing new customers with your product to clarify any ambiguity they may have and to ensure they achieve their desired results.
Onboarding makes the difference between a satisfied and an unsatisfied customer. If done successfully, customer onboarding has the potential to turn new customers into enthusiastic long-term users of your product.
10 Reasons Why Customer Onboarding is Important
The benefits of customer onboarding for a SaaS business are numerous. Here are 10 benefits of customer onboarding:
Helps you understand your customer’s goal (job to be done)
Every successful product is designed to meet the user’s needs. If you can’t help the user achieve their goal, they churn.
An effective onboarding process helps you understand your customer by defining their job to be done (JBTD). It gives you in-depth information about your customers and addresses their needs upfront with the right resources they need to succeed with your product.
During onboarding, you can ask for personal information to learn more about them. For example, you can use an onboarding survey to ask about your new user’s profession and recommend valuable features they may not have discovered on their own. Here’s an example of an onboarding survey from copy Ai
In this onboarding survey, Loom strategically asks the customer about how they plan to use their product. This would help them group their users into segments, recommend relevant features, and personalize their experience.
Builds customer relationships and increases customer satisfaction
Another benefit of customer onboarding is that it helps you build relationships with your customers. This facilitates customer satisfaction.
When new users start using your product, don’t leave them alone. Use interactive walkthroughs to help them understand your product and give them a clear picture of its features.
Good onboarding builds trust and sets the user up for success. It sets clear expectations upfront, so customers know exactly what your product does and what to expect.
Drives users to the activation stage faster
Effective onboarding drives users to the activation stage faster. When customers become activated, they know the value of your product, which leads to key feature adoption.
This, in turn, encourages them to keep using your product, try out more features, and become power users who refer your product to others.
Keeps users engaged and drives product adoption
A good onboarding process encourages your users to keep interacting with your product. Not just your product, but your business.
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Onboarding creates a good first impression that motivates them to explore your product, discover relevant features, and upgrade from trial to paid customers. Hence, it helps them reach product adoption faster.
Increase customer retention and cut back on acquisition costs
Having a customer onboarding process that is effective and efficient can increase customer retention. If you’re able to onboard customers and help them discover your product’s value quickly, they’re more likely to stick around and become repeat customers.
Since you’re retaining more customers, you spend less on acquiring new customers which in turn, increases your company’s profit
Higher product referral
Satisfied customers are more likely to refer your product to others. With great onboarding, you can turn users into raving fans who freely talk about your product and become strong advocates for your brand.
Having raving fans drives word-of-mouth referrals and helps you build credibility in the minds of new users—even before they try out your product.
Educates the Customer
Another objective of customer onboarding is to teach customers all they need to know about your product and its relevance to them. This ensures they can maximize its features to get their work done.
For example, Asana uses short feature onboarding videos to introduce features to new users. The short video is embedded in a modal and only displayed to users when it’s needed.
Reduce churn rate
If customers have no knowledge or experience of your product’s benefits, they will jump ship and move to another competitor. Good onboarding takes care of this.
Creating a seamless onboarding keeps customers happy and takes note of friction points that may cause a high drop-off of users. This knowledge will help you proactively deploy appropriate customer retention strategies.
It will also help you address customer concerns before they become major issues.
Gives your business a competitive edge
Deploying a brilliant customer onboarding process can set you apart from competitors.
When you have a good onboarding process, people automatically think your business is credible and will choose to stay with you instead of going elsewhere.
Improve trial to paid conversion
If you offer a freemium product or a trial version, customer onboarding is when you sell the benefits of your product to the user. A good onboarding process shows your product’s value and convinces your customer that it can solve their problems.
Such customers are more likely to convert to paid ones with a premium customer onboarding experience.
Conclusion
Businesses that embrace customer onboarding soon realize its importance to their customer growth strategies. However, establishing a customer onboarding process may seem daunting if you do not already have one.
But with Churn360, you can get one set up easily. Churn360 has a special solution to help SaaS businesses design the best customer journeys for their clients. Book a demo today.
