It’s simple to go wrong with SaaS onboarding and fail. Following all the recommendations increases your chances of user activation and a reasonable retention rate. Those impressed by your goods should sign up for a membership. But you’ve already lost them if you can’t run a smooth SaaS onboarding process. The initial stages of a subscription are formative in terms of client loyalty. An efficient onboarding procedure is essential to guarantee this kind of experience. If you don’t use SaaS onboarding software, keeping them as paying clients each month can be difficult. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a solid SaaS onboarding process in place. This article will discuss some pitfalls and best practices for saas onboarding.
SaaS Onboarding: What Is It?
SaaS onboarding, often known as SaaS user onboarding, is an organization’s procedure to orient new customers to its software as a service. Remember that new user has no prior experience with your software and will benefit significantly from instruction as they learn the ropes and progress to more complex uses of the program.
Best Practices: 2022!
The question is where you should begin:
Usually, the person who helps design the onboarding process also helps create the product itself. You’ve worked hard to ensure that the product meets the needs of its target audience. You’ve worked hard on it and want everyone to see it. If this describes you, proceed cautiously as you design the onboarding process. The natural inclination will be to begin by including numerous tooltips that emphasize your product’s most distinctive and beloved attributes. The issue with this strategy is that you’ll concentrate more on the things you’re enthusiastic about and prevent people from making that decision themselves.
If you want to know what your new users want, you should poll them with a series of questions. In this way, you showcase many onboarding options and guide customers toward the one that would help them achieve their goals rapidly. Users will feel more in control of the onboarding process if it is structured around their answers to a series of questions. You should work with a SaaS onboarding program or software that incorporates interaction into all of its tutorials. Many of these solutions are designed for a linear approach to product onboarding.
Goals that are reinforced have a greater chance of being achieved:
This may seem like a no-brainer, but explaining the rationale behind a customer’s actions when utilizing new technology is essential. Understanding the big picture when using new software with prior experience and background might be challenging. On the other hand, customer success managers understand what it takes to ensure a client’s success and can articulate precisely why they suggest particular courses of action. It is essential to provide a reason for anything you ask your customer to do or do together during the onboarding process. That’s why learning about your clients’ short, intermediate, and long-term aims is crucial. Trust and anxiety are at a premium in the early stages of your customer’s lifetime; being able to justify your actions by pointing back to those goals helps greatly.
Be selective in what information you ask for:
When it comes to user data, one of the most essential rules of thumb for SaaS organizations is only to collect what you intend to utilize. The people in charge of designing onboarding experiences often cut corners by copying the practices of other organizations in the same industry. Just because every other onboarding experience you’ve seen requests it, you shouldn’t ask a new user their job title. Recognize why you need that data and how you can improve the user’s experience by doing so.
Asking for job titles is one method to determine if users with specific job titles prefer one path over another. It is useful if you’re implementing the best practices in this article and giving users some control over their onboarding experience. By keeping this information in mind, you may better cater to the needs of consumers with that job title in the future.
Time-efficient optimization:
We hope that every shopper who makes a purchase feels nothing but joy and satisfaction—gaining a customer’s attention within the first 24 hours after a transaction is crucial if you want to capitalize on their enthusiasm and maintain momentum after the sale. Without it, your customer’s enthusiasm may fade, and they may start giving more attention to other tasks. The worst-case scenario is that the customer develops doubts about their purchase and begins to feel regret.
Consciously organize “new client welcome time” for your CSMs.
This initially needs delving into the numbers. You can forecast how much time has to be set aside on the teams’ schedule to welcome new customers by looking at the trends and numbers of consumers you sign up for each month or quarter. Always set new customers as your top priority. Existing clients are at least somewhat trustworthy, and they might be understanding if you need to reschedule. New consumers have zero trust, and if you disappoint them immediately, it can be twice as difficult to win them over later.
Make some of the processes automatic.
At the beginning of a customer’s lifecycle, scheduling calendars between your team and their teams can be a time-consuming and inefficient way to spend time. Sending a welcome email to the customer once a contract is closed is a good way to show appreciation and educate them on the next steps, the people they may reach out to, and how to schedule appointments. Numerous resources exist to facilitate this sort of robotic process automation. Check to determine if you have access to the marketing team’s automation technology to develop your client onboarding initiatives.
Conclusion
A thousand examples of successful SaaS onboarding could serve as inspiration, but here’s the crux of the matter: The specifics of the saas onboarding process will vary based on factors including the nature of the business, the nature of the product or service being offered, and the aims of the organization. Not everyone will have the same result from attempting a method that has been successful for others. Experiment with those recommended practices mentioned above to find the optimal approach combinations and maximize results while keeping the customer at the center of the onboarding process.
