Onboarding new clients are highly crucial. During the client onboarding process, there is a potential risk of losing your customers. Customer lifetime value is usually staged in the course of the onboarding journey. In this article, we will cover all the information that is necessary to build a successful SaaS customer onboarding program.
What is SaaS Customer Onboarding Process?
Customer onboarding is a process that guides the customer from the beginning to the end of the customer journey. In other words, it is explicitly and systematically showing all the value you can provide and offer to customers.
What is Onboarding in SaaS?
SaaS onboarding is a unique opportunity and process when the customer gets the all information necessary to use the software efficiently. SaaS onboarding stages inform the customer about how to maximize benefits while using the software. For most cases, SaaS user onboarding starts with Informative video tutorials, articles, and other technical documents.
Why Customer Onboarding is Important for SaaS?
Customer onboarding is generally the first significant interaction between customers and SaaS. If SaaS companies fail to give great impressions by managing the customer onboarding process smoothly, it is possible to lose customers forever. For this reason, having an excellent onboarding strategy is crucial to have higher retention rates and, as a result, maintain business profitability.
What Defines Successful SaaS Onboarding?
A higher retention rate is one of the most important indicators that you have a great SaaS onboarding. Also, the following points are crucial to measuring the effectiveness of the onboarding program.
TTFV (Time to First Value)
Amount of time between the closed sales and onboarding process
Customer Progress
It is important to track customer progress during the onboarding process. Customer onboarding progress will help you find some customers’ pain points and weak points of your client onboarding program. The completion time of the onboarding process is a great signal to understand that your customer is struggling.
Trial to Paid Subscription
What percentage of the customers with a trial subscription is converted to a paid version. Additionally, measure how long did it take to convert free users to paid users. It is highly recommended to do A/B testing to find out what are the points of improvement.
Interaction with the Product (Product Adoption)
Track how many times your customers are logging in to your platform and how long they are spending by using the application. It will show you the engagement level of the customer with your product.
Churn
Simply put, it is how many users stop using your product or service. If you have a great onboarding strategy and service, you can expect lower churn rates. It is crucial to measure churn rates because higher churn rates might mean that your customers did not understand your product/service value.
How Do You Optimize Onboarding Customers?
1- Set an Objective for Your Onboarding Program
Knowing your goal is a vital step in creating a successful SaaS onboarding program. It is necessary to have a clear objective for the program and create measurable indicators that will help measure the success of your efforts
2- Define Success for Onboarding Steps
Define success for each of your onboarding steps. For instance, set a completion time for each step and understand which customers perform below the average. Another example might be completing the tutorial documents successfully.
3- Find the Customers that are Struggling
Analyze the data and find customers that are performing below the average according to your metrics. Analyzing the data will help you to understand the problematic points of your Onboarding program for SaaS.
4- Offer More Support
Offering more support to customers who are having problems is a great way to understand customers and build strong relationships. This will increase the chances of selling your product as well.
5- Collect Feedback
Collecting feedback from your customers effectively is essential for you to enhance your SaaS onboarding process. It will also give the impression that you care about your customers, and your company has excellent customer support.
6- Optimize and Re-Test
After collecting all the feedback and reviewing your data, try to improve the points leading to a bad customer experience. After that, test your new onboarding process and compare the data depending on your onboarding success metrics.
