Glossary
Customer Onboarding Labs
A customer onboarding lab is a specialized type of virtual training lab designed to help a business create and deliver hands-on training to new customers. Typically encompassing setup, training, and product adoption, labs may feature guided walkthroughs, scenario-based education, free-roam sandboxes, or virtual demos. They’re also designed to integrate with other customer onboarding solutions such as learning management systems and learning experience platforms.
How Onboarding Labs Work
Since they’re designed to make the customer onboarding process as seamless as possible for both customers and employees, customer-focused training software generally offers the following functionality:
- Extensive training and behavioral analytics
- Videoconferencing and screensharing
- File sharing
- Streamlined setup and configuration
- Support for both self-service and high-touch onboarding
- Automated feedback for trainees
- On-demand resourcing
The Benefits of Customer Onboarding Labs
Using a cloud-based virtual platform to onboard customers provides several benefits compared to traditional in-person training.
Accessibility
Trainees can access a virtual lab from anywhere with an Internet connection. This makes them an excellent choice for any company with a geographically distributed customer base.
Engagement
Interactive training will always be more compelling than passive learning. Allowing customers to ‘learn by doing’ can simultaneously speed up adoption, improve training outcomes, and reduce churn.
Cost-Effectiveness
Compared to in-classroom education and traditional virtual training, cloud-based onboarding labs require significantly fewer resources. Using them also eliminates travel time.
Scalability
Larger-scale deployments can be incredibly challenging to accommodate with traditional classrooms or labs. Because they’re built to scale, virtual environments don’t suffer from this shortcoming.
Flexibility
Most virtual labs provide a range of different options for training setup and delivery. Rather than being limited to specific environments or training modalities, companies can tweak their training based on each customer’s needs.
Customer Onboarding Best Practices
Training plays a pivotal role in reducing customer churn. But what differentiates a successful customer onboarding initiative from an unsuccessful one? Aside from finding the right customer onboarding software, it’s all about strategy.
Keep the following best practices in mind:
- Understand each customer’s core business objectives and pain points
- Identify which software features best address those needs
- Keep initial onboarding simple. Avoid focusing on advanced functionality at the outset
- Prioritize interactivity when developing training content
- Keep track of the right SaaS onboarding metrics, which include:
- Time to first value
- Completion rate and abandonment rate
- User behavior
- Retention and churn
- Daily and monthly active users
- Activation rate
- Product adoption rate
- Collect feedback from users who’ve completed your training, and use that to identify weaknesses and bottlenecks
- Provide customers with additional training materials they can explore and reference post-onboarding
- Regularly revisit and update your onboarding process as your software evolves
It’s also important to choose the right style of onboarding.
Low-touch onboarding requires minimal interaction between company and customer. It’s almost always delivered on-demand, and the customer has complete autonomy over how they engage with and explore the product. Unless a company uses adaptive learning for personalization, a low-touch process is best-suited to simple, high-volume onboarding.
High-touch onboarding sees the company play an active role from beginning to end, prioritizing virtual instructor-led training over self-paced training. It’s usually necessary for highly complex software or deployments that involve multiple stakeholders. A company may also employ high-touch onboarding with extremely high-value customers.
