Glossary
Customer Onboarding Software
It’s important to provide exceptional experiences at every point of the customer journey. Onboarding is a crucial part of this. This is particularly the case for software companies where guidance and training are required to get the most value from your product. Using the right customer onboarding platform can take the customer onboarding process to the next level and prove hugely beneficial for everyone involved. The fact that a higher percentage of b2b customer interactions occur remotely means a good virtual onboarding process is key.
What is Customer Onboarding Software?
Customer onboarding is the process of both welcoming new customers and helping them learn how to use your product. Customer onboarding software is the digital technology that makes this as seamless and effective as possible. When it comes to SaaS customer onboarding, this largely involves facilitating customer education and training. But it can perform a number of important roles. The right software can help provide a joined-up experience for customers (and your employees) by integrating with your organization’s other technologies and systems. Platforms with data analytics built-in can help you monitor user activity and measure key customer onboarding metrics, which can be used to improve the onboarding process.
Why is the Customer Onboarding Process so Important?
It is crucial for several reasons:
1. First Impressions Count
Customers will be keen and eager to get started. But for even the simplest software, they will need some guidance. Now is not the time to abandon them, but to provide value through engaging education and helpful tips and tricks. With the right software you can build and nurture the right kind of relationship right from the off.
2. Value Enhancement
With increasing competition across industries and customer loyalty harder to come by than ever before, customer onboarding takes on added significance. Organizations are prioritizing customer retention, and it all starts with onboarding. Customer education and training has a role to play to ensure customers unlock the full potential and value of your product. You need to make sure they know how to use your product to meet their business objectives, and there’s no better place to start than onboarding.
3. It’s Easy to Get Wrong
Go in too strong and customers may be overwhelmed with technical information, which can lead to poor user adoption. And on the other extreme, leaving employees with little to no guidance can have the same result. To throw in another complication, every customer will have preferences on how they engage in training and in how they learn best. It’s important to have all of this in mind when preparing your onboarding strategy, as a flexible approach with different learning options may be best. You might want to provide self-service onboarding or include instructor-led training at certain points too.
The Benefits of Using Customer Onboarding Software
So how do you build the right relationship and get things off to a flying start? Here are the main benefits that customer onboarding software will bring to your organization.
- Engage customers and improve training outcomes
- Facilitate seamless experiences for remote customers
- Offer a range of training options—e.g. hands-on, instructor-led, self-paced—to provide personalized learning and freedom for customers to engage in learning on their own terms
- Gain actionable insights from training data and analytics to continually improve onboarding processes
- Deliver consistent joined-up experiences at every customer interaction point on the customer journey
Customer onboarding software can help you engage new customers in your product and begin your relationship the right way. When you improve SaaS onboarding processes at your organization you also boost the likelihood of fostering customer loyalty and better customer retention rates.
