Ever wondered how AI can improve your user onboarding flows?
The traditional approach is often a frustrating experience. It bombards customers with generic information, lacks in-depth analytics, and struggles with adapting to changes in user behavior. This can have a significant impact, as 74% of potential customers will switch to competitors if they perceive an onboarding flow to be confusing or complicated.
But the best part? 86% are willing to remain loyal if they receive proper onboarding and continuous education. That’s what AI-powered systems can help you achieve. With artificial intelligence tools, you can automate routine tasks, personalize onboarding experiences at scale, and trigger Aha! Moments faster. Let’s explore 7 strategies that have proven to work.
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7 AI-powered strategies for a successful onboarding process
We’ve divided the strategies into three buckets for clear categorization:
- Drive personalized engagement: Leveraging AI to tailor the onboarding experience to individual user needs.
- Automate onboarding optimization: Using AI to streamline and improve the onboarding process based on data analysis.
- Deliver proactive support: Employing AI to anticipate and address user challenges before they arise.
I. Drive personalized engagement
Personalized onboarding content directly addresses the user’s needs and shows how your product caters to their specific use case. This encourages them to engage more, leading to increased activation rates and higher customer satisfaction.
1. Localize onboarding content instantly with AI
Even if your audience understands English, translating your onboarding content to their native languages will build a deeper connection and boost instant user engagement.
Extra points if you can go beyond translating words to factor in cultural nuances. For example, something as simple as “Click here to get started” can be perceived as too commanding in certain cultures. Similarly, a bright red button, which might signify urgency in Western cultures, could have negative connotations in other regions.
Choose an AI tool that can understand these differences and adapt your messaging accordingly. Or better yet, have a human review the localized content before rolling it out to new users.
Another factor to consider is choosing a tool that integrates seamlessly with your onboarding elements. Platforms like Userpilot make this easy. For example, its AI-powered localization features let you instantly translate content for onboarding elements like surveys, modals, and resource centers, all without coding.
2. Boost user engagement with AI-powered copywriting
Onboarding microcopy helps you explain features and encourage users to take action. But let’s face it: this copy is hard to create and even harder when you need to keep your writing short and to the point.
Why spend hours brainstorming the perfect copy for each onboarding screen when generative AI can help you create copy based on the ideas you feed it? Besides saving time and maintaining consistency, AI can optimize your copy for conversion by suggesting wording that is more likely to cause user action.
Tools like Userpilot’s AI writing assistant let you do this in seconds. Imagine you’re building a welcome survey and can’t think of the right words to string together. You can write the ideas that come to your head and have this writing assistant improve, summarize, or make the content longer.
💡Pro tip: Follow the 20-60-20 AI prompting rule by Aakash Gupta:
- 20% prompt: Provide clear, detailed instructions to guide the AI.
- 60% AI draft: Use the AI’s output as a starting point.
- 20% refinement: Review, edit, and add your personal touch to create the final version.
3. Use AI to analyze new customer data and personalize customer experiences
Collect diverse customer data that covers details like demographics, in-app behavior, and survey responses. Then, use AI to synchronize all these data points and understand your users better.
AI systems use machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to predict future user behavior based on the data you’ve collected. For example, you might find that users who don’t complete the initial profile setup and haven’t logged in for three days are at a higher risk of churn. Based on this insight, you can then trigger a personalized email with a quick start guide and an invitation to a one-on-one onboarding session.
Userpilot can automate this entire process. With a few button clicks, you can set the platform to automatically collect user feedback through in-app surveys, then segment users and trigger personalized flows based on their responses:
Create fully customized in-app surveys code-free with Userpilot.
Global talent hub The Room had automation needs similar to the churn example described above. In their case, users were signing up and not adding their CVs to the platform. This was a big issue since it’s impossible to get hired through the platform without a CV.
The team solved the problem by using Userpilot to redesign their onboarding flow. As in the second and third slides, they created UI patterns that remind users to add their experience and upload a CV. The flow intelligently identified users who had not uploaded their CVs and provided continuous reminders.
The result? 75% increase in new CV uploads within 10 days of implementing this automation.
Power Up Your AI User Onboarding Flows with Userpilot
4. Create engaging AI videos for effortless onboarding
The customer data you collected through surveys and your analytics tool is important here; use it to create AI-powered personalized onboarding videos that address specific user needs or challenges.
For example, if a user is struggling to install your app, you could generate a video featuring an avatar that addresses them by name and walks them through the key steps.
Want to see how this works in real life? Here’s an example we generated to explain the onboarding process:
II. Automate onboarding optimization
This second category will show you how AI can empower you to analyze user data and improve your onboarding process.
5. Analyze user behavior and optimize onboarding with AI
Traditional analytics is great, but it relies on predefined rules and requires significant manual effort to analyze data.
AI-powered analytics overcome these limitations by automatically identifying patterns, spotting anomalies, and interpreting correlations that reveal deeper insights into user behavior.
How can you begin? Onboarding tools like Userpilot incorporate AI analytics functions that provide actionable insights. For example, instead of manually sifting through aggregated data, you can generate detailed funnel reports that automatically highlight how users interact with key pages of your app. That’s what Beable did when they used Userpilot to track content engagement:
III. Deliver proactive support
Finally, let’s discuss strategies that leverage AI tools to provide timely and relevant assistance to users.
6. Provide instant support with AI-powered chatbots
75% of customers expect around-the-clock customer service, but for many businesses, it’s impractical or too expensive to maintain human agents with such availability.
Solve this problem by using AI chatbots to answer common queries. You can significantly improve the effectiveness of your chatbot by training it on FAQs, product-specific knowledge, common troubleshooting steps, feature explanations, and user guides.
What’s more, you can integrate chatbots directly into your Userpilot onboarding flows to provide 24/7 assistance during this crucial customer journey stage.
7. Analyze user sentiment and improve onboarding with AI
Sentiment analysis helps you understand the emotional tone behind customer feedback. Equipped with this insight, you can identify at-risk customers and deploy proactive interventions to retain them.
How do you conduct sentiment analysis? You only need three steps if you’re using Userpilot:
- Collect user feedback through in-app surveys and NPS prompts.
- Use the built-in survey analytics feature to spot trends and understand user sentiment.
- Identify the recurring issues and address them to improve your overall onboarding experience.
The top AI-powered tools for your user onboarding process
Your AI user onboarding strategy is as effective as the tool you use. Let’s discuss some of the best platforms and their most relevant features.
1. Userpilot for optimizing the onboarding experience with an AI writing assistant
Userpilot is an all-in-one growth platform with features to help you design engaging experiences throughout the customer journey.
Its AI-powered WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor allows you to create and improve your user onboarding copy in minutes. You can fix spelling, correct grammar, and adjust content length.
Here’s how it works.
If you’re starting from scratch, just press “space” in any text box and insert a prompt.
Userpilot’s localization feature comes pre-loaded with 32 languages to help you provide personalized onboarding to your international customers.
You can add more languages or enrich existing translations by importing a CSV or XLIFF file.
Here’s an example of a localized welcome modal:
2. Synthesia for creating AI-generated video tutorials
Synthesia is a video communication platform that uses deep learning to create realistic, engaging video tutorials for your user onboarding process.
Instead of relying on costly and time-consuming video production, Synthesia allows you to generate professional-quality tutorials simply by providing a script. You can choose from over 200 diverse AI avatars and voices to represent your brand or even clone your own voice to create a truly tailored experience.
3. Freshchat for offering assistance through an AI chatbot
Freshchat is a customer support tool that empowers companies to create chatbots for contextual 24/7 assistance.
What makes this tool stand out is its multichannel nature and extensive localization options. It supports over 30 languages and allows you to provide proactive support through web widgets and popular messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Power up your onboarding with AI
Treat AI as a copilot that helps you get to your destination instead of an autopilot that runs the entire process.
In practice, this means always reviewing AI-generated results to ensure alignment with your onboarding goals and objectives. It’s also important to vet your data collection process because flawed, incomplete, or biased data will inevitably reflect in the AI’s output.
Ready to start building AI onboarding flows? Book a demo to see how Userpilot can help you generate microcopy, automate localization, and analyze customer data code-free.
Try Userpilot and Take Your AI User Onboarding to the Next Level
FAQ
What are the stages of user onboarding that AI can optimize?
AI systems can improve every stage of the user onboarding journey, including initial signup, secondary onboarding, and account expansion.
Why use AI during the customer onboarding process?
AI user onboarding solves many problems that product and customer success teams face at the moment. Some of these include:
- Increased personalization.
- Better microcopy creation.
- Proactive support.
- Predictive analytics.
- Data-driven improvements.
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