Think of the customer onboarding process as your user’s first impression of your product or service. Done well, it helps reduce time to value, driving customer success.

But if done poorly, you’ll have customers questioning why they even bothered in the first place. And the research backs this up. Poorly designed user onboarding causes 40-60% of new customers to drop off after signup.

The good news is – it’s fixable and it pays great dividends. In fact, 86% of customers report that they will remain loyal to a product if they’re provided a successful onboarding experience.

This article will help you unlock such customer satisfaction and loyalty, covering key topics like:

• Define customer onboarding.
• Understand if you need customer onboarding.
• Customer onboarding strategy mistakes to avoid.
• Steps to design a successful customer onboarding process.
• How to measure customer onboarding success.

What is customer onboarding?

Customer onboarding is the process of guiding new customers through your product, helping them understand how to use it effectively. It helps ease the transition from signup to experiencing the product’s value, often through tutorials, walkthroughs, and a supportive customer success team.

Do you need a customer onboarding process?

The short answer is: Yes, every B2B SaaS company needs a customer onboarding process.

Other processes, like secondary onboarding or ongoing user education, may not have such a directly proportional relationship to the bottom line.

However, new customer onboarding does. There is a linear relationship easily traceable between onboarding and its effect on revenue growth. This relationship holds true irrespective of what product model you implement, be it self-serve or more sales rep-reliant.

This also explains the common phrase “Retention starts with onboarding” which underscores the importance of developing a customer onboarding strategy.

However, the specific elements of your customer onboarding process will have to differ. These differences will depend on product models (self-serve, sales reps, etc.), product complexity, product lifecycle, etc.

What are the common customer onboarding mistakes?

Oftentimes, we’re blind to our shortcomings, which means we might not see the obvious roadblocks in our own customer onboarding strategy. To better equip you on how to avoid such possible flaws, I’ve listed down the most common ones to look out for.

Confusing sign-up process

If the customer onboarding process isn’t easy to understand, new customers will immediately give up and churn. And the starting point of any onboarding journey is sign-up. So, here are some ways your sign-up process might cause user frustration:

• Not conveying value immediately: You might focus too much on making the sign-up page look appealing. Or perhaps opt for unnecessarily pushy language. In either case, you sideline your main value proposition, confusing users about what you offer and why they need it.
• Making sign-up mandatory for basic exploration: Only make sign-up mandatory if your product’s value is clear from the start (e.g. for a tool that helps convert docs into PDFs). Otherwise, don’t force users to sign up to unlock value. A good workaround is to enable interactive demos right on the landing page, similar to what Zendesk and Pendo do.

• Poorly designed landing pages: Cluttered sign-up pages that don’t follow any UI design principles lead to a poor customer experience. Poor design includes examples like too many CTAs or text, slow loading time, no progress indicator, and unclear instructions.

Poor user experience

The customer onboarding process is effective only when the user experience is secure. A “secured” experience ensures an intuitive interface, clear instructions, and minimal friction so that new customers feel supported and at ease while navigating your product.

In stark contrast, here’s what makes for a poor user experience:

• Simple onboarding for complex products: More complex products need greater guidance. They require a level of explanation that a simple, shorter product tour just can’t provide. So don’t add a product tour for the sake of it when your product calls for a more detailed walkthrough.
• Ineffective self-service options: Without an in-app resource center, users can’t troubleshoot independently, adding to the customer support load. Additionally, there might be limited content formats, inaccurate resources, or a disorganized help center design.
• Unresolved technical issues: Issues such as login errors, broken links in tutorials, or unresponsive features, only further user confusion. Such bugs and errors disrupt the user’s first impression, reducing customer satisfaction and trust in your product.

Lack of post-sign-up engagement

The onboarding process doesn’t stop after new customers sign up. This is because the main goal of onboarding isn’t just to introduce new customers to your product.

Rather, the ultimate purpose of customer onboarding is to drive conversions.

However, it’s common to lose sight of this bigger aim and instead develop an onboarding process that fails to showcase product value. Such onboarding offers no real guidance or personalization necessary to guide users toward customer success and conversion.

Another oversight is not prioritizing collecting customer feedback or mistiming the onboarding feedback survey.

For instance, something I experienced with the survey tool ProProfs was that they sent NPS surveys right after users signed up. At that point, the user doesn’t know enough about your product to offer any valuable insights for future improvements.

You can escape this potential mistake by leveraging customer onboarding software though. Such tools provide customer onboarding templates for customizable survey design. Plus, they can automatically gather customer use case information upon signup, and then use it to design and trigger personalized onboarding.

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How should you design your customer onboarding strategy?

Before you build your customer onboarding strategy, you first need to figure out where you want to take your user. In other words, what is the core functionality you want users to explore through onboarding?

For example, for Notion, it might be “How to create and organize a workspace to streamline tasks, notes, and projects in one place.” This reflects Notion’s main feature and defines what success looks like for the onboarding process.

Once you specify your victory moment, you’re ready to design your customer onboarding strategy. Let’s go over how.

Start with mapping use cases and user personas

By now, you’ve established what functionality you’re guiding new customers towards.

Next, it’s time to understand possible use cases and user personas that might require this functionality. So you can map out how each group of users interact with your product, along with their defining characteristics, goals, and challenges.

However, best practices suggest that you assign the mapping to someone who understands the product and target audience well: Someone who’s been in the company long enough to understand common use cases and pick up on the nuances in customer problems and behaviors.

Because sometimes the defined use cases may slightly differ from what customers actually use your product for. Or things might get lost in translation, with customers describing their concerns in a language that only a seasoned professional could understand.

For example, customers might say, “We need a feature to export reports into multiple formats.” Taking it at face value, you might start building the feature.

However, someone who knows your target audience well might recognize that the actual issue is customers struggling to share data effectively. So, the real solution could be simplified sharing options.

List down key actions that lead to customer success

For each use case and persona, determine the shortest path new customers must take to experience product value. Put differently, the least number of steps required for customers to see how your tool helps solve their problem.

Once you’ve listed down the optimal customer journey, add key actions users should take at each step to inch closer to value.

For instance, here are what the key actions for a project management tool like Trello might be:

1. Sign up, where users fill in their basic information to gain access.
2. Set up a project by naming it and assigning a deadline, which introduces them to the core functionality.
3. Add team members to collaborate effectively.
4. Define tasks and assign owners to structure the workflow.

Each key action requires specific guidance, which brings us to the next step of the puzzle.

Structure your customer onboarding process

For each key action defined above, determine what sort of guidance is best suited.

For example, Typeform’s customer onboarding utilizes tooltips and modals to get users to perform key tasks, along with checklists to visualize the user’s progress along these tasks.

However, the emphasis here isn’t on simply leveraging in-app guidance tools like walkthroughs or tooltips. Instead, it’s on finding out how you can get new customers to complete the above actions without losing engagement.

So each guidance element you choose needs to be well thought-out and justifiable. Only then can you finally start structuring your customer onboarding process.

To help with the structuring, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Start with an onboarding survey: This helps you collect information on customer roles, industry, JTBD, etc., useful for segmenting them from the get-go.
• Personalize guidance: Based on the above user segmentation, you can design tailored tooltips, walkthroughs, checklists, etc. Or for more complex products, trigger demo invites for each customer segment. This ensures minimal friction, creating a happy path to onboarding.
• Try non-intrusive elements: While UI modals work for Typeform, they might not for you. This is because certain personas tend to ignore intrusive information in the form of modals and pop-ups. So you would benefit more from non-intrusive elements like checklists and progress bars.
• Leverage no-code software: Tools like Userpilot make designing and executing customer onboarding easier. Plus, they go beyond onboarding, offering behavior analytics, experimentation, feedback collection, and support to drive product adoption.

Lastly, while it is tempting to opt for SKDs to customize customer onboarding experiences, it’s best not to. Because in reality, the complex handoff between design and development teams always makes SKDs fall short of what you actually need.

Attention Insight understood this vital point, instead taking the no-code route with Userpilot to refine their onboarding strategy. Implementing an interactive walkthrough, onboarding checklist, dedicated flows, hotspots, and more, they were able to boost user activation rates for a key action by 47%.

Monitor the result and iterate for a successful customer onboarding process

Designing your customer onboarding strategy doesn’t stop here. To consistently improve customer satisfaction and retention, the onboarding design process should take an iterative approach.

This means you need to regularly monitor how your customer onboarding process performs regarding the end-goal — driving trial-to-paid conversion.

There are several ways to measure this performance. You can track customer onboarding metrics like engagement rate or task success rate. Perform funnel analysis to discover drop-off points or collect and analyze users’ feedback.

All these methods will help uncover gaps in the current onboarding process along with improvement opportunities.

Based on any gaps you find, you can also try experimenting with ways to refine customer onboarding. For instance, run A/B tests of onboarding elements, like what onboarding content format performs better, videos, or interactive walkthroughs.

How do you measure customer onboarding success?

The obvious answer you’ll find online is to gauge customer onboarding success through common metrics like user engagement or time to value.

However, that’s only part of the answer because simply tracking the metrics won’t tell you much. Instead, translate those metrics into what they mean for your product.

So if your chosen metric is time to value, consider how elements in your customer onboarding process contribute to it. For example, if you incorporate checklists, then look at how long it takes users to finish tasks on the onboarding checklist. Or what’s the completion rate for each task on the checklist?

Looking at these aspects instead of just the metric will help identify bottlenecks or friction areas that delay value realization and onboarding success.

Another tip is not to rely solely on a single measure of success. Instead, use a combination of analyses for a more holistic view of how your customer onboarding process is doing.

For instance, use funnel analysis to identify drop-offs, path analysis to study activity patterns, and feedback analysis for user insights behind churn.

Looking for customer onboarding software?

One last bit of advice — customer onboarding doesn’t have to be a dull process, just about getting new customers to start using your product.

It’s much more than that — the starting point that defines your entire relationship with your customer. So start the relationship off on the right foot by building some excitement into it.

Celebrate customer wins after each task they complete. Utilize personalized messaging and some gamification elements. Add a progress bar so customers feel good about everything they’ve accomplished. The more excitement you create during customer onboarding, the more loyalty you’ll win.

Adding such onboarding elements becomes easier with customer onboarding software. Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can design and implement these elements, along with interactive walkthroughs, checklists, onboarding surveys, and more.

Try Userpilot and Take Your Customer Onboarding Process to the Next Level

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