Best Customer Onboarding Practices in 2023

You’ve worked hard to gain a new customer — your marketing team has poured time and resources into a lead generation strategy, and your sales team has spent weeks or longer nurturing the lead and winning the conversion. But now it all comes down to the customer’s first experience with the product actually in their hands (so to speak). All that time, effort, and money spent winning the customer could go to waste if the product or service doesn’t deliver the value the customer expected. Following customer onboarding, best practices can ensure customers are fully equipped to succeed in as little time as possible.

If a customer churns right away, it could be because the product or service is simply not up to par, but there could also be another reason. A customer may need help understanding the product or service well enough to use it successfully. To combat this issue, businesses should strive to provide the best customer onboarding experiences possible.

Some products are relatively simple to use or operate right away. A customer’s natural first impression of a new sweater is generally pretty accurate because everyone already knows how to wear a sweater and how they prefer their sweaters to fit and look. However, software products are much more complex. Customers might have never encountered a tool like the one your B2B SaaS business offers. 

Customers are unlikely to be able to reach the intended value of a complex software solution without some guidance. If they are not offered this guidance, it’s no surprise that many of them will become frustrated or confused and give up on the product or service right away. Implementing a SaaS onboarding strategy that employs customer onboarding best practices is one of the keys to retaining and engaging customers at the very beginning of their customer journey.

Best Customer Onboarding Practices

Your customer onboarding strategy should ultimately be designed around your customers’ unique needs. No two SaaS products are exactly alike, so it’s important to take your product’s specifics into account while you’re planning your onboarding roadmap. 

However, there are also quite a few customer onboarding tactics that can play a valuable part in just about every customer onboarding strategy. Here are a few of the best customer onboarding practices to make your SaaS onboarding process a success:

1. Automate

Your customers want their onboarding process to be as easy as possible. They don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort manually navigating convoluted steps or trying to figure out what to do next. The onboarding process should be a frictionless experience that reduces stress for the customer — not one that adds stress. 

One way to streamline the onboarding process and make it more intuitive for the customer to navigate is to automate as many parts as you can. Automation can help guide the user from step to step so they never have to wonder what they’re supposed to do next. Northpass makes it possible to set up personalized learning paths that can automatically lead customers along an onboarding route that’s tailored to their needs. 

2. Use Customer Onboarding Tools

It’s usually very difficult to manage the customer onboarding process successfully without the proper tools. Selecting the right customer onboarding tools is an important part of the planning process. The type of customer onboarding software you choose will have a major impact on the kind of onboarding experience you are ultimately able to deliver to your customers. 

One of the most common types of onboarding software is learning management software. A learning management system (LMS) is a powerful tool you can use to organize all your brand’s educational content into a central, easily-accessible digital repository. Learning management systems can also be used as customer onboarding platforms. 

3. Customize It

Customers often respond well to a personalized onboarding experience. Customizing the onboarding experience can not only make customers feel like they are truly valuable to the company, but it can also help them learn to use the product or service more successfully. A generic, one-size-fits-all onboarding process is usually not as effective as one that is specifically tailored to the needs of each individual customer. 

You can use customer onboarding software like an LMS to deliver individualized customer onboarding experiences. For example, you can use Northpass to track customers’ progress through their onboarding training materials, which makes it possible to reach out directly and offer customized assistance if they appear to be struggling with a particular step.

4. Keep It Going

The customer onboarding process starts the moment the customer signs up for your software service. After the customer has converted, any time you wait to begin the onboarding process is wasted time. It’s usually a good idea to set the first step of the process in motion immediately. Often, the first action is a welcome email that tells the customer what to expect and directs them toward the next step in the process. It’s crucial to keep the momentum going once the customer has made their purchase so they can make it through the onboarding process as quickly and efficiently as possible.

5. Define Expectations & Customer Outcomes

Establishing effective communication upfront can almost always prevent problems down the line. If a customer is unhappy with the results they’re getting from a product or service, the cause could simply be misaligned expectations. 

It’s very important to listen to customer expectations and understand their objectives as well as clearly define what they can realistically hope to achieve. This ensures the customer enters the onboarding process with an accurate expectation and helps your customer success team guide them toward their desired outcomes. If the customer is continually encountering onboarding interactions that don’t line up with their expectations, they might decide the service is not what they were looking for.

6. Onboard Your CSMs

Onboarding best practices don’t only apply to customers — while customer onboarding is critical, it’s also important to effectively onboard your customer success managers (CSMs). A successful customer onboarding program requires collaboration from a whole talented team of customer success professionals. Everyone at an organization who contributes in any way to the customer onboarding program needs to be thoroughly trained in the best onboarding strategies. Organizing this internal training process into an onboarding flow of its own can help keep training efficient and manageable, as well as help keep all team members aligned toward common customer onboarding objectives.

7. Analyze & Iterate

Your onboarding process should evolve over time. This means you need to consider your onboarding program’s flexibility from the start. It’s important to remember that some parts of your onboarding program will probably not go as planned right out of the gate, and what works right now may not work later on as products evolve and customer needs change.

To ensure your customer onboarding program does not stagnate, it’s usually best to periodically analyze the program's outcomes. You can use a learning management system like Northpass in order to track your customers’ behavior within your onboarding courses and determine which parts are working and which parts are not effective. Then, you can update your onboarding program as needed and start the analysis cycle again.

8. Make It Human

Technology is a great tool to assist with onboarding. Using software like a learning management system or another technology solution like automation is a great way to make your customer onboarding process more efficient. However, it’s important not to completely abandon the human side of onboarding in pursuit of tech solutions. Some of the very best customer onboarding programs combine technology with a human touch. For example, you can use a blended learning strategy to provide customers with remote access to training materials without sacrificing the experience of speaking to an instructor or fellow learners face-to-face. 

Importance of Customer Onboarding

These eight tips are some of the most important customer onboarding best practices to keep in mind. Businesses across nearly all industries can reap numerous rewards from maintaining a streamlined and effective customer onboarding process — however, customer onboarding takes on special importance for B2B SaaS businesses in particular. 

When your product or service is as complex as most SaaS products are, educating your customers is crucial. Without customer education, many of your users will become discouraged quickly when they aren’t able to reach the value they’ve been promised on their own. That’s why your customer onboarding process should kick off the customer education journey immediately. The sooner you start empowering customers to succeed with your products, the greater chance you have of impressing them and retaining their business long-term.

As a part of the customer education experience, the customer onboarding process can benefit considerably from learning management tools like Northpass. Northpass is a learning management system that’s designed to help SaaS companies make product education (including onboarding materials) more accessible to customers. Northpass offers numerous features like customizable learning paths, advanced analytics, and convenient cloud-based access that make it an ideal choice for driving improvement to your business’s customer onboarding strategy.