For SaaS companies, customer onboarding is a crucial part of their customer journey. The effectiveness of your client education and relationship strategies hugely affect your customer retention rate and growth. Ensuring that customers have an outstanding experience during this phase can lead to higher lifetime-values (LTVs).
But, how do you ensure at the early stage of your user journey that you will retain your customer’s business for its lifetime? Read on to learn more about how you can create a successful customer onboarding experience that puts their confidence and trust in your SaaS, allowing you to retain customers— and even earn referrals!
What Does an Effective SaaS Customer Onboarding Look Like?
1. Make sure customers understand the value they are getting out of using your service
It is crucial that in a successful customer onboarding stage, you provide your clients a comprehensive overview of what your product or service can do for them and how it will benefit their business operations in the long run.
Sure, your customer has already put their trust in your company because they believe that their business will run much better with your SaaS to support it. Reinforce that belief with an exciting and insightful meeting. Much like a second or third date!
Whether you choose to make a virtual presentation to your clients or share a customer onboarding document, it is important that you sit down and spend time on your users as enthusiastically as you did when you first marketed and pitched your SaaS to them.
Successful customer onboarding includes presenting to users (again) what they need to understand about your product in relation to their business, and showing them the figures that they can achieve with the help of their partnership with you.
Your users need to confirm that they made the right investment in a SaaS company (amongst many!) that does not only understand what they need as a business, but also cares about the relationship you have with them.
Such a positive experience can only do you favours when your clients bring you up in their meetings with their customers and partners.
2. Provide educational resources and tutorials
Empower your customers during the onboarding phase to be educated and independent when it comes to your SaaS product.
Remember that not all your customers will be savvy when it comes to the specifics of your software. In fact, even in this age, a lot of brilliant minds in business from all levels are still struggling and intimidated by tech and digital concepts. Help customers get up to speed quickly on how to use your software or platform. This will help reduce confusion and save time for both you and the customer.
From profile creation to basic troubleshooting, provide easily accessible materials for them to learn.
Create these resources using a language that is direct, simple, and positively representative of your brand. Using new software feels daunting enough; make the learning phase as smooth as possible.
Tutorial videos and blogs, illustrations, workflow diagrams, and animation that teach and answer every possible concern when using your software will allow your client to reap the benefits from their investment, and motivate them to continue to rely on your processes and software, and share the good news of your company.
3. Implement a customer success team
Problems and confusion - whether due to a technical error or a lack of information on the user’s part - while using your software are inevitable.
Letting your clients know during onboarding that there is a team available to provide personalised support when they need it is greatly reassuring. This team should be available during all office hours (24 hours if you cater globally), and competent to reach back and provide options/solutions to a concerned client within 5-15 minutes of their initial query.
Having an accessible customer service resource will build trust between you and your clients and make them more likely to stay with you and recommend your reliable solutions to other businesses they work with.
4. Analyse and LISTEN!
As is with any aspect of SaaS business and customer service, customer onboarding should continuously adjust in favour of the needs of the clients and in the correction of the flaws or shortcomings that reveal themselves through earlier processes.
Accept customer feedback with urgency and empathy, and analyse it throughout the onboarding process to get insights into potential areas of improvement or additional features that could be added in order to better meet your customer’s needs.
By taking these steps, SaaS companies can move towards an increasingly effective and excellent customer onboarding plan that will lead to increased client referrals and happier customers in the long run. With an optimised process in place, SaaS businesses can build enduring relationships with their customers and create reputedly positive customer experiences that will lead to continued success for both the SaaS team and the client’s business.
Bonus: Ask and you might just receive!
When you have reached a point in your relationship with your users where you have provided consistently excellent service and they trust you enough to share their favourite stories or their pain points, ask them for more comprehensive feedback. This way, you will understand their struggles and will be able to inform your decisions better, and they will feel heard and involved in the product. Win-win!
Kick SaaS at Every Customer Onboarding
When it comes to customer onboarding, SaaS companies need to prioritise providing an exceptional user experience from the start.
Taking the time to plan out a comprehensive onboarding process can help you get more referrals, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately boost your business's growth in the long run.
As a SaaS provider, your understanding of the importance of customer onboarding and your commitment to taking steps in ensuring a successful onboarding for each of your clients can make all the difference in securing happy customers and getting more referrals.
I am passionate about helping SaaS companies grow and I hope that this article helps you kick SaaS during customer onboarding! If you enjoyed this article and you look forward to more insightful content, subscribe below and I will share more updates, news and tips with you. You can cancel anytime you deem necessary.
Best of luck!
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