5 Essential Best Practices for Customer Onboarding in 2023

Onboarding is one of the most frequently discussed topics in sales and marketing circles for good reason. It’s a crucial part of the customer journey and one of your business’s best tools for driving retention and growth. 

In the SaaS industry, onboarding strategy is even more important than usual. Learning to use a new software tool is not like learning to use other kinds of products. Software usually has a steep learning curve, so the onboarding process can easily make or break a SaaS business’s relationship with a new client. 

It’s very important for everyone involved with onboarding at SaaS organizations to be familiar with customer onboarding best practices. Customer onboarding best practices that are built using best practices are more likely to deliver outstanding onboarding experiences that strengthen customer relationships.

Every business defines the onboarding process a little bit differently. There is no universally agreed-upon beginning and end to the onboarding process, but it occurs at the very beginning of the customer journey. It’s common for people to imagine the onboarding process as a short process that simply involves completing a few training materials. 

However, an effective customer onboarding process is much more. Many businesses that want to provide an exceptional onboarding experience consider the onboarding process complete when the customer has achieved a successful outcome with the product and recognized its full value firsthand.

Customer Onboarding Best Practices for 2023

Building an effective SaaS onboarding strategy is not always simple. One of the best ways to streamline the process of building a customer onboarding program is to use customer onboarding software or other kinds of customer onboarding tools. For example, you can use a learning management system (LMS) like Northpass to streamline and scale your onboarding process with ease.

Besides selecting the most effective tools, another of the best actions you can take to ensure your customer onboarding process is successful is to use established customer onboarding best practices to guide your way. Let’s break down some of these best practices now. 

1. Put Customer Outcomes First

Before anything else, you should ensure you understand what the customer expects and wants out of the onboarding process. Not every customer will go into your onboarding process with the same expectations or hoping to get the same thing out of it. It’s extremely important to understand customer expectations so you can align their experience as closely as possible. 

The ultimate purpose of the onboarding process is to help customers arrive at successful, valuable outcomes (customer outcomes) with your product or service as quickly and painlessly as possible. It would be next to impossible to help customers achieve successful outcomes if you don’t even know which outcomes they’re trying to achieve. Sure, you may be able to make some educated guesses and create an onboarding process that works for some of your clients some of the time — but to create an onboarding experience that leads every customer toward their own definition of success, you need to communicate with them every step of the way

2. Make It More Than Just Content

The best customer onboarding examples are about much more than training content. While content is a major part of the onboarding experience, it’s equally important to build a positive relationship with the customer. Focusing on building a solid relationship with each customer during the onboarding phase can pay off down the line by greatly reducing the chance the customer will churn.

Relationship-building should be an especially high priority for SaaS companies. The relationship between SaaS customers and businesses extends far beyond a single transaction. It’s essential for customer success teams at SaaS companies to look beyond the initial sale and focus on cultivating a relationship that will lead to long-term retention and a high customer lifetime value. An effective onboarding experience invests in the long-term success of the relationship between customer and business just as much as it teaches the customer how to use a product.

3. Automate What You Can (But Be Smart)

One of the best customer onboarding practices you can use to improve efficiency is automating onboarding steps wherever you can. You can use various kinds of customer onboarding software (like an LMS) to automate some parts of the customer onboarding process.

Customer onboarding can be a somewhat time-consuming and tedious process for some businesses. Small companies, in particular, may struggle to find the resources to keep up a fully manual onboarding process. A growing SaaS startup with limited resources may be able to streamline onboarding using automation. 

Automating some parts of the onboarding process can free up your customer success team to focus on strategy and build relationships with high-value clients. Combining an effective customer onboarding platform with the talents of a competent onboarding team can help create a streamlined system that enables employees to focus their efforts where they’re needed most.

4. Keep It Going

It’s difficult to define exactly when the onboarding process ends. As we mentioned before, some businesses define the end of the onboarding process as the moment when the customer has used the product or service successfully and recognizes the value. However, even after the customer has reached this point, there is still more work left to do. 

At this point, the onboarding process should segue into an ongoing customer education strategy. Your customer education strategy, much like your customer onboarding strategy, usually should have the overarching goal of helping customers achieve successful outcomes with your business’s products or services as easily as possible. While your onboarding strategy is about getting customers up and running for the first time, your ongoing customer education strategy is about supporting customers throughout the journey and enabling them to continue to be successful.

One of the best ways to maintain an ongoing customer education strategy that works is to implement a learning management system. You can use an LMS like Northpass to build a robust academy of content for your customers and enable them to access it in moments anytime they need to. 

5. Make It Easy

Finally, don’t forget to make your onboarding program user-friendly. No matter how effective the content of the onboarding program is, it won’t matter if your customers can’t access it and navigate it successfully. Online onboarding can be extremely convenient for customers and businesses alike, but if your business’s digital onboarding process is poorly-designed, it will likely be a nightmare to use and present a negative first impression. It could even drive new customers away altogether. 

To ensure your business’s onboarding program is intuitive and accessible to all your customers, you can use onboarding software designed to provide a smooth experience for users. A learning management system with features like mobile optimization, flexible learning paths, and multi-content support may be the best method of delivering your onboarding content effectively. 

Why Care About Customer Onboarding Best Practices?

The best practices we’ve listed here are just a few of the measures you can take to create a successful customer onboarding program. The very best customer onboarding experiences are carefully tailored to meet the unique needs of the organization’s customers. 

For SaaS organizations, maintaining a highly-effective customer onboarding program can lead to a few notable benefits in particular. Here are some of the most significant examples:

1. It Prevents Churn

One of the most substantial benefits of investing in a better customer onboarding program is that it can help prevent customer churn. The earliest stages of the customer journey are crucial for developing the kind of customer relationship that results in long-term retention. If a customer receives a poor onboarding experience, they are much more likely to churn. By getting customers straight to the value of the product or service as quickly and efficiently as possible, you can greatly improve your chances of earning customers who remain loyal to your business for a long time. 

2. It Decreases Time to Value (TTV)

Another of the most important advantages of an effective customer onboarding program is that it reduces time to value for your customers. When a new customer signs on with your business, they are expecting a certain outcome. To impress them and keep their business, it’s essential that you deliver that value as soon as possible. A long, complex onboarding process could wear the customer out before they’ve even gotten the chance to experience the value of the product or service. On the other hand, an efficient onboarding process shows the customer the value they were promised right off the bat.

3. It Improves Product Adoption

When customers are able to get to your products’ value quicker, they’re much more likely to actually use those products on a regular basis. When you roll out a new product or feature, a smooth and effective onboarding process can help ensure your customers find success with new changes as quickly as possible.

4. It Drives Growth

Finally, an effective customer onboarding process promotes growth. Successful onboarding creates long-term brand advocates who not only contribute to recurring revenue with repeat purchases but also spread the word about your business to other people. This creates an ongoing cycle of growth where satisfied customers help attract more customers. Starting the customer journey off on the right foot with a stellar customer onboarding program is one of the best ways to create those satisfied customers in the first place.