The Ultimate Guide to Customer Onboarding Software

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing new customers to your product or service. Imagine for a minute, if you will, your company does not provide customers with any support or product education whatsoever. You’re putting your company in a pretty precarious position. A lack of proper onboarding often results in a higher churn rate as customers become frustrated with your business’s product or service and stop using it. 

One of the best ways to reduce churn and improve customer experience is to invest in a robust customer education program. This is most easily accomplished using a learning management system (LMS). With customer onboarding software, you can create effective and engaging online training programs for your customers even if you have no previous experience creating e-learning materials. An LMS can improve customer education in the following areas:

• Organization: An LMS helps customers become self-sufficient learners, which means you can continue to hit every goal on your client onboarding checklist even as your knowledge base scales beyond what you can keep track of manually.
• Engagement: The best customer onboarding examples go beyond just introducing customers to your product and fully engage the customer in the learning experience. No one likes sitting through boring videos or reading through pages of dry documentation (no one actually learns anything from them, either). 
• Customer Experience: Your product education content could very well be a customer’s first impression of your product — you don’t want that first impression to be soured by boredom or annoyance. The learning experience should be seamless, convenient, and get the customer excited about using your product. 
• Retention: By offering customer education materials that are convenient to access and navigate (not to mention informative and digestible) you can reduce the customer churn that can happen when a poor customer education experience creates a bottleneck in your business’s customer onboarding process. 

Benefits of Saas Customer Onboarding Software

Customer onboarding software can benefit all kinds of businesses, but the software as a service (SaaS) model can especially benefit. If you’re at a SaaS company, you probably know that software products or services can often have steeper learning curves than some other kinds of products or services. An LMS can be tremendously helpful in coaching new customers through the rough patches early in the enterprise SaaS onboarding process. 

Few things in life are as frustrating as software that simply won’t cooperate, and this goes doubly for enterprise software. Luckily, you can ease your customers’ frustration by making helpful information readily available to them via SaaS onboarding software.

Ideally, your customer onboarding content not only mitigates frustration but also improves the customer’s ability to use the product — maybe in ways they didn’t even anticipate. Using a SaaS onboarding template to achieve a consistent look and feel for your onboarding process is a great way to help customers get more out of both their onboarding and ongoing product education experiences.

What’s Different About Customer Onboarding Software?

Learning management systems make designing beneficial customer training programs a more manageable prospect. You can use an LMS to create informative and accessible product documentation that engages customers and reflects your brand identity. Customers don’t want to sift through databases of technical documents — they want fast and convenient access to practical knowledge that will actually help them get more out of their product.

Imagine if you purchased a product or service that you couldn’t figure out how to use. You would probably look for a manual or FAQ provided by the company to help you learn more. When this information is both readily available and truly helpful, the learning experience is likely to be a positive one. 

However, if you were not able to find this information anywhere or if it was difficult to access or understand, you might feel like the product or service is just a waste of time and eventually give up on it.

Even though this illustration makes the importance of a streamlined customer education experience seem obvious, there are still many customer onboarding process examples out there that could be vastly improved. 

When customers can conveniently access a client onboarding portal or a customer onboarding application without having to expend unnecessary time and effort, they are much more likely to remain loyal customers. You can use client onboarding software or a customer onboarding template to help you provide the kind of high-quality onboarding resources that customers are looking for.

Why a Strong Customer Education Strategy Matters

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of a great customer education strategy, but a better customer education experience can help your business thrive in many areas. For example:

1. A strong customer education strategy can help you grow your most important accounts. An intuitive knowledge base supported by an LMS allows customers to answer their own questions and learn how to use their products without contacting customer support, which frees up time for your support team to focus on cultivating the highest-priority accounts.
2. A strong customer education strategy can help you save money. When customers understand every aspect of their product and how to use it, they are more likely to appreciate the full value of their purchase. If a customer doesn’t understand how to use the product or service they’re paying for, it might cause a case of buyer’s regret—we’ve all been there, and you can probably agree that it doesn’t make you want to buy from that company again. You can avoid your own company’s reputation being tarnished in this way by giving your customers access to informative, engaging, and organized onboarding content.

Know the Customer Onboarding Process Flow

Not every customer onboarding checklist looks the same, but all of them include some basic key elements that form the backbone of an effective customer onboarding process. 

The most important steps in developing a customer onboarding process using an LMS include:

1. Setting Your Goals

   The first step is to establish a goal and build a team. Ask yourself what you want your customers to get out of their onboarding experience. Do you want to present the material in an entertaining way? Or hold their attention with some other method? How do you plan to cater to different learning styles (visual, kinetic, etc.)?

2. Putting Together a Team

   The next step is to assemble the right team to create the ideal learning experience for your customers. Consider the different roles involved in creating customer onboarding material and which members of your organization are the best fit for each different role.

3. Mapping the Customer Journey

   Mapping the customer onboarding journey can make it easier to design a customer training program that approaches the onboarding process in a logical and streamlined manner. The steps with which customers might engage during onboarding include sign-up, account set-up, product demonstration, and more.

4. Creating Content

   Once you understand the path the customer will be taking through the onboarding process, you can create the educational content you want your customers to see, then upload it to an LMS like Northpass where they can access it with ease.

5. Testing Your Program

   Before launching your customer education program, you should test it, both on a technical level and an information level, and make adjustments if necessary.

6. Launching Your Program

   When the content is ready and testing is complete, you can launch your onboarding program so customers can start enjoying refreshingly accessible onboarding content right away.

Using an LMS like Northpass is one of the easiest ways to develop a customer onboarding process that provides a top-tier customer experience. Even if you don’t have much (or any) experience with creating e-learning materials, you can use an LMS to offer customers the kind of learning experience you would want for yourself — the golden rule applies everywhere, after all!

You can think of an LMS sort of like your customer success onboarding playbook. Just like a football team has a better chance of scoring if they all stick to the playbook instead of running around in different directions, you’ll have a better chance of giving customers the ideal learning experience if you use an LMS to keep the onboarding process organized.

Use a Customer Onboarding Template 

Even if you understand the importance of a customer onboarding strategy, how it can benefit your organization, and what a successful strategy looks like, putting it all into practice isn’t so simple. Building online training courses the right way takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s difficult to know if your content is structured efficiently and easy for customers to navigate until after it’s gone live.

If you're stressing over building your customer education program the right way, don’t; you can use a customer onboarding template to create consistently well-structured onboarding content so you can focus on supplying inviting and informative material and trust that the LMS template will make the information easy to navigate. A template can help you:

• Organize your content into an approachable and digestible format
• Create a cohesive network of information for a seamless customer education experience
• Locate and fill gaps in your knowledge base

The Right Customer Onboarding Software Matters

When businesses empower customers with engaging, informative, and digestible information, it benefits both parties. Customers receive a smooth learning experience that helps them get the most out of their product, and your business gets to save money and reduce churn — everyone wins.