What is customer onboarding? Types, steps and metrics
As we've said many times here, having an amazing product or service isn't enough if everything else falls short. That's why we put together complete content on Customer Onboarding, so your company makes the best possible first impression.
Here you'll finally understand what customer onboarding is, well enough to tell the types of onboarding apart. You'll also learn the main steps and how to build your own onboarding process for your customers, and understand the metrics that show how you're doing. Sound good?
What is customer onboarding?
If you're here, you've surely heard the term "customer onboarding". But do you know what it means? Onboarding is the process of introducing your customers to your product or service and teaching them their first steps. Onboarding literally means getting someone on board.
It will be one of the first contacts your customer has with your product. This is the moment to make sure new users can use the product and understand all the tools available to them.
This point is important and decisive for whether the customer likes your product. Showing the right way to use it, and how to get the most out of it as soon as they start, demonstrates the product's value to the person who bought it.
Onboarding is widely used on technology-based platforms, such as ERPs, marketing platforms, CRMs and the like.
The 3 different types of onboarding
If you search for onboarding online, you'll find different types. In this section we'll explain what each one is, so you can choose the best one for your company!
Each type has its own particularities, mainly in how efforts are directed. Here we split them into email onboarding, guided tour and video call.
1. Email onboarding
This is the first type because it's the most common. Emails can be used at different moments in the process. In fact, email can be used in every stage of the onboarding process, as the section below shows.
That's because email isn't considered spam when used correctly, and it presents data and product updates in a more informal way.
A good email onboarding has little information in the body of the email, just enough to spark the reader's curiosity. If they're interested, they're redirected to deeper content, either an online course or a knowledge base.
2. Guided tour onboarding
This type of onboarding is more specific to online products such as software, or even an app itself.
We've already published more detailed content on how to build guided tours.
Here the tutorials should live inside the app to explain how to use it. They can be interactive, with arrows, and also include videos. The way you explain can change, but what matters is having an app that explains its features well and also shows, somehow, why it's different from competitors. That difference is what keeps customers using it.
3. Video call onboarding
Finally, the third type of onboarding is by video call. Here the customer is guided synchronously by your customer success, customer education or support team.
The big difference is the more personalized follow-up. It's also very common to run these in groups, via webinar for example. Check our post on the subject for more detail on how to run them!
What are the traditional steps of an onboarding process?
As you may have noticed, the onboarding process is continuous. Here we'll lay out the traditional onboarding steps your own process shouldn't be without.
These steps cover what new customers see when they access your platform. The whole onboarding process, even before the first login, is covered in the next section!
1. Welcoming new customers
This is the customer's first contact with your service. Welcome them in a way that makes them feel taken care of and sees their new purchase as exciting and full of possibilities.
Send an email, or show a welcome message from the company in the product, just to remind them that there's a team behind the product, available to help throughout the process.
What matters is to show that you're accessible (while being clear about your availability) and about the resources they have at hand.
2. Using the product
In this second step, your customer has already been welcomed and is eager to use their new purchase, whether it's software or a physical object like a rice cooker.
This is where onboarding really begins. Here you should explain what the main tools mean. Be as visual as possible: point on the screen, or draw in the instruction manual.
It's important for your customer to be clear about where and what to do with each feature. That way, they can think about what best fits what they want from your product.
3. Throughout the experience
You think you've presented every possible tool, and now you want to leave everything to your customer so they discover the features on their own, right? Wrong.
However great your tutorial was, always stay in constant contact with your customer so they don't lose interest after a while. Remind them of the tools they have and how to use them.
If you ship an update or find new ways to use the product, show the customer and remind them of your product. That way it never falls into oblivion, forgotten in a drawer. It stays in constant evolution, and your company teaches people how to use each new update every time.
4. Create a place to receive feedback
This point isn't strictly part of onboarding, but it's so important that it shouldn't be left out. Having a clear place to receive questions and feedback is essential for mapping where your customers' main doubts are.
This can help you spot what's getting in the way of the best possible onboarding, so you can think of solutions. It's also worth considering creating customer communities, so longtime customers can help new ones get familiar with your products and answer their questions.
These are the main steps when thinking about customer onboarding. What matters in these steps is to think about the customer, always focusing on how to improve their experience. You might think your company's product is very simple and doesn't need an explanation stage, but people without background in the subject may struggle. So always think about how to reach every audience as clearly as possible.
How to plan and create your first onboarding process
To plan and create your first onboarding process, the first thing to do is define the goals your company wants to achieve with it. This may seem trivial, but defining goals and objectives is the best way to guide any process and also to help you track it.
Goals can be: in 3 months, improve customer retention by a certain percentage, or increase the number of paying customers for your services, and so on. But make them all measurable! Otherwise you won't know whether you're close to reaching them.
The second step of the onboarding process is deciding who it will reach. Think about how you'll reach that audience: website, app or email? All of this should be based on your product and on what makes sense for your company. Don't try to copy competitors if it doesn't fit your company culture or how you connect with your customers.
The third step is defining the most important things for your customers to learn in the short term. There's a term called "time to first value". We'll explain it better in the metrics section. Here, what's essential is defining which content will let your customer get the most from your product or service, weighing cost (of teaching) against benefit (of learning).
Finally, set up a communication channel with your customers. Both new and longtime ones. That lets you track every difficulty and keep improving customer onboarding. This can be hard, because a process your team spent hours planning and invested good money in may turn out not to be that useful to customers, who may complain on these channels. So you need to be ready to change and change again, always remembering that the customer experience is the priority, however long the process took. If it doesn't work, rethink it and change it.
What are the metrics of a customer onboarding process?
We didn't mention this earlier because it's so important it deserves its own section. There are different ways to measure whether your customer onboarding process is succeeding, so here are some of them. You can choose the one that works best for your business.
We've covered Customer Education metrics more broadly, if you're interested.
1. Access data
If you have a platform that requires login, this data is important to check whether your customers are accessing it and spending time there. If they are, it shows the platform has value for them, and that they're worth checking in on from time to time.
Metrics you can look at:
- Number of daily, weekly or monthly logins (depending on your type of product).
- Days without login.
- Average session length.
2. Participation rate
This is another way to measure whether your customer onboarding makes sense. When a customer is willing to invest their time in your activities, it's a sign they're interested, satisfied with what they consume and know how to take advantage of it.
Each type of onboarding will have a different participation rate. For webinars, it's the number of registrants and attendees versus the target population. For guided tours, it's the people who complete the tour versus the number of impressions. And so on.
It's important to consider the target population of the onboarding. Otherwise, you'll be hit by an incredibly low rate.
3. Time to First Value (TTFV)
This is the time until your customer perceives the value of your product. If your customer onboarding is effective, TTFV will be lower. If your TTFV is high, you're probably not showing well enough why your product is good and deserves attention.
Keep in mind that each product has a different TTFV. For example, an email marketing platform might have a TTFV of 3 days: the time to set up the account, import the audience and send the first campaign. A sales platform might have a TTFV of 30 or 45 days, the time it takes for the person to make their first sale.
We should point out that TTFV is adjusted as you learn more about your audience and how they use your product. Also, some customers will take longer and others less.
For those who take longer than your target, you need to step in and simply make sure everything is okay. Maybe everything is fine with them. Still, as a metric, you'll want to be sure that if things aren't fine, you can still get them back on track.
4. Customer onboarding cost
This metric is interesting because it can cut both ways. The more you spend on customer onboarding, it can mean one of two things: that your customer onboarding is very well funded and has a highly prepared team to handle every kind of issue. Or that you're spending too much because you don't have an efficient, clear enough system.
So if you use this metric, think about your business situation and which of the two is more likely. Like everything in a company, you'll always want to optimize your process.
Customer onboarding is a vital customer education strategy
Although there are many metrics, it's best to choose more than one so you can analyze your customers' patterns correctly. Your customer onboarding may fall short on one metric but look like a success on another. Linking two or more helps you map more precisely where you need to pay attention.
Today we went deeper into customer onboarding concepts. If you're planning to implement it in your company, the key is to focus on the customer and always keep in mind what will be best for them. Think of someone who has never had contact with your product, and explain it in the smallest detail, in a fun and intuitive way. Make your customer's experience with your product always a pleasure!
