Successful onboarding is a key metric of success for any SaaS company. Whether you provide CRM, healthcare or apps, ensuring client satisfaction is your top priority.Selling the software to your customers is not enough to achieve success, especially if they decide to undertake a free trial first. You have to make sure they understand and use your software correctly, to be able to successfully onboard them in the future. Client’s success is your success.

To help you get on track, we will focus on 10 tips how to improve customer onboarding process and provide maximum value and satisfaction to your clients. Well, SaaS onboarding best practices are never late to follow and we invite you to implement them as soon as you can.

1. Follow Up

When starting to use any new software/service, everybody is bound to face some kind of problems/difficulties in the process. Follow up with your clients frequently and see if everything is going smoothly or if they need help with anything particular. This will help build up trust between you, while also proving that you are a responsible service provider. You can organize phone/Skype calls, online or outdoor meetings to discuss any issues they might have on a regular basis.

2. Educate Them

As a service/software provider in your industry, you should be familiar with all the latest trends/news and topics associated with it. Educate your clients about news, tips and tricks of your industry to make their user experience smoother. Online schools, articles and webinars are a great way to accomplish this task. Share with them any new, relevant articles that you publish and invite them to webinars to inform/educate them and discuss their issues.

3. Provide Diversified Access

Providing diversified access to different team members is a great way to familiarize your client’s team with all the features of your software/service. Enable invitations to explore different parts of the software to specific people. For example, if you are a CRM provider, you can invite the social media marketers to explore the parts connected with social engagement and give the sales team access to the contacts and leads features. This way everybody will get familiar with all the aspects of your service much quicker and the onboarding will proceed much smoother.

4. Share Your Success

Providing proof of having satisfied and successful clients before is a very powerful tool. It helps generate trust towards your company in no time and shows your client that you really know what you are doing. Create great, educational case studies regarding projects you have had before and define precisely what the problem was and how you helped find a solution.

5. Create user manuals

Depending on the complexity of your software usage, you can create a comprehensive guide or simply an article which will help the new users understand the principles of using your product. Your content may be a Q&A text where you can add the main questions and then provide answers. Questions may include interrogative sentences like “How to use the software”, “How to find this”, “How to do that”, etc. Another way is to add tooltips on the buttons, so when the mouse stops on a button, the user reads what it’s designed for. Screenshots almost always help in this kind of situations, so don’t forget to add screenshots as well. You can send the user manual to their email or make it available for reading or downloading in a visible place on your website. Note that writing user manuals requires not only content writing but also technical writing skills.

6. Talk to Those Who Bounced

This might seem a little uncomfortable to do, but it’s a must. Some people used your software and didn’t convert, they were unwilling to continue using your product/service. You need to know why. Send them an email in a plain text, tell them everything that you do for your clients and ask them what went wrong. This might bring out reasons that you haven’t even thought of before. It’s some kind of a hidden problem that is hurting you from the inside and you aren’t even aware of it. There might be cases that people wouldn’t be willing to talk to you and explain their objections. In this case you have to put in effort to make them willing. Don’t rush them or schedule meetings or calls right away. Treat them as fellow humans and make them understand that you are trying to improve your service and nothing else. Also ask them why they didn’t tell you about the problem beforehand. Was it a communication problem? Maybe it was a customer support issue? Find out as much information as you can.

7. Enhance Communication and Feedback

There may be cases that your clients are unhappy with some features of your software or would like them to function in a slightly different way. Encourage client feedback and idea generation for this purpose. Your clients are the ones that use your software/app/service every day and if they have any ideas that can help tune your product, you should seize that opportunity. Discuss their ideas and suggestions in detail, to understand what is it that they really want and consider its implementation. Never discard ideas that cannot be implemented. Even if your client wants something that simply cannot be done, take the time to explain why that’s impossible and suggest alternatives. This will build trust between you and your clients, prolong their lifetime value and prove that you are a caring and responsible vendor. The chances of successful onboarding rise up when your client satisfaction rises up.

8. Don’t Sell Features, Sell Success

After you have explained all the ins and outs of your app/service to your clients, it’s important to take a look at it from their perspective. After all, understanding all the features and knowing how they work is all well, but what your clients really want is success. Knowing and understanding features doesn’t necessarily mean they will achieve their goals. To maximize the value you provide as a vendor, you have to show some ways and guide your client to their success with the help of using the features of your service. Your customers have to understand that they can actually achieve success with your software, and that’s exactly why they should stick with you.

9. Signify Early Conversions

If your clients started to use your service and they are in the free trial period, it technically means that they are ready to convert. Your service attracted them enough to undertake a free trial, so why not focus on a faster conversion? You don’t have to wait for the full 30 day trial period to expire to convert your customers. The first few days are your best shot. During the first days clients are mostly open to ideas, discussions and learning. They are keen to see what your service offers, what are the features and what tricks and tips they can implement to achieve their goals faster. With a good communication strategy, listening to them and providing suggestions and solutions, you will be able to build a solid reputation during the first days of service usage and actually have high chances of converting the client, say on day 2 or 3. As time goes by, clients get accustomed to the service little by little, and their willingness, resolution and enthusiasm tends to decrease. If you wait for the full time of the trial to expire, they might very well find a much more fitting solution and not even consider customization and long term relationship with your company.

10. Constantly Update Your Tactics

Even if you have created the perfect onboarding strategy, it’s important to make the task a constant one. With each coming/going customer, you have the chance to learn something new, something you didn’t know or hadn’t thought about before. Focus on this data and always come up with new ideas on how to improve the process. This will not only help you with constant innovation, but aslo boost client satisfaction and give you the opportunity to differentiate yourself from competitors. Build a reputation of a SaaS company who truly cares and listens to his/her clients. 11. Set up a wise, yet easy signup process If you are a SaaS founder or the marketing manager at a SaaS company, it doesn’t mean you don’t sign up for other online tools. For example, you may need more advanced SEO tools, consider business analytics software, strive to schedule your social media posts with a separate tool, etc. Will you be ok if the software provider asked more than 4-5 questions to you while you signed up? You should keep the signup process as smooth as you’d like it to be. As it’s an essential part of your SaaS onboarding process and contributes to better understanding of customers’ needs. For example, Demio allows you to organize live events and run webinars. When you hit the Get started free button, they ask you questions like

1. Full name, work email, password
2. What’s your company name?
3. Is your company currently running webinars?
4. What are your primary goals with webinars?
5. How close are you to launching your first webinar?
6. How did you find us?

One may say – Demio is asking to many questions, but on the other hand it can help build closer relations with customers. The more you know about your user’s company the more relevant emails and notifications you can send to them. You waste your visitor’s time if you ask for too much info and are not going to use that data. But if you have different email flows in case of different answers, both you and your users will reap the benefits. Don’t include questions just for the sake of including. When you have reasonable questions, try not to exceed 5 not to exhaust your visitor’s energy without being provided high results and value.

Bonus section: SaaS onboarding software: Which one to choose?

  Tools we are going to write are all about personalization. All acknowledge that every user is unique and needs special attention. Here are 3 software you can consider depending on your SaaS company size and amount of revenue. Gainsight PX – The first software we are going to talk about is designed for SaaS companies. It tracks your user activity, checks their in-app actions and provides you with rich information. You will know all about user logins, clicks and figure out how to engage them more. Userpilot – This tool allows you to send flows based on what goals your users pursue, what’s their use case. It helps you trigger hints based on how your user behaves  so you help your users the right and engaging way. Appcues – With this tool, you can invite your users to quick product tours, create onboarding flows based on customer segments and use personalization in your messaging. Tooltips, in-app surveys and messaging & NPS are available for all plans.  

Wrapping up

  Keep in mind that your clients are real humans and value communication and caring as much as (if not more) they value good features, friendly user interface, etc. Good relationships will increase your client retention, even if something goes wrong and they will be willing to invest time to find a solution for the problem at hand, and not consider changing their service provider from the first minute of having an issue. Problems/issues happen all the time, with all the companies, in every industry. Caring and listening to your clients is what matters. Happy SaaS customer onboarding!

Next Steps

Saas companies can have an easier time with their marketing if they choose to embrace inbound.

• Find out about the best inbound practices to improve your SaaS company’s sales – Inbound Marketing Best Practices to Improve Your SaaS Company’s Sales
• If you are looking for a marketing automation platform, HubSpot might be your best shot – Hubspot Implementation for SaaS Companies: Is the Cost Worth It?
• Still thinking about PPC over Inbound? Make up your mind once and for all – 7 Reasons Why Choose Inbound Over PPC for Your SaaS Company