When it comes to improving customer retention in the SaaS world, providing a brilliant onboarding experience should be one of your top priorities.
Customers sign up for a trial or buy a subscription to your product to reap the benefits your sales team has sold them on. Of course, those results don’t miraculously materialize out of thin air the moment the customer signs up. Users can only start hitting goals and seeing results once they’ve gained the ability to use your software effectively.
What’s more, a very basic understanding often isn’t enough. Customers need to be proficient enough to feel confident using your tool; at least when it comes to your flagship features.
As Patrick Campbell points out in this article, confident, capable customers are less likely to need constant customer support, more likely to become reliant on your software, and highly likely to keep renewing their subscriptions over and over again. That’s why providing a thorough onboarding process plays a key role in increasing the lifetime value of your customers.
That leaves one very important question: What constitutes a brilliant SaaS onboarding process?
1. Set your customers’ expectations during the sales process.
Many companies don’t realise that a good onboarding experience actually begins during the sales process. Every time your sales team lists your product’s features, explains your product’s value, or takes prospects through a demo, they’re doing the very important work of setting customers’ expectations. Meeting these expectations – by helping customers achieve those very results – should guide the rest of the onboarding process.
Remember, while your sales team and the customer support team might operate as different entities, it’s important that the client experiences every stage of the buying cycle as one smooth process, from first touch, to sign-up, to onboarding, to success.
2. Conduct objective-based onboarding.
Objective-based onboarding is a client-centric style of onboarding that focuses on helping new customers achieve a particular set of objectives. This kind of onboarding usually starts with a planning session. In this session, your team works with the client to identify appropriate objectives. Then, it’s up to your team to guide the client on how best to use your software to achieve those specific goals.
This form of onboarding is most gratifying for clients because it’s tailored to each customer’s unique situation and requirements. Depending on the complexities of your product, this model could require a dedicated onboarding team.
Alternatively, objective-based onboarding can be outsourced to a partner within your ecosystem. This is one of the great benefits of having a robust SaaS partner program in place. Accredited partners take the pressure off of your own team by taking care of client onboarding and training. Make it even easier for customers to find and hire an accredited partner by having a commerce-enabled partner directory.
3. Use your SaaS partner program to provide customers with agile and robust customer support.
Customer support is a key component of a successful onboarding process. Of course, quality customer support needs to continue long after the official onboarding process has ended, however, it’s absolutely critical to offer agile and robust customer support during the first three to six months of any software subscription. This is because customers are most at risk of canceling during this initial phase before they’ve had a chance to properly skill up or achieve ROI.
Again, your SaaS partner program can be a game-changer for providing customer support. When your accredited partners are bona fide experts in your software, they’re able to field most customer support needs, freeing your own team up to focus on true tech support inquiries.
Using a customer service solution like Morphed’s commerce-enabled private marketplace and customer portal makes it even easier for customers to connect and transact with your accredited partners. If you’re looking for a way to service your customers while alleviating the pressure on your support desk, we’ve got the infrastructure to help you do it. Read about our commerce-enabled directory here.
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