As SaaS products are continuing to gain popularity, there is strong demand for onboarding automation tools and processes.
The adoption of a SaaS product is similar to that of a website or app. A new visitor to your website or app has no idea what the product is about and how it can benefit them. They need to be introduced to your product, understand its features and then decide if it’s worth their time and money.
User onboarding is the process of bringing new users to the “Aha!” moment. It is all about making sure that when someone starts using your product, they understand how to get value from it and can start doing what they need to do as quickly as possible.
Onboarding is not just about welcome emails and sign-up flows. It’s about helping people complete their goals as quickly as possible by using your product in a way that makes sense for them.
It is one of the best ways to build loyalty. It’s an opportunity to set up your new users for success, and build their trust in your brand.
But why is onboarding so important?
It makes the first impression count. A good onboarding experience can make or break a user’s perception of your brand. It can either bring them back or turn them away completely.
It creates a positive experience. Onboarding isn’t just about showing people how to use your product; it’s also about creating a positive experience with your company and brand as a whole. This can help you build trust and loyalty from day one, which can lead to long-term growth in both retention and revenue.
It increases life-time value (LTV) and reduces churn rates by upselling products or features that are relevant to the user’s needs based on past actions or purchases made during the onboarding process.
Automating the onboarding process
Onboarding automation isn’t easy. It requires you to be thoughtful about how you design each interaction with your users. This means thinking through every step you want them to take and making sure that they have everything they need available to them at the right time. You also need to think about what happens if they make a mistake or if something unexpected happens during their journey.
Automated user onboarding can save you time and money by reducing the need for human intervention.
Why you shouldn’t automate your onboarding process
Automating the onboarding process is usually the end goal, long term it will help your company save time, money and allow you to scale at speed. However, we regularly find companies are jumping in to trying to automate their onboarding too soon. Often creating poor experiences which can put new users off, before they even begin.
This might not be a huge issue for products which are relatively simple to sign up for and easy to use. However, if your onboarding process requires the user to complete numerous set up tasks or is on the more complex side, rushing into automating the onboarding process could negatively impact your product’s success in a major way.
At this point taking a step back and committing to manually onboarding new customers can be the smarter option. There are many benefits of not automating the onboarding process.
It saves time and money
Allocating resources towards automating an onboarding process can be expensive, especially if you don’t have many users yet or if it’s not yet clear what the process should look like. By letting real people handle the onboarding process, you can save money by not having to hire employees for this specific purpose yet. Building an automated onboarding process is costly. It’s much easier to figure out the details before starting the technical development process.
You’ll connect with your customers on a personal level
Automated emails can be impersonal and robotic, which can lead to poor responses or even worse, lost customers. By using real human beings to send emails and texts, you’re able to connect with customers on a more personal level — which will make them feel more comfortable using your product.
You to gain empathy for your users
From talking to users during the onboarding process, you’ll start to build empathy for them. This will enable you to understand not only your users’ immediate frustrations, but also their hopes, fears, abilities, limitations, reasoning, and goals. It allows you to dig deep into your understanding of the user and create solutions that will not only solve a need, but effectively improve their experience by removing unnecessary pain or friction.
You’ll have a deep understanding of the onboarding process
By manually doing the onboarding yourself, you’re putting yourself in the position of the user time and time again. You’ll quickly start to understand the process inside out and learn what is required to onboard a user. It’s much better for you to be dealing with pain points at this stage than the user. This deep level of understanding will allow you to place the user at the heart of the onboarding process.
You can easily test different approaches
Being able to test and learn different approaches of onboarding new users is a huge benefit of not automating from the start. You’ll be able to conduct small experiments in the way you onboard users to understand if doing something differently has a positive impact on the user’s experience.
You can measure success with first hand user feedback
A key outcome of manually onboarding users is that you’ll automatically gain user feedback directly from them. Tracking feedback and key metrics, you’ll be able to understand what is working and what isn’t working. This in turn will be able to guide your next iteration of the onboarding process.
You’ll have a clear understanding of what an automated process should look like
It’s much more efficient to build an automated process when you have a clear understanding of what it should look like. Development is costly and having to rebuild and change along the way can add unnecessary costs. The research, experience and feedback you’ll get from manually running user onboarding at the start will lead to a much cleaner automated process.
Conclusion
Of course, manually onboarding clients isn’t the end goal (unless you find it working well). But the key aim of this approach is to learn as much as you can while you have the opportunity to easily do so. Once your product starts getting traction and new users start to sign up, it will become much more of a risk to implement an automated process. This approach eliminates a lot of that risk because if any problems do occur, you’ll be on hand to understand and fix them. If problems occur during an automated process, the user will be on their own to fix it and more often than not, you’ll lose them.
