Best SaaS Onboarding Software

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Key Components of Effective SaaS Onboarding Software

User-friendly interface and navigation  

A user-friendly interface is a fundamental aspect of any wholesome product, and this also applies to SaaS onboarding software. It’s literally like giving hands to a child who is stepping for the first time in a new outside world. With the right blend of UI elements and guidance in navigating through menu options, users can easily grasp and get their initial understanding on how to do a particular task using the product on their own. Several best practices are implemented to ensure user-friendly interfaces.

• Minimal options and steps to eliminate friction

• Guided tours and contextual tooltips to navigate  

• Visual indicators to track the progress  

• Interactive product tutorials  

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Personalized user guidance and support  

Effective personalization with average UI is better than poor personalization with excellent UI today. Any SaaS product that you consider today is serving different customer segments. Clearly, one size can’t fit all. And that’s why hyper personalization is so crucial in delivering a delightful onboarding experience. With the help of surveys or feedback even before the onboarding step, try to collect as many data points as possible about the target customer, and based on that data, craft a personalized onboarding and guidance from Day zero.  

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Seamless integration with existing systems  

No one wants to juggle between 25 applications every day to their job. Your product should seamlessly integrate with the customer's existing product framework. Be it a CRM or any other tool, try to expand the integration capability to smoothly fit in the existing systems across various customer segments. This will reduce the heavy burden on users in terms of daily usability.

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Data migration and security considerations  

Delivering a smooth and secure data transition is crucial for any customer. To execute this with perfection, conduct a thorough assessment of the customer's existing data and set the data migration goal. Conducting tests at each stage of the migration is necessary to spot any issues in the earlier stage. To maintain control over the process, ensure accurate data mapping and a phased migration approach.

When it comes to security, make sure to implement encryption protocols to safeguard sensitive customer information during the transfer process. It’s a must to validate that data handling practices are in compliance with the regulated standards. Overall, effective data migration is possible with meticulous planning from the outset and a robust environment, fostering long-term trust and customer satisfaction with the product.

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SaaS onboarding best practices

Setting clear onboarding goals and objectives  

Setting up clear goals and objectives is a foundational aspect for any successful onboarding process. The respective goals should provide clarity for the customers and the onboarding team. This clarity eliminates ambiguity and sets the right expectation on both ends from the beginning. Establish specific, measurable, and realistic goals that teams can execute, as well as properly track onboarding effectiveness. Make sure the onboarding objectives align with and support the broader business goals. Determine the appropriate metrics to measure progress and success, such as time to first value, customer satisfaction rate, product adoption rate, and so on. Document the goals clearly and ensure that everyone on the team is aware of them and involved in the process.

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Customizing onboarding processes for different user personas  

Currently, any SaaS product caters to multiple personas, making it essential to offer tailored, personalized onboarding to maximize user engagement and help them understand the value of the product. To do this step in the first place, identify the distinct user persona and collect relevant data points like name, role, company size, and industry.

Leverage this information to craft the onboarding experience for each persona by acknowledging their specific goals and aspirations. Try to customize different onboarding paths based on the persona's behavior and experience level. This customization effort increases the chances of users feeling valuable and satisfied, which can significantly improve product engagement and adoption.

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Utilizing interactive tutorials and walkthroughs  

Interactive tutorials are on-screen guides that teach first-time users how to navigate through features with step-by-step instructions. These tutorials are best to deliver contextual assistance for users to perform tasks inside the product. By guiding them through key functionalities, it helps users realize the value more quickly and is more likely to adopt the product. It’s best to choose no-code solutions that offer interactive tutorials with customization capabilities and analytics. Segment your customers and identify the critical actions that help to activate the users. With this approach as the basis, design the walkthrough journey in a simple way that every user can easily understand and engage with.

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Leveraging automation for onboarding tasks  

Utilizing the automation capabilities is necessary to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the onboarding programs. To precisely implement this, break down the entire onboarding process into steps and analyze which parts require time and repetitive manual effort. Some of the common examples for these kinds of tasks include welcome emails, milestone reminders, etc. List down the tasks and classify them based on their nature. Then select the appropriate automation tool and set up the workflow to automate the end-to-end process. At the same time, don’t forget to track how the automation delivers value to the users. Regularly gather feedback and be open to improvising the automation to improve the onboarding experience by eliminating glitches.  

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Maximizing user adoption and satisfaction

Encourage user engagement during onboarding

User engagement refers to the level of involvement and interest a user shows during their initial interaction with your product. Highly engaged users have a high likelihood of spending more time on the platform. Regular logins, profile completion, utilizing interactive features, and feedback sharing are some indicators of strong engagement. We shouldn’t expect users to do all these actions on their own. Instead, a healthy onboarding process should provide an interactive environment to engage the users and make these actions happen.  

To ensure precision, it is crucial to first set clear expectations for the users about what they can anticipate from the product. This can provide them with a clear path to get started by communicating the benefits and outlining other key functionalities. Interactive tutorials and walkthroughs can help to achieve this by breaking down the feature navigation into bite-sized actions, which users can easily understand by going through the clicks.  

The next important step is to incorporate gamifying elements like points, progress bars, badges, etc. to reward the user actions and make them feel a sense of achievement in the product usage. This can make users stick with the product for a more engaging experience. Finally, apart from the above modules, it is critical to provide contextual help and support through live chat and emails when users feel stuck and need some assistance. Always providing real-time support at the right time can prevent chaos and increase user trust and confidence.

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Gathering and implementing user feedback for continuous improvement  

When it comes to improving user onboarding, nothing comes close to the value of collecting direct feedback and implementing it to enhance the user experience. By gathering feedback only, you will get enough real-time exposure and identify the areas for improvement. To operate this engine efficiently, you can utilize the product's capabilities to automate the feedback collection process, rather than relying solely on manual methods like emails or surveys.

• Usability testing: Implement session recording tools to analyze how users navigate through the onboarding paths and identify where they experience friction or confusion. Through this analysis, you will gain insight into the user's perspective and make necessary adjustments.

• In-app tooltips: One of the most efficient methods for collecting feedback is through in-app tooltips. By emphasizing the right touch points in your product UX, you can include bite-sized questions in the flow to collect users’ thoughts. Keep the questions concise with a minimum cognitive load, so that users don't feel like they are doing a survey.

• Community forums: Establish a forum site or at least a dedicated chat group for your users to provide feedback and discuss with other fellow customers.  

• Customer support tickets: Regularly analyze the raised support tickets to gain insight into customers' frustrations and questions. Properly prioritize each item and implement solutions to ease their product usage.  

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Monitoring user success and satisfaction metrics  

Customer satisfaction metrics are the key elements to evaluate your customer’s happiness and satisfaction with the product usage and overall user experience. These metrics only reveal how much your product resonates with your customer’s expectations and behavior. The fundamental aspect that anyone needs to measure the success metrics for their product is to ask the right, concise questions at the right time. Few common customer success metrics are customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES) and net promoter score (NPS). Most well-known products collect this score by popping up a simple question with options to measure user satisfaction with the overall product, a specific feature usage, or how much they are willing to recommend it to a friend. Regularly monitoring these metrics will help to evaluate the effectiveness of the launched onboarding process and gain valuable insights into the user's expectations and satisfaction rates.  

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Strategies for Optimizing SaaS Onboarding Software

Implementing A/B testing for onboarding processes  

A/B testing is one of the powerful ways to optimize the user experience in a data-driven way. It is simply comparing the different versions of a product or feature to evaluate which version performs in terms of achieving user goals. You could use this to test various elements, such as content layouts, interactive tutorial usage, and onboarding paths, among others.

Here is the outline to implement A/B testing for your onboarding process.  

1. Begin by formulating a clear hypothesis about the necessary implementation and testing. Eg: Adding interactive product tutorials will increase product adoption by 25%.  

2. Fix the right metric to evaluate a version's success. Some of the common metrics to consider are completion rate, signup rate, drop-off points, conversion rate, etc.  

3. Fix the right one according to your determined hypothesis.  

4. Without any bias, users from the same group are now randomly assigned to try the versions. Determine the test's duration based on your user base.

5. Use the appropriate tools to analyze the results, and then implement the changes based on the version that performed well.

Obviously, this is not a one-time job. Try to regularly conduct A/B testing to determine the right hypothesis and ensure continuous testing based on ongoing user feedback. This can hugely help to optimize the onboarding experience on the go and prevent heavy churns.  

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Analyzing onboarding data to identify areas for improvement  

Teams can easily identify the areas for improvement by regularly monitoring and analyzing the onboarding data. Ensure to have an effective onboarding environment with trackable metrics like time to onboarding, onboarding completion rate, time to first value, trial to paid conversion rate, etc. Also utilize heatmap tools and session recordings to see how users are navigating through the onboarding process. By employing data collection methods like this, organizations can keep track of their onboarding process and implement iterative improvements on the go. Continuous monitoring and iterations will only help to evolve the onboarding process in response to dynamic user needs and expectations.

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Integrating onboarding software with customer relationship management (CRM) systems  

Everyone knows that the CRM is the central database for any company. With disconnected systems, organizations may face inefficiencies, and that’s why integrating onboarding software with the CRM system is so vital. A healthy integration with the CRM can streamline workflows and ensure seamless data consistency throughout the onboarding process, which enhances customer satisfaction. With the foundational data points about the customer in one central place (CRM), it is easier to personalize the onboarding communication process. Further, it eliminates manual actions like data entry and streamlines the process with real-time updates enrolled in the CRM. Overall, integration with CRM can assist in ensuring that customer information is consistent across all the systems and improves operational efficiency.  

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Collaborating with cross-functional teams for onboarding optimization  

Cross-functional collaboration in the onboarding process can help to leverage diverse expertise and fresh perspectives that can enhance the user experience to the next level. This fosters creativity and exposes the team to handling the onboarding process from various perspectives. With the collective insights from various teams and functions, teams can gain a comprehensive understanding of the customers and implement corrective actions to enhance the onboarding process. In addition, setting common objectives fosters accountability among team members, enabling them to understand and contribute from their respective roles to the onboarding process, thereby achieving the desired customer experience goals. Effective collaboration with the right tools, such as a digital sales room and regular meetings, can encourage team members to collaborate seamlessly without much effort.

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The Top 15 SaaS Onboarding Software

1. Buyerstage

Buyerstage, an interactive digital sales room platform, offers a unified onboarding portal that facilitates the planning and creation of action items, as well as the organization of all resources in a single location. Through mutual action plans, the onboarding process can be broken down into bites of action items attached with necessary materials and clear deadlines to keep the onboarding progress on track. You can monitor your customer’s journey and interactions through analytics and take respective actions to ensure your customer's learning and satisfaction during the onboarding.

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Pricing:

Free plan – 30-day free trial available✅ (Limitations- 3 Rooms per user per month, Unlimited users)

Paid plans -

• Growth - $20/user/month

• Premium - $34/user/month

• Enterprise - $69/user/month

Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• Buyerstage makes it easier for sellers and buyers to meet in a meaningful way.  

• Another great thing about the tool is that it lets you set up precise implementation processes.  

• The software gives insights based on artificial intelligence, which lets timely identification of critical areas of improvement.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• Improvement needed in robust content management.  

• It might take a little while to load when the room is already overloaded with content.  

Key features:  

• Mutual action plan  

• Content management

• Stakeholder mapping

• Analytics and reports

• Customer onboarding

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2. Userguiding

Userguiding positions themselves as a product adoption platform, which helps anyone to create and deliver awesome onboarding experiences without any coding. It offers various features that can enable self-serve options, announce product updates, boost feature adoption, and help collect feedback. Non-technical teams can implement it so quickly with an easy setup.

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Pricing:

Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)

Paid plans -

• Basic - $89/month (billed yearly)

• Professional Plan - $249/month (billed yearly)

• Corporate Plan - Talk to sales

Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):

• It doesn't take long to set up guides, polls, and other things, and the scheduling and audience targeting tools that are already built in are very useful.

• Great help and an easy-to-use interface. Was able to navigate to each field effectively.  

• Setting it up is pretty simple, and it makes learning easy for our first-time users.

Top Cons (from G2):

• There aren't many options to choose from. Needs more choices for customization.  

• It doesn't always line up right on the user's screen.

• People would sometimes get stuck on text-based user guides, and the guide would just stop.

Key features:

• Onboarding checklists

• Knowledge base

• Product updates

• Announcement modals

• User segmentation

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3. Rocketlane

Rocketlane is a customer onboarding platform built to streamline a collaborative onboarding experience for SaaS products and other services. With a bundle of capabilities like project management, document collaboration, and resource management, it helps to efficiently run and deliver the projects within the projected timeline and budget. Further, it helps to know more about the customers by gaining visibility into the projects and customer sentiments.

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Pricing:

Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)

Paid plans-

• Essential - $19/member/month billed annually

• Standard - $49/member/month billed annually

• Premium - $69/member/month billed annually

• Enterprise - $99/member/month billed annually

Rating (from G2): 4.8 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):

• It's by far the best project management software I've ever used. It lets you break up your projects into stages, goals, tasks, and subtasks so that people can work together on the platform.  

• It works great with Salesforce and lets me see what my team is working on and also bring that same visibility to our clients.  

• A lot of fun to use and made life easy. Cut down on the time it takes to plan a job and make better plans for tasks. It is very simple to use.

Top Cons (from G2):

• Not too much, but yeah, sometimes it takes a little while to process the older timesheets.  

• Setting it up for the first time is a bit tricky, and customer service isn't great.  

• Too many email alerts for each task when a case is assigned.

Key features:

• Project management

• Finanace management

• Time tracking

• Resource management

• Customer portal  

• Business IQ

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4. Clueso

Clueso is a tool to create help documentation and video tutorials blazing fast with the help of AI. It provides an extensive toolkit for recording product screens, as well as the ability to instantly convert them into studio-quality explainer videos and help articles.

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Pricing: Undisclosed❌

Rating (from G2): 4.8 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• It saves a lot of time, and the final deliverable has high quality.  

• The best place to make high-quality guide videos with the help of AI.  

• The founders personally reach out to customers on WhatsApp, which is great customer service. It's also simple to export videos to various publishing platforms.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• There are times when the video and audio don't sync well, even when relevant screenshots are included for comparison.  

• There are still some rough spots (like keeping the alignment after multiple rounds of AI rewriting the script), but it is getting better quickly.  

• It can be hard to figure out how to make changes and edits at first.

Key features:  

• Studio quality video tutorials

• Step by step help articles maker

• 1-click translation

• Custom help site

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5. Userpilot

Userpilot is an in-app engagement and product analytics tool that assists in building powerful in-app experiences. It enables product teams to create onboarding paths, announce product updates, collect feedback, and build self-serve support, all through a no-code solution that doesn't require developers to build onboarding flows.

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Pricing:

Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)

Paid plans-

• Starter - $249/month billed annually  

• Growth - $749/month billed annually  

• Enterprise - Talk to sales

Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• It lets the marketing and product teams quickly make and share in-app lessons, feature highlights, and a way for users to give feedback.  

• As soon as the product is changed, UserPilot lets us quickly update our walkthroughs. This makes it easy to keep the onboarding and user help up to date.  

• While other tools may be easier to use, Userpilot is better because it is really easy to set up and use.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• I like that it has a lot of features, but some of the more complicated ones are too much for me to handle. The prices could also be more affordable.  

• It would be great if it allowed for more customization of the analytics.  

• What I miss about Userpilot is the ability to add more personalized designs that better match the brand and the app's style.

Key features:  

• Product analytics

• User engagement

• User feedback

• Churn prevention

• In-app support

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6. Pendo

Pendo is a product experience and digital adoption platform that enables teams to set up in-app guides with a no-code builder to provide efficient customer support and drive product adoption. Pendo’s analytics let teams understand what users are doing and how they are interacting with their product. Further Pendo AI offers a variety of exciting features, such as suggested replays, journey insights, NPS insights, and so on, to ease the user adoption process.

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Pricing:

Free trial - Available✅ for up to 500 monthly active users.

Paid plans - Talk to sales.  

Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• It helps you keep track of which features users are using and makes it easy to work with analytics.  

• Pendo is unique because it can give you deep insights into how people use your software. This makes it an invaluable tool for learning how people use our software.

• Pendo is a powerful tool for collecting data, giving guided tours, getting feedback, seeing how features are used, and finding out how people are using our products.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• Not being able to keep track of every page or event on our site. On our site, I'd like to be able to track certain pages more easily.  

• Pendo is very strong and has a lot of features, but it can be hard to figure out how to use them all.  

• Setting it up can be tricky, and there are times when I think everything is mapped properly, but it's not.

Key features:  

• Analytics

• Guides

• Session replays

• NPS

• Feedback collection

• Pendo AI

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7. Appcues

Appcues is a no-code product adoption platform that helps to track web and mobile app’ product usage, build onboarding flows, feature update announcements, and implement surveys. From user onboarding to retaining the users beyond, Appcues offers flexible ways to build tailor-made product experiences.

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Pricing:

Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)  

Paid plans-

• Starter - $249/month, for 1 app, billed annually  

• Starter - $879/month, for 1 app, billed annually  

• Enterprise - Talk to sales

Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• The fact that Appcues is so simple and easy to set up is something I really like about it. Our development team doesn't have to do much to make it work, so the product team can quickly add in-app guides, polls, and tooltips without any problems.

• It was a great time getting started.I felt encouraged during the whole process of implementation and even afterward. They care a lot about how well you do with Appcues.

• It's easy to use, and Appcues gives us the organizational flexibility we need to get the word out about our products.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• Appcues has a good collection of templates, but it would be great to have more design freedom and customization choices.

• The price may be too high for smaller teams or companies that are just starting out, even though the tool is great.  

• Overall, the tool is great, but I'd like to see more bestpractice models that are already made.

Key features:  

• User onboarding

• Feature announcements

• Mobile adoption

• Feature adoption

• Insights

• NPS & surveys

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8. Churnzero

Churnzero is a customer success platform that helps onboard users, work on renewals and expansion opportunities, and deliver the best customer experiences. It offers in-app communication, personalization, and automation capabilities to easily engage and activate the customers.

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Pricing: Undisclosed❌

Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• To begin, I like the UI because it's easy to use. It will also be easy for people who are accessing it for the first time. With all the features it offers for keeping track of account basics, it makes the life of the CSM easy.  

• The deep analytics and automated workflows have changed everything for our team and helped us focus on the right people at the right time. The design is easy to use, and the ChurnZero team has been great at helping us.  

• Since I can send emails straight from churnzero, I don't have to make a note and then open an outside email to follow up.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• One downside is that it makes it hard to adjust email outreach. With ChurnZero, you can't carry on an email thread, which makes it hard to keep talking.

• Some information would be easier to find if it were all on one page instead of many.

Key features:  

• Customer health score

• Churn risk prediction

• Product engagement

• Customer segmenting

• Reporting and dashboards

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9. Custify

Custify is also a modern customer success platform that helps to ensure product adoption, understand the customer's lifecycle, and expand accounts through upselling. It offers capabilities in onboarding, customer health, feedback collection, and analytics modules to orchestrate the entire customer management process in real-time under one umbrella.

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Pricing: Undisclosed❌ (Talk to sales)

Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• We can handle all of our customer success tasks, which gives us a lot of time to work one-on-one with our most important accounts.

• GDPR-compliant, with good customer service and support and a fast sales process. Fair prices, and it's easy to set up.  

• The best thing about Custify for me is that it has powerful reporting tools, especially for keeping track of customer interactions and churn data.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• It wasn't easy to learn how to use the UI.

• It took me a while to figure out how to use it for daily tasks, and the menu buttons sometimes make me feel lost!

• Even though the experience as a whole is very good, a few small changes could make it even better. No email integration with HubSpot.

Key features:  

• Customer health

• Expansion and growth

• Surveys

• Tasks and alerts

• Automation

• Dashboards and reports

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10. Dock

Dock is a client-facing workspace to create onboarding plans, client portals, sales proposals, and project hubs. It helps to stay organized throughout the deal process by sharing resources under a single organized workspace. With deal rooms, Dock enables teams to create personalized onboarding hubs, where they can plan the onboarding steps, share the required resources, and collaborate under one space.

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Pricing:

Free plan - Available✅ for up to 5 workspaces

Paid plans -

• Starter - $49/person/month (billed annually)

• Growth - $59/person/month +$250 monthly platform fee (billed annually)

• Enterprise - Talk to sales  

Rating (from G2): 4.9 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• Prospects and clients love how easy it is to use Dock to share within the company. It's very easy to make a new workspace and brand it with your company's logo.  

• I love that Dock gives me a central place to share useful content and tools with my prospects. Several leads have told me they love how easy it is to use compared to multiple email attachments.  

• Dock is an amazing tool for enabling people to do great things. It has an easy-to-use interface and flexible workspaces that make managing projects much easier.

Top Cons (from G2):  

Setting up an area in a workspace can be a little tricky at times because of the way it is formatted.  

• I wish there was a lower-cost entry level option to use dock.  

• Mobile-friendly access is the only thing I'm really looking forward to.

Key features:  

• Customer onboarding

• Content management

• Sales order forms

• Client portal

• Client project management

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11. Guidecx

GuideCX is client onboarding software that helps to transform complex product learnings into digestible task lists with progress indicators to track progressive learning. It enables anyone to easily create a personal branded customer onboarding workflow with necessary learning resources to educate the users.

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Pricing:  

Starts at $143 month / license

Premium and Advanced plans - Talk to sales

Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• What a great surprise how simple it is to understand.When they asked us for help, we had to tell them we didn't need it because we already knew most of the answers. I really like THAT idea for a self-service point!

• Their staff is always ready to help you fix a problem or find a way to do something.

• Very simple to set up and work with different platforms. scalable, high-tech, and easy to change.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• The reporting is helpful, but it's not always clear to me what's wrong with certain onboardings.  

• I'd like the UI to have a few more ways to be customized.  

• There are too many clicks to get around, and that needs to be fixed.  

Key features:  

• Customer engagement

• Process automation

• Project and task management

• Time tracking and resource management

• Advanced reporting

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12. Productfruits

Productfruits is an emerging user onboarding platform that helps to achieve higher activation rates and minimize customer churn with the help of features like AI-powered guided tours, onboarding checklists, and in-app tooltips.

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Pricing:

Free trial - Available✅(14-day free trial)

Paid plans -

• Core - $79/month - upto 1500 users

• Boost - $139/month - upto 1500 users

• Enterprise - Talk to sales

Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• The Product Fruits tool is simple to use and gives our users a great experience. It also helps us get quick feedback to make our product better and meet our users' needs.  

• The customer service works well and quickly. As of now, every issue has been fixed in a flash!  

• It's the best price I've seen for something that does a lot of useful things for the SaaS platform. The features are also simple and quick to set up. I got personal support whenever I needed it.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• There is a lot of room for improvement in the analytics part, to be honest.  

• The system is flexible, but it can be hard to understand at first.  

• It could have more obvious features, like having an invisible hint.

Key features:  

• Tours & guides

• Onboarding checklists

• Hint and tooltips

• In-app announcements

• NPS & Surveys

• Knowledge base

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13. Stonly

Stonly presents itself as a modern knowledge platform for customer onboarding. They assist in expediting the creation of explanations and interactive guides, thereby effectively enabling self-serve options for customers. AI provides swift answers to complex queries from both customers and agents.

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Pricing: Undisclosed❌

Rating (from G2): 4.8 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• Our experience with Stonly has been pretty easy, and it has helped us get a lot of value with not much work.

• I really like how Stonly's onboarding wizard tool and user study features work. It makes my job a lot easier and gives me useful information about how our users feel.

• Their support was also very helpful when we were merging and when we had technical issues or questions.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• It would be great if the connections worked better.  

• Integration between Stonly and Zendesk isn't as stable as I'd like it to be.  

• Not enough ways to customize—would like more types of tips and prompts and more ways to customize.

Key features:  

• Interactive guides

• Knowledge base

• Guided tours

• AI answers

• Contact forms

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14. Whatfix

Whatfix is an interactive digital adoption platform to guide customers and employees through contextual guidance, on-demand user support, and a self-help knowledge base. The robust analytics track user interactions with web and mobile applications, allowing us to understand users' digital journeys and collect feedback across the application to enhance product adoption and retention.

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Pricing:  

Free trial - Available✅(Upon request)

Paid plans - Undisclosed❌

Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• As for us, Whatfix has saved us a lot of time. We no longer need to wait for long development rounds or depend on our own development teams; we can do most of the work ourselves.  

• It's very easy to use, clear, and straightforward.  

• Great customer service and success teams that are always ready to help.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• Some features still feel like they're not fully developed yet and need to be improved and developed further to reach their full potential.  

• It's tough to test the content before sending it to production. The admin side of things are glitchy sometimes.

Key features:  

• In-app guidance

• Self-help user support

• Product analytics

• No code event tracking

• AI-Powered, Actionable Insights

• Replica application environments

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15. Walkme

Walkme is one of the leading digital adoption platforms that offers personalized guidance and automation capabilities to ensure consistent and efficient product adoption. Its AI capabilities precisely pinpoint the areas where customers encounter difficulties and implement appropriate personal guidance actions to maintain their productivity.

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Pricing: Undisclosed❌

Rating (from G2): 4.5 out of 5

Top pros (from G2):  

• How simple it is to use WalkMe is what makes it so useful. You don't need to know how to code to use methods, which is very helpful.  

• Their help team is great, which is something I really like. They answer quickly and will tell you every week about a ticket if they haven't heard from you, which helps me when work gets busy.  

• Compared to other Digital Adoption Platforms, WalkMe is simple to set up. It's also easy to make content, which makes teaching and automating tasks for end users go more quickly.

Top Cons (from G2):  

• It's not easy to make changes. For instance, making changes to the CSS.  

• The platform takes a little while to get used to.  

• I must go back and choose parts more than once sometimes, because of glitchy.

Key features:

• Guidance creation

• Applicaiton usage analytics

• Workflow analytics

• In-app guidance

• License optimization

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Measuring the success of SaaS Onboarding Software

SaaS Onboarding KPIs (Key performance indicators)  

Here is a list of essential onboarding metrics to track the success of an onboarding process.  

1. Onboarding completion rate  

The total time spent by users to complete the onboarding process from start to end.  

2. Time to first value  

The time duration taken for the users from the first touch point to value realization (desired outcome) with the product.  

3. Product adoption rate  

Percentage of users regularly using the product after the onboarding process.  

4. Churn rate  

Percentage of users who stopped using the product in a specific time frame.  

5. Customer satisfaction score  

A weighing factor on how satisfied the users are with the onboarding process. Usually this is collected through in-app and email surveys.  

6. Customer effort score  

This score evaluates how easy it is for the customers to use the product or interact with support during the onboarding process.  

7. Feature usage rates  

Number of times at which certain features are used by the new users after the onboarding process.  

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Conducting post-boarding surveys and assessments  

As we mentioned earlier, the user onboarding process is always in progress because of its continuous improvements. To ensure the delivered onboarding process quality and customer satisfaction levels, it is critical to conduct post-boarding surveys and assessments. This feedback will greatly assist organizations in identifying the values, strengths, and lagging factors in the onboarding experience.

To do this effectively with your customers, don’t overwhelm them with a lot of questions in the survey. Keep it concise and select quality questions that focus on critical aspects of onboarding. A few examples are  

• On a scale of 10, how satisfied are you with the resources delivered in the onboarding?  

• What was the most challenging or frustrating aspect of the onboarding process for you?

Ensure that you complete the survey within one or two weeks of completing onboarding. The right timing is critical to collecting what customers actually experienced. You can use a variety of survey tools to streamline the entire survey process and data collection. Once you have gathered sufficient sample data, conduct an analysis to pinpoint your strengths and areas for improvement. Make your customers' feedback valuable by communicating these updates to them, demonstrating the impact of their suggestions.

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Tracking user retention and product usage after onboarding  

To track how your onboarding process influences users to convert from newbies to highly engaged users, it is critical to value the user retention and product usage of the customers after onboarding. Some of the key metrics for tracking user retention include daily/monthly active users, feature usage rates, support requests raised, funnel analysis, and other miscellaneous engagement metrics with respect to the product. By looking into these metrics, organizations can extract valuable goldmine insights on how their onboarding process has influenced the customer journey. Implementing a user behavior analytics platform can ease this process to track and visualize. Establish a regular routine to follow these metrics so that the team can easily monitor trends and identify patterns to improve the onboarding to further levels and take the right actions on time.  

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Overcoming Common Challenges in SaaS Onboarding

Managing resistance to change during onboarding  

During the onboarding process, it is common to encounter resistance from the customer's end in adapting to the new change. The primary reason for this resistance is the fear of the complexities that come with this change. Onboarding teams can, however, instill confidence in users by clearly communicating the rationale behind the onboarding process and outlining its benefits.

To streamline the process, identify the influential team members (champions) and thoroughly explain the benefits of onboarding to them. They will eventually share the positive experiences with other members of the team. More importantly, don’t bombard them with overwhelming feature showcases. Instead, implement a gradual rollout so that it feels manageable for them to get convinced for the change. Create a dedicated space for users to share their concerns about onboarding changes. Address their requests on time to reduce the resistance and clarify the misunderstandings about the change.  

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Handling technical issues and troubleshooting for users  

Often, most of the users feel stuck during the onboarding process due to some technical issues they face. The first basic step that every organization must do is to create an extensive knowledge base, which should include video tutorials, troubleshooting articles, and step-by-step solutions for solving all the common issues. You can also encourage your users to contribute solutions to the knowledge base by creating a community-driven support environment.

During the onboarding, regularly engage with the users to proactively address their technical concerns. Because of your proactive commitment, you may be able to prevent serious issues on time and build trust among users. To address highly complex issues, ensure you’ve provided simple access to technical support such as email, live chat, or through calls. Quick response time is highly critical to solving issues with high complexity. In these cases, it is crucial to provide personalized one-on-one support, particularly for high-value accounts, to ensure they receive instant, dedicated support on time.

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Adapting onboarding strategies for global and diverse user bases  

In today's globalized, interconnected world with global customers, designing onboarding processes that take factors such as diversity and cultural context into account is imperative. This includes communication styles, training resources, and a dynamic timeline to align with global customer expectations. Addressing global customers requires careful consideration of the cultural context.

To ensure this, provide training to the onboarding teams on the importance of cultural context in the onboarding measures. The next important step is to offer multilingual support. Whether it's the knowledge base section or other onboarding materials, provide multilingual support to facilitate their understanding. This includes subtitled videos and document translation to the native languages, if needed. Don't limit yourself to implementing lean content methodologies. Try to offer various learning formats like guides, videos, interactive modules, hands-on training programs, etc. During the onboarding process, take into account the diverse learning preferences of the customers.

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The Future of SaaS Onboarding Software

Emerging trends and technologies in SaaS onboarding

The trend of 'there is an AI for that' is at its peak, revolutionizing every industry and domain. In SaaS onboarding, AI is disrupting the industry with adaptive onboarding assistance. These are simply AI-powered guides enabled by machine learning to deliver onboarding experiences with respect to unique user goals.  

In terms of content types, SaaS onboarding software is surpassing traditional text tutorials by heavily utilizing interactive modules, such as interactive walkthroughs, and cutting-edge elements like virtual reality. With this technology, users can instantly receive feedback for their actions within the product, making the experience more engaging and enjoyable. Advanced data analytics and automation are making it easier to trigger the right actions at the right moment based on user behavior, encouraging users to complete specific tasks. This will significantly influence product adoption and encourage users to maintain regular feature usage.

In summary, AI, automation workflows, and data analytics are rapidly advancing, transforming SaaS onboarding to become more immersive, beneficial for customers, and enabling teams to implement journeys faster than ever with more advanced capabilities.

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Predictions for the evolution of onboarding practices  

With changing workforce dynamics and advancements, the future of onboarding looks so disruptive. Personalization at scale will continue to grow to new heights, with organizations leveraging data analytics to extract individual user needs and behaviors. This will be beneficial for both sides, as personalization directly impacts high buyer engagement. Automated workflows and intelligent assistants will streamline repetitive tasks and enable onboarding teams to focus on creative tasks and works that truly matter and are meaningful to do. In terms of onboarding content, gamification and interactive content will become a new norm, which will make the onboarding process more enjoyable for the users.  

Organizations should prioritize localization efforts and inclusive designs as customer segments expand worldwide to ensure effective sales engagement with users from different countries. Automation and immersive technologies will significantly drive the evolution of onboarding. To leverage these technologies and enable effective onboarding experiences that foster long-term customer loyalty, onboarding teams should invest in continuous learning and improvement.

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Conclusion

Recap of key takeaways  

Over time, the real revenue growth comes from retained customers. Effective onboarding is always crucial for any product to increase their customer’s retention. In today's crowded SaaS market, it is very hard for users to find value in the right product. Even if you successfully convert a customer by overcoming these obstacles, losing them due to churn in later stages can be a significant loss. As a result, crafting a solid onboarding process is the only way to ensure that your customers find value soon after signing up and feel confident that they are in the right place.

Some of the key takeaways are,  

• Always try not to overwhelm your users. Gradually roll out any module to educate them progressively.  

• Personalize your onboarding effort as much as possible by researching your customer’s background.  

• Leverage the right SAP onboarding software based on your needs and priorities to simplify the whole process.  

• To evolve your onboarding efforts, invest in continuous learning and iterative measures through feedback and analysis.

• Adapt to the growing technological trends and customer flow to keep your onboarding process efficient and very relevant to the customer you are serving.  

Final thoughts on mastering SaaS onboarding software  

• Choose the right SaaS onboarding software that helps you to craft simple and engaging onboarding experiences within a short time.  

• Ensure the selected software provides a robust data analytics environment to track and measure your customer engagement.  

• Ensure your onboarding software has automation capabilities to create onboarding workflows that can increase your efficiency at scale.  

• Give priority to no-code solutions in order to reduce the dependence on developers to build your onboarding modules.

• Leverage data, segment your users, and personalize the experience.  

• Keep track of the best practices followed and try to implement them through your onboarding software to improve the experience.