July 16, 2024
The Ultimate Guide to Digital Sales Rooms
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One of the critical reasons why many products are losing their customers is that they think the job is over once the sale is done. That's a million-dollar void. Customer onboarding is a crucial step in ensuring customer satisfaction and long-term success. A successful deal doesn’t mean that your customer knows end-to-end how to use your product in the right way to extract the maximum outcome.
To make an everlasting first impression about your product and accelerate the time to value, customer onboarding is a necessary thing to do for any SaaS product. A well-structured onboarding can lower the demand for customer support and improve the user adoption rate, which in turn heavily impacts the long-term revenue growth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pricing:
Free plan – 30-day free trial available✅ (Limitations- 3 Rooms per user per month, Unlimited users)
Paid plans -
Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)
Paid plans -
Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)
Paid plans-
Rating (from G2): 4.8 out of 5
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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.
Pricing: Undisclosed❌
Rating (from G2): 4.8 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)
Paid plans-
Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free trial - Available✅ for up to 500 monthly active users.
Paid plans - Talk to sales.
Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free plan - Available✅ (14-day free trial)
Paid plans-
Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5
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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.
Pricing: Undisclosed❌
Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5
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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.
Pricing: Undisclosed❌ (Talk to sales)
Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free plan - Available✅ for up to 5 workspaces
Paid plans -
Rating (from G2): 4.9 out of 5
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Setting up an area in a workspace can be a little tricky at times because of the way it is formatted.
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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.
Pricing:
Starts at $143 month / license
Premium and Advanced plans - Talk to sales
Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free trial - Available✅(14-day free trial)
Paid plans -
Rating (from G2): 4.7 out of 5
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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.
Pricing: Undisclosed❌
Rating (from G2): 4.8 out of 5
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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.
Pricing:
Free trial - Available✅(Upon request)
Paid plans - Undisclosed❌
Rating (from G2): 4.6 out of 5
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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.
Pricing: Undisclosed❌
Rating (from G2): 4.5 out of 5
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Here is a list of essential onboarding metrics to track the success of an onboarding process.
The total time spent by users to complete the onboarding process from start to end.
The time duration taken for the users from the first touch point to value realization (desired outcome) with the product.
Percentage of users regularly using the product after the onboarding process.
Percentage of users who stopped using the product in a specific time frame.
A weighing factor on how satisfied the users are with the onboarding process. Usually this is collected through in-app and email surveys.
This score evaluates how easy it is for the customers to use the product or interact with support during the onboarding process.
Number of times at which certain features are used by the new users after the onboarding process.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
