The Customer Onboarding Journey in SaaS

You have a great SaaS product that is going to be a game changer for your customers and make them wonder how they could ever manage without it. But then, for some unclear reason, they do not renew the subscription or sign the contract once their trial is over and drop-off rates are off the charts.

One place that you need to check and try to improve on, is your customer onboarding process.

Customer onboarding and churn 

Recent studies present interesting stats on churn SaaS companies see, some highlights that we’ve picked:

• Companies making more than $10 million in revenue have an average churn rate of 8.5%

• 30% of SaaS companies reported their churn rates have increased in the past year.

• If your customers are logging in to a mobile app, there is a 4 times higher chance for retention compared to the ones that use a web interface
• In recent years, 52% of SaaS providers have increased their spending on customer retention

There is a direct correlation between an un-successful customer onboarding process and customer churn of SaaS products in enterprises and SMBs.

The implementation of a new SaaS product is not always easy for the end user. Depending on the product, customer needs and the individual end-user role, it may take days, weeks or even months until the product is first implemented and then fully adopted by the users.

The early days when you have the user’s attention and cooperation is when you can boost their usability of your product and have them reach a level that could sustain high value and satisfaction. The other way around – users dealing with ill-guided information (not relevant to them, too much information..) and to many “how-to?” moments could be quickly turning into non fans.  To ensure that your customer is enjoying your product and making the most out of it, the product should not only be delivered as smoothly as possible, but also you should be leaving no unclarities or gaps in your user’s understanding of the implementation process and the product itself.

Creating successful Customer Onboarding Journeys 

Some of the most common pain points reported by SaaS companies when it comes to customer onboarding are limited understanding of the implementation process, lack of communication and motivation on the end user’s side and as a result- many support tickets being sent out.

All of the above are early signs of future churn risk and from this point on it’s a slippery slope towards losing the customer forever.

Luckily, there are technologies nowadays that could help your team manage the complexity of driving onboarding journeys, help you plan and execute an end-to-end personal journey without having to manually manage the process via email communication, support phone calls and so forth.

What is your current onboarding process probably lacking that advanced technologies can help you achieve?

1. Product education and training – per use case and per end-user role
2. Transparency – sharing status on implementation helps align everybody involved
3. Proactive communication – given end user onboarding journey progress (e.g. first use or a feature or product capabilities could be followed with next steps in the training)
4. Personal touch – personalization generates attention, relevancy and action. 
5. Quick turnaround of changes in onboarding related material – to be deployed

The ultimate – if only you could have a CSM watching after every end-user individually, hand holding and driving them through a successful onboarding. With personal journey orchestration we’re getting there.. quickly.