What Does An Ideal SaaS Customer Onboarding Look Like?

Every enterprise SaaS company dreams of delivering the best customer onboarding and shining with the brightest stars given by their customers. Customer Onboarding is a process in which you get to add those stars in the minds of your customers to shine. 60% of B2B SaaS companies say their current user onboarding experience for their product is not satisfactory.

Customer SaaS onboarding is the process that helps new users to implement and deliver materials to help customers achieve their goals and get set up so that the user will realize the value of the product quickly.

Creating a compelling customer onboarding SaaS experience starts with building a constructive framework. Which helps define the ongoing relationship your customer has with your product. 77% of B2B clients say that technology has dramatically transformed their company's expectations of how companies should interact with them.

It is your chance to help your customer understand how your product helps them meet their needs and solve their problems using an effective customer onboarding tool like CogniSaaS.

What Is The Current Customer Onboarding Process?

A customer onboarding journey is a step-by-step process a user goes through to start using your product or services.

Customers today are so used to seamless experiences users expect to complete a journey with as few steps as possible, wherever and whenever they want. The complexity of your customer onboarding process determines if they'll start using your product or service or drop out before becoming a customer.

Pre-Sales

B2B SaaS companies use many tactics to create awareness and lead generation, like SEO, paid ads, and outbound email marketing that generates traffic and attracts the right audience.

Companies use sign-up forms which help customers to get started with your products. They ask customers questions through sign-up forms that offer a selection to choose from rather than making users start from scratch, which also helps identify customer concerns and what can be the best solutions for them.

Onboarding

The information collected through sign-up forms is forwarded to the onboarding and implementation team and helps them outline the client's desired outcomes, goals, and a plan to move forward using CRM tools.

CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce help track the behavior of your prospects on your website and help you approach your target better in emails. It helps send personalized emails based on the prospect's activity and readiness to purchase your product and offers unique solutions to their problems.  

In this stage, customers log in for the first time and create their first impression of the product. Customers use the pilot product and follow a step-by-step process to set themselves up. They usually rely on the onboarding team to help them set up the product according to their requirements and get integrated into the main product.

SaaS companies must provide smooth navigation to the customer to engage them as much as possible. It will help them realize to value the product offers and support them to use its full potential or assist them if they have some customization to make the product fit their use case requirements.  

The main requirement of all B2B SaaS companies is to have tools like CRM, PM, Jira, and Confluence, with the support of the customer success team, in one place. Integration of these tools allows your team to import data from other sources to reduce the information in silos or invite their team to work together to get the most value from your product.

Implementation

The main goal of implementation is to get users to adopt and integrate a software application into an existing business workflow. The implementation team is assigned the use cases based on their task dependencies according to where it stands on the product roadmap.

It is crucial to work with a single source of truth platform that provides a synchronized system for cross-functional collaboration across your organization to avoid delays in go-live with the product customized to customers' requirements.

Customer Success

Most companies believe their task is over after a customer has been onboarded, but it is far from over. It is crucial to make your customer feel valued. You can put out a survey and ask about their experience with your product. Also, you can share additional resources like new updates, tips on how to use the features, Testimonial videos, or customer quotes.

Customer retention is a metric that shows customer success and satisfaction, focusing on customers' use of your product. The higher your retention rate is, the higher your revenue growth and lifetime value will be. Customer success encourages the customers to recommend your product to their friends or colleagues and promote it through word-of-mouth marketing.

What Is The Best Customer Onboarding Process?

SaaS enterprise business is about Delighting the customers because they are the sources of all business sustainability and success. SaaS Companies focus on creating a better customer experience to delight, win, and retain with a productive customer onboarding journey.

Customer onboarding is the orientation of your customer to know your product, service, or processing. Most businesses fail when they are not able to delight their customers. A customer's pleasant experience with your business is a powerful resource as it brings more referrals and ensures customer loyalty. It costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. It is essential to make your existing clients happy with your product/service, solve their problems on time, and find more ways to make them return.  

The best onboarding process should provide a single source of truth platform like CogniSaaS with the features like automation, insights, forecast, etc. The best Customer onboarding process should make the lives of employees and customers easy and hassle-free.

Here are a few features that provide a smooth customer onboarding experience.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

CogniSaaS provides a platform integrated with CRM and PM tools like Jira and the confluence with the support for the customer success team to provide seamless customer onboarding and retention.

This integration helps avoid the loss of information that usually happens due to different silos of tools used across organization departments. It makes it easier for the internal teams and customers to collaborate and increases the efficiency of the implementation team.

Visibility & Transparency

Customer success managers need to keep track of tasks, deliverables, and feedback, so they require a platform that provides a single source of truth platform like CogniSaaS. There are many occasions when customer success managers or project managers have to spend extra time collecting data from silos of tools.

It leads to data loss or miscommunication that causes delays in go-live. The best onboarding platform must provide effortless visibility & transparency on crucial data like the status of tasks and deliverables to build trust between companies.

Time To Value And Revenue Risk Minimization

If a platform can provide you with insights and recommendations to prevent revenue risks and speed up the prioritization plan, What could be better than that?

These insights and recommendations are tasks and use-cases levels that enable teams to recognize revenue risks. It helps teams prioritize what needs immediate attention and how to provide the most value to the customers.

These insights also help understand where customers face difficulties to make their onboarding process smoother by shorter and more effective onboarding to help users achieve value sooner.

Accountability

A good customer onboarding platform must provide accountability and dependencies of tasks and use cases to provide seamless team collaboration.

Most of the failures faced by implementation teams are due to misfits in the use case dependencies and the product roadmap and not fully developed implementation during the go-live of the customer journey, which results in customer churn.

CogniSaaS provides a holistic view of customer data in a single-click view of all the projects, use cases, tasks, and product dependencies associated with a customer to eliminate information silos and save valuable time and bandwidth.

What Are The Differences Between Traditional Onboarding And Structured Onboarding?

Most businesses are moving from traditional customer onboarding to Digital customer onboarding. Due to pandemic restrictions, companies started to work remotely.

Structured onboarding allows the leverage of modern digital tools and technology for onboarding new customers. It helps companies to create cost-effective, efficient customer onboarding checklists. It also provides 24/7 centralized access to all information, assistance for understanding company workflows, and creates a personalized onboarding experience.

Let's discuss a few differences between traditional and digital onboarding processes.

Cost

SaaS companies must understand the current cost of their customer onboarding by considering every detailed aspect when deciding which process to choose and which is better for your company.

In Traditional customer onboarding, 44% of the company focuses on customer acquisition, whereas only 18% focus on retention.

Whereas structured Customer onboarding focuses on Customer retention and building a loyal relationship with customers, thereby avoiding customer acquisition costs. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70% while selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.

Information Sharing & Security

Customers trust your company with their confidential pieces of information, so it is a must to provide them with assurance and security. Employees must handle this information delicately.  

In the traditional customer data onboarding process, the data sharing is in silos which causes new pains and discrepancies in Cross-functional teams. Manual data collection in cross-functional teams loses focus on data collection, analysis, and insights and limits visibility. It affects your transparency and accountability with your customers, which may cause your company to miss potential business development opportunities.

However, a structured customer data onboarding process provides a GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation) compliant onboarding software that keeps data secure. Sharing data is easy with a single source of truth platforms. CogniSaaS provides CRM, project management, and Jira integration to help keep the documents confidential and make importing and sharing easy with customers and their employees.

​​Data Insights & Tracking system

In the process of customer onboarding, it is crucial to track the task, deliverables, and insights of the process to make data-driven decisions.  

Traditional onboarding doesn't provide these benefits as it becomes difficult to track accurately. Whereas structured onboarding ensures information is always consistent, up-to-date, and accurate. A platform like CogniSaaS helps to receive feedback and performance insights.

Data Forecast

When facing onboarding issues, there's no warning in traditional customer onboarding. SaaS Customer onboarding traditionally needs to raise a support ticket to get their problem solved for every problem they face with an application, software, or process.

However, the customer onboarding platform CogniSaaS provides a forecast of issues that may arise in the future and their solutions with the help of Tracking the data and using their insights while also providing 24*7 employee support without the need for a support ticket.

Conclusion

Businesses that think customer onboarding is the end of the client relationship are more likely to fail. It is the start of building a long and mutual relationship with a client who is a valued member of your community and recommends your product to their network.

If your goal is to provide a seamless software onboarding process for your customers, then CogniSaaS is your go-to solution. For more information about our features, please refer to our feature page.