Following our recent Customer Success Roundup, we thought we’d dive a little deeper into one of the biggest aspects of SaaS customer success – SaaS Customer Onboarding!
Your onboarding process will make or break your customer’s ability to achieve their desired results and can dramatically affect your churn and retention numbers. So what makes a good SaaS onboarding process? These 5 articles will get you started!
What Every SaaS Business Needs to Know About User Adoption
BetterCloud‘s Rachel Orston kicks things off with a crash-course in what every SaaS business needs to know about user adoption. Published on the Openview blog following Orston’s presentation at SaaStr Annual 2018, this article sums up her presentation while also expounding on many aspects of user adoption that were not previously discussed. Complete with useful data and helpful graphics, Orston’s carefully written glance at SaaS user adoption is well worth the read.
Without understanding the needs, characteristics, and expectations of your customers, you leave open the potential for miscommunications, an inability to tailor your efforts, and misguided direction on how your product fits into their day-to-day.
– Rachel Orston
Has Your SaaS Nailed the Onboarding Process?
Making their SaaSX roundup debut is mobile and web app development partner Koombea with a fantastic piece on delivering a great SaaS onboarding experience. Penned by Executive VP of Sales and Marketing Robert Kazmi, this article addresses the various complexities within high-touch onboarding and low-touch onboarding before asking readers to consider one thing: has your SaaS nailed the onboarding process?
Providing the best possible on-boarding process means that you must understand what customer success looks like and what milestones customers must achieve to get there. There is no “standard SaaS on-boarding process” you can cut and paste, you’re going to have to devise one based on the needs of your SaaS.
– Robert Kazmi
High-Touch Customer Onboarding for SaaS Companies
Excerpted from Process Street‘s eBook Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies, this article focuses on high-touch SaaS onboarding and why it’s such an important part of avoiding customer churn. Written by an unaccredited Process Street author, this chapter is only one small part of a much larger study on SaaS onboarding. For the purpose of this roundup, we suggest that you start here, but encourage all of our readers to give the book a read as well!
A high-touch onboarding approach for SaaS involves reaching out to each customer individually. Once you’ve made the sale, you can focus on educating your customer instead of acquiring them.
– Process Street
Rethinking Customer Onboarding to Accelerate Success
ChurnZero‘s latest Q&A with Jason Whitehead of Tri Tuns and Customer Success Mastermind is a welcomed change of pace from the highly-ambitious, sprawling educational pieces typically included in our weekly roundups. Though still deeply-informative, this somewhat-freeform discussion with Whitehead maintains a casual flow throughout, making the brilliant tips included a pleasure to absorb. With great questions from ChurnZero’s own Cori Pearce and insightful answers from Whitehead – you really can’t go wrong!
I would say [customer adoption] should really start during the sales process. Part of this is getting your salespeople to focus on having the right discussions with customers, not just landing the initial sale, but making sure we’re selling for renewals from the very beginning and including this as part of our sales process.
– Jason Whitehead
There is No Better “Growth Hack” for SaaS Than Talking With Your Customers
Lastly comes a UX Collective entry from brilliant B2B SaaS consultant Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré. With the groundwork for proper SaaS onboarding laid by the articles above, DeMeré challenges readers to dive a little deeper and allow onboarding processes to give way to something a little more human. As stated in the article’s title, the author feels that there is no better “growth hack” than simply talking with your customers. Yes, you heard correctly! Emotion, empathy and human communication still have a home in the tech business, and DeMeré calls for more SaaS companies to utilize a more human approach when onboarding new customers. Your customers are your family, and it’s time you get to know each and every one of them!
It’s just not input. It’s just not feedback. It’s getting to know your customers as human beings and building relationships with them that drive positive CX far more powerfully than any of these elements could do alone.
– Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré
Happy reading!
Thanks so much for joining us for another SaaS roundup. We hope to see you here again next Monday!
Hi Sage. Wow. A lot of great thoughts. I like the approach to reach out each customer individually. It’s even better than analyzing case studies, analytics and other metrics. Just speak to your customers. You can get more information with one call.