What is SaaS Customer Onboarding and How You Can Improve It

Without question, the customer onboarding process can make or break your future engagement with the people responsible for your revenue. 

Keeping an existing customer is more cost-effective than finding a new one, which is why onboarding is critical beyond that initial training session. This process includes ongoing training for new versions and tips and tricks that will help cement the relationship.

When customers are comfortable with a product from the outset — and confident in their ability to use it — adoption rates skyrocket, and the relationship becomes secure, long-term, and more profitable. Each of these elements contributes to direct and long-term growth for your business by creating informed and loyal customers.

While customer training platforms can be deployed through the pre-sales and post-sales stages, we will focus here on the two steps immediately preceding and following a sale: the Proof of Concept (POC) and new customer onboarding, both in an online, virtual platform.

Let’s jump into some critical steps to create or improve SaaS customer onboarding.

1. Active, Not Passive

Perhaps the most critical starting point is the mode of presenting the content of your POC or training session. The least effective approaches by far are those relying exclusively and solely on passive presentations, painfully reminiscent of a school lecture. These include offering a library of videos to watch, with pre-recorded walk-throughs of functions and features. As tools, they are great, but not on their own. The second, fairly popular option is certainly better: a video conference or webinar combining webcams and screen share for what is essentially still a passive experience. Again, a good start, but they lack genuine two-way engagement.

The alternative? SaaS customer onboarding that includes a virtual training lab at its core. This approach provides the benefits of hands-on training, which engages the customer, provides first-hand experience, allows them to work at their own speed (more on that later), and instills confidence that they can handle the user interface. 

A customer POC that features a customized demonstration for the specific scenario takes the demo directly from theoretical to proven. The focus of a POC is to give the customer direct insights into how your SaaS platform will help solve their pain point in practice. You’ll take the customer from a sales page highlighting benefits to a POC directly showcasing how those benefits are provided.

2. Setting the Stage

Publish an agenda ahead of time, so participants know what they will learn, how long it will take, and perhaps offer them the opportunity to contact you in advance to request additional points to cover. This is a way to engage them before you even begin the training or PoC. Setting accurate expectations will also reduce the number of attendees who decide to cancel, perhaps thinking it will take too long or be more involved than they initially wanted. You’ll take an extra step to make sure you have every opportunity to educate your future customers.

Ideally, even before locking down this agenda, be sure you know something about your audience’s demographics – have they ever seen your software, even for a few minutes? Have they used the competitor’s product and thus have a grasp of the fundamental paradigms and lingo? Are they reasonably technical, or must they be hand-held through the basics? Tailoring to the audience is critical to SaaS training best practices.

3. Short and Sweet

Next, segment the training experience into bite-sized pieces, each with a theme, goal, or focus. This simple practice has two key benefits: It provides natural breaks to prevent boredom and loss of focus and provides a sense of accomplishment for participants to feel that they have “mastered” a concept. You might even consider administering an “easy A” quiz at the end of each segment to trigger positive feelings of accomplishment when trainees ace them.

Try to boil down the SaaS customer onboarding process to only what the customer absolutely needs to know in the very beginning. Information overload can result in the customer wanting to back away from the onboarding process entirely, end the free trial, or cancel a paid subscription. Keep your SaaS customer onboarding program to a minimum, so the customer feels prepared to use your platform without needing to absorb too much information.

4. Let’s Talk

Engagement is all about two-way communication and active interactions. There are several ways to keep the customer onboarding process or customer PoC from getting stale. Make sure your platform includes a text/voice chat function and encourage participants to use it (either by jumping right in with a keyboard or microphone or by raising a virtual hand). Not only does it keep the audience involved, but it provides new perspectives, answers questions that others may have, and adds “texture” to the discussion. 

When you review the plan for the session at the beginning of the training, ask for any requests that go beyond the official agenda. Responses will drive relevance for better attention by engaging attendees right away. Effective SaaS training isn’t always a simple walkthrough. Some complex platforms will require more focus and participation, so take the extra step at the beginning. Additionally, you’ll also discover if there are any other areas you’ll need to meet attendee requests.

5. Stories Win Every time

Whether for post-sales training or a customer PoC, instead of walking through a list of menus, buttons, and other UI elements that demonstrate features, create a story to use throughout the narrative: A real-world simulation with a hypothetical challenge and goal. A unified story, instead of fragmented pieces of the puzzle, will create a story to follow. After all, you are selling an experience, not a list of benefits. Even within a single session, take breaks to ask the audience questions, jump to related, relevant topics, or tell an anecdotal story … anything to let the audience’s eyes rest from following a cursor or arrow across the screen.

There’s No replacement for Hands-on Experiences

SaaS training best practices must incorporate hands-on training. While your audience might have seen how you do it, their trust and confidence in your product and their ability to use it will only grow when they demonstrate their own mastery.

So how do you maximize the benefits of a hands-on training approach in your SaaS training?

• Real-time monitoring: Assign tasks (either long, complex, challenging ones, incorporating many of the features they have now seen, or quick, superficial ones along the way, to get a sense of the UI’s look and feel). Correct or re-steer their actions when they do something wrong and compliment them when they get it right. When you see an interesting or clever approach, share their UI with others, and ask them to explain what they just did. Even consider an informal contest, where the first person to complete a task announces it and “gets to” demonstrate it to others.
• Leave them with the environment: While the methods just mentioned are valuable while the training session is going on, there is always tremendous value in letting the trainees spend time on their own, at their own pace and schedule, to work their way through the software without time pressure. And since the top customer training platforms will let you spin up a clean, stand-alone, “bullet-proof” version of your software, you can be confident that users won’t break or disrupt any other users or change data. In the top customer training platforms, the environment vanishes once this self-paced training is complete.

Improving customer onboarding for your SaaS solution often requires having the right solutions to enable this crucial process.

Are you looking to transform your onboarding processes? Book your CloudShare demo today and see how top SaaS companies use CloudShare to create interactive and intuitive onboarding experiences.

This post was originally published on June 2021 and updated on February 03, 2023