Top 5 best customer onboarding practices for your B2B SaaS businesses

Author: Megha Poojari

Your sales team has successfully pursued and converted your lead into a customer. The customer has paid for the solutions you provide. What next?

Next lies the make-or-break situation for your business. Because that’s where your business’s customer success journey starts, i.e. your “customer onboarding” process.

Your primary goal is definitely to scale your business, but how would you scale your business if your customers were choosing your competitors over you?

This means there is something not quite right with your customer onboarding process.

Customer onboarding is much more than just giving your customers a walk-through of your product.

As Will Rogers once said,

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,”

so now it becomes the responsibility of the onboarding team to get everything right from the get-go.

We bring to you five such customer onboarding practices that will help you create a smart onboarding experience for your customers and also help you scale your business in the long run.

Stick to the basics

You know your product. You also know how it would solve your customers’ problems, but your customers are new to your business and product. The golden mantra here is to “SIMPLIFY.”

One of the very first steps of a successful onboarding process is simplifying your product for your customer. They don’t want an overload of information. The initial setup for your product should be as basic as possible while still covering the important aspects of your customer’s business.

This would set the tone for your customer’s first interaction with your product.

Create a structured flow for onboarding

It’s like creating a script for the onboarding process. You can always improvise during the actual process, but the skeleton of the flow should be consistent.

This means you take your customers through the product walkthrough systematically. Depending on the type of customer you are onboarding, you could always start with the basics like how to sign up, what each element on the dashboard means, etc.

A structured onboarding flow will let your customers understand what pain point of theirs your product is trying to solve, giving them a reason to stick with your product as they can see the value you provide.

Customize your onboarding experience

This goes hand in hand with our previous point, which was to create a flow for your customer’s onboarding.

Each customer is going to be different, and therefore, a rigid onboarding structure can make your onboarding process a disaster.

Some customers might want to leap into your product from day 1, while some would like only the necessary information about your product. This could be established during the sales kick-off call.

Giving the right amount of information during the onboarding process will help you create a positive customer experience.

Create the “Eureka” moment

If you can achieve this moment, be rest assured that this customer is going to stick with your product for a long time.

While giving the walk-through of your product, you are not just introducing your customer to the product, but also letting them know your product is the best solution available for their business needs/problems.

Your onboarding strategy should work toward giving your customers that “Eureka” moment.

Unify your teams for the onboarding process

This depends on the bandwidth of your team. If you have a separate onboarding team, you would need to have your customer success team included in your customer onboarding journey.

If the teams are internally unified, this can help to avoid the communication gaps that occur due to different silos of tools that are used during the customer lifecycle.

This can also help your customer touch base with different teams or the key people responsible for handling their account with your business.

We at CogniSaaS provide your business with the right platform for customer onboarding and implementation, thus helping you scale your business with a customer-centric approach.

A one-stop solution for all your onboarding and implementation needs that will help you deliver faster time to value for your customer and help you reduce your churn rate.

To learn more about our product, schedule a call with us! Link: https://cognisaas.com/request-demo

Conclusion:

The B2B SaaS industry is a volatile space when it comes to the retention of your customers with several competitors in the same game.

And with most customers making their decisions in the onboarding phase, it is prudent to get your onboarding strategy right.