4 Signs You Need Customer Onboarding Software

Customers expect to learn about your offerings in a fast, simple, accessible, and secure manner, and they also want to gain value from their investment as soon as possible. Hence, the meaning of “onboarding” has expanded beyond new employees to include your customers as well.

Why Is Customer Onboarding Software Important?

Consider the following stats from Wyzowl:

• More than 90% of customers believe companies could do better when onboarding new clients and users.  
• The onboarding process – the support they’ll likely receive shortly after purchase – is essential to two-thirds (63%) of customers deciding whether to go with a particular vendor.
• Eighty-six percent of people said they would be more likely to remain loyal to a company that invests in educating and welcoming them after they make a purchase.

Customer onboarding software could become a critical tool to achieve these goals and more. The right solution can help to eliminate customer calls to your business’ sales team or support teams, accelerate digital transformation, and improve overall customer metrics such as retention and engagement.

Related: Success Strategies for Scaling Customer Education, Training, and Onboarding

How Can You Know If You Need Customer Onboarding Software?

If you want to improve your clients’ experience, you need to educate them efficiently and continually: from onboarding to renewal.

Here are four clear signs your business is ready for customer onboarding software.

1) You have multiple-format onboarding guides that live in different places.

Customers have a wide range of learning styles. As a result, your team has developed original content in a variety of formats over time to help them understand your product better.

Onboarding content lives in video, text, or audio formats you upload in different libraries that range anywhere from your blog to a help guide or even a YouTube channel. This becomes not only tedious to update but prevents you from keeping track of important metrics related to your user’s journey.

You could easily solve this challenge with modern customer onboarding software that offers flexible content hosting, on-demand training capabilities, and the power to support multiple formats.

Related: What Does a Modern External Training Program Look Like?

2) You have a growing customer base, and your customer service managers can’t provide one-on-one training for all of them.

Customer success teams usually arrange a series of scheduled phone calls in order to educate new customers about their products. Even though this may be efficient for a small customer load, having Customer Success Managers (CSMs) handle onboarding processes manually makes it impossible to scale over time.

Manual onboarding training presents difficulties as scheduling conflicts might hinder participation, knowledge is difficult to convey over the phone, and it can lead to inconsistent customer onboarding experiences.

A better solution would be to offer a variety of on-demand training that can be delivered instantly, regardless of time zones or instructor availability, with customer onboarding software. In today’s world of ever-increasing customer demands, this training style can be a successful strategy to facilitate onboarding and education.

Compared to in-person training, the on-demand model is also more cost-efficient from a time and resource perspective. Training materials can easily be updated throughout the platform and customized to meet the demands of different users.

Related: Customer Onboarding, Retention, and Training in the Age of Hybrid Workforces

3) Your tech support tickets are increasing with questions about how to use your product.

If customers are not clear on how to use your product, support inquiries grow, placing additional burden on your tech staff.

In this scenario, customer onboarding software can have a significant impact on the entire organization. You can increase customer satisfaction scores, reduce support ticket volume, and improve product adoption through an automated process that in some ways can be even more effective than in-person onboarding, because users can self-select the information they need exactly when they need it.

4) You depend on other systems to ensure a successful customer journey, but they don’t support customer onboarding.

Many companies employ marketing automation platforms as well as customer relationship management systems to ensure they are maximizing the customer experience, but these systems are not designed for customer onboarding.

The ability to integrate marketing automation with your onboarding software leads to a streamlined learner experience. By integrating CRM with training, education teams can effectively measure the value of their programs in terms of product adoption, customer retention, customers’ time-to-value.

Related: Why Customer Education is Key to Increasing SaaS Adoption

Customer Education’s Role in Customer Onboarding

If one or more of these scenarios resonate, you may also want to review other barriers to success your customers may be experiencing.

• Did they find the product too challenging to use first-hand?
• Were they looking to get a simple question answered, and they didn’t see how?
• Was it not clear how to log in or find the tools they were looking for?

Use a  customer survey, review tech support tickets, and ask your CSMs what questions frequently come up when onboarding customers to target the areas you need to address with customer onboarding software.

In today’s busy world, everyone has a lot on their plate, including your customers. However, buyers want to see immediate ROI. Unless you have the proper onboarding strategy and messages to welcome users, they will wonder what the next step is. This results in a negative first impression, decreased engagement, and in the worst case, switching to a competitor.

How Does Customer Onboarding Software Work?

Customer education programs focus on onboarding and retaining customers. In the long run, you can measure these goals with customer onboarding software. The resulting data can be used to make improvements to your program over time, as well as glean insights for Sales and Marketing.

In conclusion, investing in customer education can help you improve the customer onboarding experience and focus customer service efforts on more critical tasks. Virtual, on-demand training allows you to serve more customers and create a more efficient, flexible onboarding process. When you provide the right content at the right time to your customers, you build better customer relationships.

Skillsjar’s award-winning customer training platform helps you onboard, engage, and retain your customers and partners. With our cloud-based learning management system (LMS), you can create courses, distribute them to web and mobile devices, and analyze results. Through Skilljar, companies accelerate product adoption, automate onboarding workflows, reduce support costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Interested in learning more about how Skilljar can help you onboard customers faster and more efficiently? Request a demo now.