Top Challenges in SaaS Customer Onboarding

While choice is nice to have, when there are too many, people get overwhelmed. Interfaces that are too cluttered will cause a headache more than anything. Showing tons of options to a user before they have gotten familiar with a product will potentially turn them off from delving into it any further.

The onboarding process should start off simple. Direct the focus of users in one direction at a time. If there are too many elements grasping for their attention, they will either skip the onboarding process or return to it later.

Any service entity should always collect user feedback. Forget waiting for users to come to you. Ask them about what they thought of the onboarding process. You can do something as simple as requesting they tell you how helpful it was, on a scale of 1 to 10.

You could also ask them if the onboard process made it easier to understand how to use the product to achieve their goals. Beyond this type of feedback, look at user behaviour, identifying exactly how users are interacting with your product while using it.

Different users have different skill levels and different needs. This means the onboarding process should not take a one-size-fits-all approach. There will be different needs, skills, and capacities among users. When you take the lazy approach, it can slow down the momentum that users have initially.

To achieve higher SaaS customer retention, you need to perform a bit of data analysis. This means tailoring the SaaS customer onboarding process to fit the kind of user you are onboarding. This will ensure the entire process is engaging all users in a meaningful way.

A study has found that the shorter the time is from a customer getting onboard to them achieving their first success, the higher the likelihood of them continuing to use the product for the long-term. You can improve the time between onboarding and first success by ensuring each step during onboarding is designed to help them achieve success.

You need to always remember that your customers are human beings who have real problems they are looking to solve. This means they are not going to have the time to go through a complicated SaaS customer onboarding process. They simply want to start using the product successfully as soon as they can, to achieve the results they are looking for.

Keep things simple and address the challenges we mentioned earlier, so you can keep your customer success and retention levels as high as they can be.