Top 5 onboarding metrics to track customer onboarding

First time value is the point during the onboarding phase when the customer realises the value of your product in their business context. And Time to first time value is the time taken for them to reach that result. 

Now, when you are setting up your product in their technical environment you may have to do the following: 

• Make the technical configuration of the product according to the customer’s business needs
• Integration with other software they use to collaborate seamlessly 
• Setup users, assign roles and give access rights.

According to an industry-wide standard, a free trial to paid conversion rate of anything less than 25% is considered to be poor for this marketing strategy. It means, for example, out of 100 free trial users, if the number of customers who are deciding to purchase your product after their trial period is over is less than 25, then it means you need improvement in your product. 

Users, out of their zeal of trying your product for free, self-educate themselves about the product. This saves a lot of time and effort that you need to give them to provide initial training.

When you are providing the training to the customer, you need to divide the whole training package into different modules. Then for each of these training modules, you must measure the time a customer takes to complete them. 

You can either follow the tech-touch engagement with them where you send them online material to watch and learn by themselves. Or, you can follow a high-touch onboarding where you personally give them the orientation of the product.

When customers start using the product, there are various points when they need your technical support to resolve their issues. Take regular surveys and feedback from the customers and log all the commonly raised queries in your customer success platform. Then measure the time you have taken to respond to each of them to resolve their issues. These metrics for the onboarding process are crucial to decide the efficiency of your service and customer success processes.

Defining customer personas makes it useful for you to work with customers from different backgrounds. Your customers might be having a totally different mindset from the team that has built your product. They might start with using different features than what you expect. 

By creating their personas, it would help you give them orientation of your product based on their skills and proficiency. For example, if a statistician is using your product, then your onboarding meeting with them would be different. And for a technical architect it would differ as well.

There are many metrics to calculate the product adoption rate. Metrics like the Daily active users (DAU) calculate how many users are active on your platform on a daily basis. Likewise, MAU calculates the same on a monthly basis. The more engaged they are with your product the higher the adoption rate.

As a customer success manager, your goal is to facilitate the early adoption of your product in the customer’s business environment.

Follow the same standards for all your new customers’ onboarding. This would make it easy for you to track the right metrics and introduce steps to optimise the process. If your efforts are inconsistent, then it will be difficult to know the areas of improvement.

Onboarding is not just about all the technical setup and getting your customer started on your product. It is also a phase when new relationships are built, sometimes even for a lifetime. Hence, keep your introductions with new team members remarkable and think of it as a start of a new relationship for the long-term.

You might be following the high-touch or tech-touch engagement model for your new customers. No matter which model you choose, know that a new customer demands more of your attention in the initial times. You have to allocate more time than usual during the initial days. And as they grow old, you can resort to whatever engagement model that suits your bandwidth.

The more accurately you can measure all the onboarding metrics, the better chances you have to improve the different areas. It is important to keep a granular view of your onboarding. Through that, you can fine-tune every aspect of it by measuring them individually.

Once you have executed an impeccable onboarding process, within no time, you would have deployed all measures that are initially necessary towards long-term customer retention.