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B2B SaaS Onboarding: Strategies for Success & Customer Retention

by 

Lauren O'Bryan

Last updated: September 30th, 2024

In B2B SaaS, onboarding can determine the trajectory of customer relationships, making it more than just a procedural step to welcome new customers. An effective onboarding process ensures that customers grasp the value of your solution from the outset, which leads to higher adoption rates and reduced churn.

In this article, we explore why customer onboarding is so important for business growth and customer retention. We’ll cover all the strategies you need to develop a seamless and impactful onboarding experience, so let’s get right into it.

What is B2B SaaS Onboarding?

B2B SaaS onboarding is the process of guiding new business customers through the initial stages of using a SaaS product. It involves platform setup and training to ensure customers understand how to use the product and benefit from it to ultimately solve their problem. Onboarding can include anything from product demos, webinar sessions and one-on-one calls with a dedicated onboarder to training documentation and FAQs.

Why It’s Important to Get Onboarding Right

Customer onboarding is extremely important for achieving high customer satisfaction and retention. According to a whitepaper by Visa, 70% of customers will completely abandon account setup if the initial sign-up process takes 20 minutes or longer. In addition, 80% of users report deleting an app due to frustration from not knowing how to use it properly.

It’s quite apparent that a smooth and efficient onboarding process has plenty of benefits for businesses.

• Accelerate Time-to-Value: Onboarding helps customers quickly experience the product’s benefits so they can validate their purchasing decision and promote your product to others.
• Enhance User Adoption: If users struggle to use your product, they will gradually stop using it. Proper training increases user engagement and satisfaction, ensuring they make the most of your product.
• Reduce Support Costs: When customers are onboarded correctly, you can reduce reliance on customer support. Providing a detailed knowledge base with FAQs and other documentation further empowers users to resolve issues independently.
• Ensure Customer Success: Helping users meet their objectives helps to foster a productive long-term relationship. Customers display stronger loyalty, with 90% willing to spend more with companies that personalize the onboarding experience.

The value of correct customer onboarding for B2B SaaS businesses is loud and clear, but before you race headlong into developing an onboarding system, it’s worth knowing that there are several different onboarding styles to choose from.

Different Onboarding Models

When onboarding customers, choose a model that suits your product and resources. Options include a hands-on approach, a self-service process, or a combination of both.

White Glove Model

The white-glove onboarding model offers a fully hands-on approach, providing dedicated assistance to new customers. This model typically involves customer success managers guiding customers through every step of the onboarding process. They provide one-on-one training sessions, customized setup, and continuous support throughout the process to ensure the customer fully understands and can effectively use the software.

This model is particularly suited for complex SaaS products or high-value clients who require tailored solutions, which is why it’s typically incorporated into higher-tier payment plans.

Self-Service Onboarding Model

The self-service onboarding model empowers customers to set up and learn how to use the software independently by providing a variety of self-help resources. These resources can include detailed documentation, video tutorials, FAQs, interactive walkthroughs, and community forums.

This model is most effective for straightforward, user-friendly SaaS products that do not require extensive customization or support. Self-service onboarding is highly scalable and cost-effective, making it suitable for businesses with a large customer base or those offering low-cost subscription plans. That said, its success relies heavily on the quality and comprehensiveness of the available resources.

Hybrid Model

The hybrid onboarding model combines elements of both the white-glove and self-service approaches. Customers will receive some level of personalized assistance to get started with the software, such as guided setup and basic training. Once the initial setup is complete, they can access self-service resources like tutorials, knowledge bases, and community forums for ongoing support.

This model balances the effectiveness of personalized assistance with the scalability and less resource-intensive nature of self-service options. For this reason, it’s a popular choice for SMBs who value having a point of contact but can handle a self-paced learning environment.

Key Elements of B2B SaaS Onboarding

Client onboarding processes consist of four key elements: understanding what the client needs, structuring the onboarding process, process customization, and monitoring and evaluation.

Understanding Your Customer’s Needs

The first step in effective B2B SaaS customer onboarding is to deeply understand the unique needs and goals of each customer. This involves gathering detailed information about the customer’s business processes, challenges, and expectations from the software. By understanding their specific requirements, you can tailor the onboarding process to align with their objectives, ensuring all their questions are answered.

Establish an Onboarding Process

Establishing a structured onboarding process that is both consistent and customized to your different customer segments will ensure that each customer receives the right level of guidance and support while maintaining a uniform standard of service across the board. Include a clear timeline and a series of defined steps that guide the customer from initial setup to full adoption of the software.

Sending welcome emails, providing account setup assistance, and offering product training through tutorials and webinars are all part of the process. By having a well-defined onboarding framework, you will make the customer’s journey predictable and less overwhelming.

Onboarding Customization

Customization is essential to effectively meeting each customer’s unique needs. Customization can include configuring the software to match the customer’s workflows, providing personalized training sessions, and assisting with integrations with other tools and platforms they use. Of course, to provide customized onboarding, a white-glove or hybrid onboarding model with a dedicated onboarding specialist or customer success manager is required.

Monitoring and Evaluation

Continuous monitoring and evaluation are critical to ensure the success of the onboarding process. This involves tracking key performance metrics, such as customer engagement levels, usage patterns, and progress against the onboarding checklist. Regular progress updates and feedback sessions with customers will help identify any areas where additional support may be needed. Collecting feedback allows for improvements to the onboarding process, ensuring it remains effective and responsive to customer needs.

How to Develop an Effective Onboarding Process

Developing an onboarding process for a B2B SaaS company requires careful planning to ensure it flows in a logical way and provides the necessary information efficiently.

Establish What Your Customers Need

Firstly, separate your customers into segments based on business size, industry, or use case. As different segments have varied objectives and requirements, they will appreciate and benefit from an onboarding process tailored to their specific objectives.

Create an Onboarding Framework and Timeline

Next, map out the customer journey from initial contact through to becoming a regular user. Identify any pain points they may encounter and opportunities to add value to their experience.

Visualize the entire process from start to finish. How will you welcome the customer and walk them through using your product? A welcome email or even a scheduled call can effectively introduce the customer to the onboarding process and outline the next steps.

Consider providing interactive product tours and webinars or self-paced training resources and documentation. To ensure customers stay engaged and derive value from your product, consider implementing scheduled check-ins or automated messaging.

Break the entire onboarding journey into smaller, more manageable segments that both you and the customer can easily follow.

Customer Onboarding Timeline

An onboarding timeline may look something like this:

• Day 1-3: Send a welcome email, assist with account setup, and provide an initial product tour.
• Week 1: Conduct the first check-in call, give access to training materials, and complete the initial setup.
• Week 2-3: Offer advanced feature training, conduct the second check-in call, and collect feedback on the progress.
• Month 1: Celebrate the achievement of the first success milestone and share the next steps.
• Ongoing support: Maintain regular check-ins, continuous training, and establish feedback loops.

While the entire onboarding process may seem complex, there are various tools that can help you implement it.

Utilize Onboarding Software and Tools

Using customer onboarding software will save you time, reduce costs, and improve your customer retention rates.

Onboarding software is custom-built to provide the necessary features for you to successfully onboard your customers, including:

• Forms and customer data collection systems
• Customer feedback collection system
• Product use and interaction analysis
• Version control on training documentation
• Scheduling reminders and alerts
• Developing on-screen tutorials

Onboarding software usually works in one of two ways: it either provides on-screen guidance or acts as a knowledge base to store learning resources. Our recommended list of CRM tools includes options that provide the exact functionality you require to smoothly onboard and maintain customer relationships.

Good onboarding software will allow customers to easily import their data from a variety of other systems. It will also provide a robust API documentation for customers who need to integrate your product with their existing tools.

Onboarding Tactics That Industry Leaders Are Using

Many SaaS industry leaders have refined customer onboarding to address the unique challenges of the niche. This includes managing training for complex tools and providing adequate onboarding to customers on free plans who don’t directly contribute to revenue. These companies have learned valuable lessons, often through trial and error, and emerged with successful strategies.

Incorporating Onboarding Automation

Automation has revolutionized onboarding by streamlining repetitive tasks and enabling continuous engagement. Chatbots are one example of how communication can be automated to manage customer expectations when staff are unavailable. They can intuitively discuss issues with customers and recommend appropriate training documentation or solutions.

Automated processes deliver a more consistent, efficient onboarding experience and reduce the potential for human error, but even in automation there’s space for personalization.

Automated messaging can be personalized to your customer segments or scheduled to be sent at a specific time or when a behavior trigger is signaled. Industry leaders in SaaS will often set up trigger-based actions that automatically send resources, tips, or prompts based on user activity. For example, if a user hasn’t logged in for a week, they might receive a gentle reminder or an offer of assistance.

Develop a Scalable Onboarding Process

Growing businesses benefit from onboarding processes that are easily scalable because they can take on more customers without compromising quality.

This involves creating a standardized onboarding framework, which includes templates, checklists, and guides. The onboarding process can be broken into modules that can be tailored to different customer needs without requiring a complete overhaul.

In addition, industry leaders often have dedicated customer success or onboarding teams to ensure customers get value out of the product. These teams provide valuable insights into customer pain points and help ease transitions as a company scales.

Set Customer Retention Incentives

Setting clear KPIs related to customer success that are communicated across all departments is another thing leading businesses do. You can incentivize staff with bonuses, recognition awards, and career advancement opportunities, as well as by fostering a customer-centric culture where every team member understands the importance of customer success.

Build a Community Space

Peer-to-peer learning is very popular and can be a cost-effective way to provide additional support to your customers without overloading your support team. Spaces like online forums or groups allow customers to discuss their issues, share experiences, and learn from each other.

You can also consider organizing webinars and virtual events that allow customers to network and learn from industry experts. Providing a platform where users can share their own resources and success stories is a highly effective tactic to help customers get up to speed quickly.

Make it Easy to Access Support

Regardless of the community forums or learning materials you have available, at the end of the day, customer support needs to be easy to reach when needed.

Offer support through multiple channels to meet the communication preferences of all your customers, including email, chat, phone, and social media. Another support method that’s becoming increasingly popular is a live chat or chatbot functionality. Chatbots can handle simple queries, while live chat agents can assist with more complex issues.

In addition to discussion-based customer support, offer a comprehensive self-service option. An up-to-date knowledge base of articles, FAQs, and training documentation is the most cost-effective method of providing support to customers.

Finally, using behavioral analytics and monitoring tools can help identify users who might be struggling. This gives you the opportunity to proactively offer assistance and guide them through any challenges they might be facing.

Monitoring the Success of Your Customer Onboarding Process

Once your customer onboarding process is established and in motion, you need to monitor its effectiveness to ensure there’s no friction along the way.

Here are the key metrics and KPIs that will give you valuable insights into your user onboarding experience:

• Onboarding completion rates tell you how many customers have successfully completed the onboarding process, highlighting the stages where customers often encounter friction.
• Customer activation and engagement rates reveal how effectively your onboarding process is keeping customers engaged with the product.
• Time to first value (TTV) is a simple metric that tells you how long it takes for a user to reach a point of significant value from the product. The shorter the TTV, the better because it tells you the user is able to grasp the product quickly and get the most out of it, leading to high satisfaction levels.
• Feature adoption rates reveal how often your product’s features are being used. If users aren’t using a majority of a product’s features, they’re probably not getting the full value.
• Churn rate and customer retention highlight how quickly you’re losing customers and can signal dissatisfaction with your product or the onboarding process. In B2B SaaS, an annual churn rate benchmark of 5% or less is the aim, otherwise you’re losing too many customers to comfortably replace and remain profitable.

By closely monitoring these metrics, you can identify and address potential issues early and make the necessary tweaks to your onboarding process.

Common Mistakes in B2B SaaS Onboarding

Given all this, there are some all too common mistakes that B2B SaaS companies make when designing and implementing their customer onboarding.

• Providing a generic onboarding experience for all customers: Customer segmentation is important, and this cannot be emphasized enough. Different customers have varying learning paces and styles, and a one-size-fits-all approach can lead to disengagement.
• Relying on email to communicate with customers: Email certainly plays a part, but don’t lean too heavily on email as your main source of customer communication. In our notification-overloaded lives, email is easily ignored, so make sure to diversify your communication channels.
• Allowing the customer to lose momentum in the onboarding process: Without setting up automated prompts and checklists to keep customers engaged, they may lose focus and fail to complete onboarding, missing out on your product’s full potential.
• Failing to act on customer feedback: Customer feedback systems are commonly included in onboarding, either during or at the end of the process. Failing to take action on feedback, particularly issues that are raised by multiple customers, is a missed opportunity for improvement.

How to Address Critical Onboarding Roadblocks

Here are solutions to common roadblocks that can hinder business growth and progress.

Low Engagement Rates:

• Incorporate gamification elements into your onboarding process. This approach makes the process more enjoyable and competitive, offering incentives and celebrations when users complete new stages.
• Utilize behavior-triggered prompts to guide customers through the onboarding process without applying undue pressure. For instance, when a user selects a template for their landing page, this action could trigger a suggestion to view landing page examples.
• Develop tailored onboarding processes based on user roles or their goals for using the product. This strategy ensures that the prompts and information provided are relevant to each user’s specific needs.

Information Overload:

• Avoid information overload by breaking the onboarding process into smaller, more manageable steps.
• Progressively release information about different features so users can learn to use them gradually.
• Provide optional “deep dive” resources that users can explore further to develop their skills when it suits their schedule and learning preferences.

Technical Integration Issues:

• Provide detailed integration guides that are carefully written to avoid confusion and potential errors.
• Offer direct technical support for complex cases to prevent user frustration and ensure smooth integration.
• Develop engaging and easy-to-follow video tutorials that guide users through integration processes step-by-step.

Misalignment with User Expectations:

• Align sales and onboarding teams regarding the product’s capabilities and functionality to prevent miscommunication.
• Set clear expectations for new user progress during sales discussions and initial onboarding.
• Present specific use case examples with associated timelines of progress to give users a realistic understanding of what to expect.

Resistance to Change:

• Highlight immediate benefits and quick wins that users will experience with the new system.
• Provide migration assistance from old systems to make the transition process less daunting.
• Provide training that focuses on comparing new processes to familiar ones, helping users understand how the new system works in practice.

Lack of Internal Champions:

• Identify and nurture potential champions early in the process who will motivate others and promote correct adoption of the platform.
• Offer additional resources and support to these champions to empower them in their role.
• Implement a rewards program for internal advocates, providing extra encouragement for their efforts in promoting the platform.

There are many proactive and reactive steps that can be taken to prevent roadblocks from forming and to quickly remove them when they do occur. One good example of an effective onboarding strategy comes from the design tool Canva.

Canva: An Example of Effective B2B SaaS Onboarding

Canva is a popular and user-friendly digital design tool that has implemented a highly effective customer onboarding process. Their success stems from personalizing the onboarding experience while maintaining a hands-off approach, enabling affordable scaling without compromising quality.

Key features of Canva’s onboarding process include:

1. User segmentation
2. Interactive tutorials
3. Surveying and collecting ongoing customer feedback

The Canva onboarding team has invested significant effort in designing a customer signup system that seeks to understand users’ motivations and pain points while analyzing their behaviors. This approach allows them to deliver a seamless experience to new customers and reduce friction points.

Another innovative aspect of Canva’s onboarding experience is its user engagement through surveys and testing sessions. This strategy provides dual benefits: it highlights potential issues for the Canva team and encourages users to continue learning and exploring the platform.

Canva also employs a progressive onboarding approach, gradually introducing features as users become more familiar with the platform. This prevents overwhelming new users while ensuring they discover the full potential of the tool over time.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, effective onboarding accelerates time-to-value, enhances user adoption, reduces support costs, and ensures customer success, leading to improved customer lifetime value.

Ultimately, the onboarding process sets the foundation for a customer’s entire relationship with your product and plays a crucial role in sustainable business growth. Business growth relies on how well you can attract, engage, and convert new customers. Our SaaS scalability score self-assessment takes into account these three factors and pinpoints how you stack up against the competition. It’s free to use, so don’t hesitate to check it out.