The Onboarding Mirage: Why Feature Tours Fail and How to Design for Customer Outcomes in the First 90 Days
The journey that leads customers to become loyal to your brand involves effective strategies and practices. Many companies often fall into the trap of a feature tour, a standard onboarding approach that doesn’t always bring the desired outcome.
A customer-centric perspective suggests that understanding behaviors and driving towards customer outcomes are essential for successful onboarding. Here, we walk through why feature tours may not work and explore an outcome-driven customer onboarding strategy for the first 90 days.
Introduction
Welcome aboard! You’re signing up for a deep dive into the realm of “customer onboarding strategy,” a crucial aspect of how SaaS companies maintain lasting relationships with their customers. It’s about more than just ensuring the customer knows how to navigate the product - it’s about positioning them for a rewarding journey with your brand.
Onboarding, in this context, is no mere tutorial. Think of it like helping a friend get comfortable in a new city, they don’t just need to know the streets, they need to feel at home. This home feeling is what effective customer onboarding aims to achieve, by helping customers see the value in your product, guiding them towards effective usage and, ultimately, establishing a rewarding behavioral pattern.
In the SaaS realm, which often involves intricate products and likely even fiercer competition, onboarding could be the linchpin between triggering that delightful Eureka! moment for new users, or having them leave your product in the digital dust. That’s why we’re setting out on this adventure together. Seatbelt fastened? Good—your onboarding journey to create a superior customer experience starts now.
The Fallacy of Feature Tours in Onboarding
We’ve all been there - the moment you login into a new software and get greeted by a cheerful virtual tour guide eager to introduce you to cool functionalities and buttons. That, dear reader, is what we commonly refer to as feature tours, a staple habit within the SaaS landscape.
Understanding Feature Tours
It parades you around the software, indicating various capabilities, accompanied by an annoying pop-up urging “click here,” “type there,” and “drag this”.
Despite being the traditional onboarding approach for a long time, feature tours might not be as appealing as they seem. Their charm usually only scratches the surface.
Why Feature Tours Aren’t Always Effective
One may argue they excel at familiarizing users with the features, but do they equip users to effectively leverage these features for real-world problem solving or goal achievement? Well, not so much, and that’s their primary downfall.
Much like a tour guide introducing visitors to a new city, feature tours do great at highlighting landmarks but falter at providing context or explaining the visitor’s overall city experience. It’s akin to missing the forest for the trees; they navigate users around the software environment but rarely illuminate how the features relate to the customers’ broader needs.
The Need for Outcome-Oriented Onboarding
Going deeper, you’ll realize that feature tours often treat our customers as if they’re simply interacting with a feature-rich system. Users are more than that; they are problem solvers, innovators, pioneers seeking to tackle concrete issues, forecasts, or ad-hoc presentations. If our software’s feature doesn’t facilitate their specific goals, they genuinely aren’t interested.
And that’s where feature tours often falter - they fail to connect “feature presentation” and “desired outcome realization.” Maybe it’s time to rethink the onboarding strategy and prioritize customer outcomes, not feature showcases.
Understanding SaaS Time to Value
“Time to value” has become a buzzword in the SaaS, yet few explore its deep implications in the onboarding process. In essence, “time to value” denotes the period it takes for a customer to realise tangible benefits from using your product or service. Why does it matter? Because, in today’s fast-paced digital environment, users are looking for real, palpable benefits, and they want them yesterday!
The key to shortening the “time to value” lies in a well-crafted onboarding process. By swiftly demonstrating the core value your software brings, you lead the customer straight to a “moment of realization” — the moment when they figure out ‘Oh, this is why I need product X in my workflow’. In other words, your onboarding should be about helping customers understand the problem your product solves in their lives.
The flip side? A longer “time to value” can lead to churn. It’s like setting up a race only to see your runners get tired and drop out one by one because the finish line appears too far. Efficiently guiding your customer to the finish line — or the value — is crucial in not just making a sale, but cultivating longevity in your customer relationships.
customers aren’t just looking for features; they crave outcomes.
So the big question becomes: how do we decrease time to value in the onboarding process? This is where common onboarding strategies, like feature tours, start to fade in effectiveness. Remember, customers aren’t just looking for features; they crave outcomes. Therefore, next in line, we’ll be discussing why understanding and influencing customer behavior plays a crucial role in unveiling the magic of ‘value’ efficiently and effectively.
Influencing Customer Behavior Change
The nuts and bolts of effective customer onboarding hinge heavily on the principle of understanding and influencing customer behavior. So, why is this crucial in the onboarding process? One simple reason: you can’t drive change without first comprehending what’s behind the wheel.
Understanding customer behavior can be likened to having a compass in the wilderness of product adoption. It helps you identify the cognitive paths users tend to tread when interacting with your product and aids you in mapping out the desired journey. By decoding this behavior, you can craft subtle prompts or nudge them towards actions that increase product utility and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.
Think of this as the law of renovation— you can’t overhaul a house you know nothing about. You first need to understand how the walls are constructed, how the plumbing works, and where the electrical wires run before making any major changes.
Now, on to the tougher part: Influencing customer behavior. This isn’t about mind control or some scary, shadowy puppeteer stuff. Far from it—it’s more of a gentle guiding hand. You’re not dictating the script; you’re just prompting the actors towards a win-win scene.
How can you do this? By designing intuitive features that encourage active engagement, embedding game mechanics to stimulate use (ever heard of gamification?), and creating personalized learning experiences for your users. Take users by the hand and subtly guide them towards desired behaviors that boost their success in your product.
Through understanding and influencing, you shift the onboarding paradigm from an exhausting, feature-focused guided tour to an exciting, outcome-centric journey crafted around user behavior. And wouldn’t you agree that sounds like a far more engaging adventure?
influencing behavior doesn’t mean dictating it. It’s more about facilitating an environment where a customer’s motivation, ability, and trigger align in a way that makes desired actions clearer and more appealing.
Remember, influencing behavior doesn’t mean dictating it. It’s more about facilitating an environment where a customer’s motivation, ability, and trigger align in a way that makes desired actions clearer and more appealing. It’s setting customers up for success by laying out a user-friendly path, a path that has them skipping along rather than tripping over their feet. And most importantly, it’s showing them that you understand what they want and are actively invested in helping them achieve it from day one.
By tailoring your strategies to effect behavior change while ensuring your customers’ needs are taken into account, you take leaps towards achieving effective, impactful customer onboarding. So let’s roll up our sleeves and put that compass to work, shall we?
Designing Outcome-Driven Onboarding Process
Switching gears to a more playful tone, imagine you’re prepping a scrumptious three-course meal; your ingredients being your SaaS platform and your end-goal the lip-smacking satisfaction of your guests, aka your customers. An outcome-driven onboarding is the recipe, the precise steps you follow to combine your ingredients and cook up an impressive, satisfying experience for your customers.
How do we design this outcome-driven onboarding process? Let’s break it down.
1. Identify Desired Customer Outcomes: The first step is to understand what your customers hope to achieve using your product. Typically, it’s not just about the features. They want results, solutions, efficiency - the meat and veggies of your dish!
2. Map Out the Customer Journey: Once you know the customer’s objectives, you must set up a plan that guides them to the finish line. Figuring out the quickest, most efficient route from A to B is your aim here. It’s like planning the steps of your recipe.
3. Use Minimal, Effective Introduction of Features: Rather than drowning customers in a sea of feature tours, introduce them to just the essential components necessary to achieve their goals. Consider this your secret spice that enhances the dish without overwhelming it.
4. Aligning Onboarding with Business Objectives: The onboarding process should align with your broader business objectives. You should be able to evaluate its success in those terms, lending a strategic dimension to the whole process. It’s like plating your dish with flair and finesse that mirrors your overall culinary skill.
5. Responsive and Personalized Onboarding: Tailoring your onboarding process to suit individual users’ needs is vital. Everyone has their taste preferences, and a dish catered to those always wins. Flexible onboarding systems that adapt and personalize according to users’ actions or inactions are generally most successful.
Follow these steps to transition from being a novice chef to a seasoned SaaS culinary master. Remember, you’re not merely providing a product walkthrough but crafting an experience that guides your customers towards their desired outcome. Bon Appétit!
Product Adoption Best Practices
Stepping into the realm of product adoption, there’s more to it than just handing over the keys to your product and waving a cheery goodbye. For a robust, customer-centric onboarding experience, let’s see “product adoption” as a game of chess, not checkers— it requires artful strategy, some finesse, and of course, a playful yet tactical approach.
So, what are the best practices in product adoption, you ask? Well, hold onto your hard hats because we’re about to drop some knowledge bombs.
User Segmentation: Group your customers based on their needs, behavior, or usage patterns and tailor-fit solutions to provide a bespoke onboarding experience. Basically, it’s like personal shopping for SaaS. “One size fits all” doesn’t hold its ground here.
Ongoing Education: Onboarding is not a single event but a process. It’s similar to having a gym instructor: once they’ve shown you how to use the equipment, they don’t just leave you to fend for yourself. Ongoing training, tutorials or webinars can steer users towards becoming capable drivers of your product.
Contextual Guidance: Give in-app guidance which is like a virtual tour guide whispering helpful tips into your ear. They are a thousand times better than info-dumping manual. Not only should your prompts tell them what to do but why it’s important, essentially helping them connect the dots for a ‘Eureka’ moment!
Use Analytics for Improvement: Use analytics to monitor user behavior, interaction with your features, and their onboarding journey. This lets you identify potential roadblocks, tweak your process, and continuously improve your onboarding experience.
Celebrate Milestones: Don’t forget to offer recognition and celebrate when customers achieve milestones or reach their intended outcomes. A simple ‘Well done!’ or ‘You nailed it!’ can go a long way in motivating them to further explore your product.
These best practices are not stand-alone strategies, rather they escort each other hand-in-hand in sparking a truelove in customers for your product. Product adoption is a critical phase in the onboarding strategy as it’s where users start to appreciate your product’s value, evolve from beginners to intermediates, and finally, morph into your product’s rockstars. Ta-da!
The First 90 Days: Capitalizing on the Golden Time
First impressions matter, especially when it comes to onboarding new customers to your SaaS product. Essentially, the first 90 days act like your product’s grand opening, a time period where you have the unique opportunity to showcase the value of your product and build strong relationships with your customers. But how do you truly make the most of this “golden time period”?
The Importance of the First 90 Days
The first 90 days is akin to having customers fall in love with your pizza at the first sniff and bite. It’s a unique window of opportunity to prove your product’s value and to build a sturdy relationship with your customers - indeed a pretty big deal!
What then are the key elements of a successful “onboarding party”?
Key Elements to a Successful Onboarding
Quick and Tangible Wins: Get your customers to explore and find their favorite feature or flow in your product, much like how they’d find their favorite slice in a pizza full of numerous toppings.
How to Capitalize on the Golden Time
To truly make the most of this golden time period, here are a few strategies you can adopt:
Tie Onboarding to Customer Goals: Understand your customers’ objectives from the get-go and tailor their first 90 days to meet these goals.
Optimize a Smooth Transition: Transitioning from old habits to a new product should be as frictionless as possible.
Personalize the Experience: Understand that every customer is different, and personalizing your onboarding process will make them feel understood and valued.
Offer Ongoing Customer Support: Be readily available to answer any queries your customers may have, via email, live chat, guides, or FAQs.
Gather Feedback: Actively seek feedback from your customers and use this to continuously improve your product.
Just as no two pizzas, or customers, are alike, your onboarding process should constantly evolve to meet the growing and changing needs of your customers. The key lies in understanding your customers’ needs and continuously fine-tuning your onboarding methods to optimize the overall customer experience.
Conclusion
As we journey through the labyrinth of onboarding, it can seem like we’ve collected an overwhelming array of tips, advice, and best practices. Yet, let’s cut through the noise and distill it down to a single vital perspective: customer onboarding should be a process driven by outcomes, not features.
The DNA of successful customer onboarding is cloned from understanding customer behaviors, calibrating SaaS time to value, and seizing the Golden Opportunity of the first 90 days — these all orbit around one central star: the desired customer outcome.
Feature tours can feel like a warm, nostalgic blanket; an age-old standard that’s been around since the dawn of SaaS. However, its inherent fallacy is its focus on what we’re proud to have built, instead of what customers need to achieve. Outcome-driven onboarding, on the other hand, ushers in an era of customer-centricity, of walking a mile in our customer’s shoes - perhaps even a stylish pair they didn’t realize they could wear!
As you reassemble your onboarding strategy with this newfound perspective, keep your guiding North Star in sight: the outcome your customer desires. Design your process to unfold that outcome over the first 90 days with a playful curiosity and laser-focused intention. Use your understanding of customer behavior to guide them towards accomplishing their own goals with your product.
So, SaaS comrades, it’s time to roll up our sleeves (metaphorically speaking, of course), dive into the trenches, and breathe life into the strategies discussed here today. Let this be our rallying cry: to make our customers’ lives better through our products, one successful onboarding experience at a time. Because ultimately, a happy customer is the best business strategy of all. Don’t you agree?