5 Types of Tools That Can Help Improve Your Customer onboarding process

Acquiring new customers can sometimes be a real nightmare, so it’s no surprise that the sales team has a huge sigh of relief once a client has registered. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the job is done. After registration, you want to ensure that the client will stay and to do so you need to pay attention to the customer onboarding process.

The beginning of a customer journey is a critical moment in the customer’s lifetime, so more and more companies are looking for customer onboarding process tools. These tools help you showcase your platform in the best possible way and create a great first impression.

Join us as we uncover how these tools can revolutionize the way you welcome and guide your customers.

Why Are Customer Onboarding Process Tools Important?

Customer onboarding process tools are the first impression that your company makes with new customers. And you know how they say – the first impression is the most important one!

These tools help you introduce your product or service to new customers, train them on all product capabilities and make sure that they are using all the features properly. Moreover, customer onboarding process tools can help you gather invaluable data about the customer experience and therefore understand if something needs to be further improved.

Did you know that 90% of users give up within the first month of registration? Surely, some of them change their mind, or some unexpected events happen, but the majority churn due to poor customer onboarding process. Learn more about setting up a winning customer success program to reduce churn and boost customer loyalty.

But, with so many options available, how to know what to look for?

What To Look For in Customer Onboarding Process Tool?

Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise company, the onboarding process should be equally important. Selecting the right tool is not always easy, but there are some points that you should take into consideration:

It’s very important that the selected tool has a clean and user-friendly interface. You need something that your employees will easily navigate and not lose time trying to understand how it works. Moreover, that would look unprofessional in front of new customers.

Usability is closely connected to the user interface. The tool should be easy to implement and your in-house resources should be able to do it as well as deal with any potential issues that might come along the way.

It’s crucial to find a tool that can seamlessly integrate with your other tech solutions, like UX/UI design and user research tools, during the customer onboarding process. Consider utilizing the webflow maintenance integrations to enhance your integration capabilities.

Last but not least – pricing. Regardless if you’re a start-up or a well-established business, you should think reasonably and look for software that will be a smart return on investment.

These are some of the basic things to take into consideration, but the final decision should be based on your needs and aims. For instance, the SaaS onboarding process cannot be the same as the onboarding process for some other company types.

Although there is plenty of customer onboarding process tools, they can be grouped into five main types:

• In-app Guidance and Messaging Tools
• Customer Learning Management Systems (LMS)
• Knowledge Bases and Help Centers
• Communication and Collaboration Platforms
• Analytics and Data Insights Tools

Let’s delve into more details.

In-app Guidance and Messaging Tools

As the name suggests, In-app guidance tools are there to help new customers to easier navigate around. Their main benefit is engaging the users to be more active by discovering new features or solving specific pain points. In-app guidance tools can have many forms, but usually, they are using product tours, native tooltips, checklists, and interactive walkthroughs.

On the other hand, messaging tools enable clients to easily communicate with the support team as well as among themselves. Such tools usually work as forums where customers can ask questions about the issues they’re facing. It’s not a rare case that a customer feels more relaxed when asking for help from another customer than directly from the support team. There are people who want to avoid that kind of communication, so such tools allow them to share experiences while at the same time, your support agents don’t have to deal with the most common and repetitive requests.

Customer Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Customer learning management systems (LMS) are mostly used in the onboarding process of new hires. However, these tools can be also tailored for the clients’ onboarding process. These types of tools make sure to create, track and report on the customer training process. Moreover, in collaboration with the marketing team, you can create short and engaging video tutorials where you will present your scope of services and features and explain why they should decide to test your products. By doing so, customer learning management systems help you raise brand awareness.

Another good thing with these tools is managing what types of access different audiences will have. For example, customers who are in the process of training can only access one tutorial at a time, without the possibility to skip them. Another example is that some of your employees can only get access to exporting the data regarding the people who took the training.

Knowledge Bases and Help Centers

Knowledge base and help center tools provide companies with solutions that make it easy to create centralized repositories of all client-related questions. Creating knowledge bases and help centers help clients reach all useful documentation in one place – PDFs, wikis, reports, and video tutorials. Once created, the knowledge base can be populated with all the mentioned documentation. The final goal is to provide users with everything they need to understand how the product works. Moreover, clients can use it to troubleshoot any problems they might encounter.

The majority of these tools offer a user-friendly interface and the possibility to create internal and external knowledge bases. Usually, external knowledge bases are public ones and come within a free plan, while for the internal, private ones you will have to switch to a certain price plan.

Communication and Collaboration Platforms

Communication and collaboration tools and platforms enable fast and easy communication both with new and long-term clients. Of course, clients can always reach you out by email, but sometimes they have a really small inquiry that doesn’t require formal communication over email. In such cases, messaging tools such as Slack or Intercom can be extremely beneficial. Using this way of communication also helps you establish a closer and more personal interaction with your clients. However, tools such as Slack can be used to create a community where your clients can exchange experiences and solve small issues among themselves without even having the need to contact you directly.

On the other hand, such tools can be used for promotional activities. You can use them to promote special offers, or new features and communicate that over notifications, emails, or banners.

Analytics and Data Insights Tools

Onboarding customers without keeping track of the process is not very beneficial. In today’s world, data is everything. Therefore, you need tools that are able to provide you with more insights into the customer onboarding process and help you make improvements if needed.

Dealing with lots of clients can easily become overwhelming, so it’s always useful to have tools that help you put all the documentation, contracts, feedback, and similar information in one place. By doing so, all the data will be quickly and efficiently accessed. That being said, it would be wise to use some of the analytics and data insights tools.

These tools can provide you with precise analytics of what’s going on during your onboarding process. Are customers completing the whole process, or do they stop it before coming to an end? Is there a part of the onboarding process that turns out to be problematic? What kind of feedback do your customers leave and what questions do they have?

Analytics and data insight tools will help you answer these and many other questions and improve your customer onboarding process.

Benefits of Using a Combination of Tools

The collective power of a well-chosen combination of customer onboarding tools offers a multitude of benefits that can revolutionize the way businesses welcome new clients.

Adding interactive onboarding guides and tutorials into the mix further enhances user comprehension and engagement, while communication and collaboration platforms facilitate seamless interaction between teams and customers. The synergy of these tools creates a holistic approach to onboarding, allowing businesses to gather valuable data insights through analytics tools, enabling continuous refinement of strategies.

Conclusion

From harnessing the power of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to automating workflows, guiding customers interactively, fostering communication, and harnessing data insights, each tool type plays a vital role in creating a remarkable onboarding journey. By strategically integrating these tools, businesses can not only streamline operations but also cultivate enduring customer relationships built on trust, understanding, and shared value.

What are your thoughts on customer onboarding princess tools? Are you using some of them? If so, please feel free to share your two cents in the comments below. If not, we hope that we’ve managed to intrigue you enough to consider using them in the future!