Why Customer Onboarding Is Crucial In B2B SaaS
By Eric Harrington, TeamSupport
For B2B software companies, securing a new customer can take a lot of work. Even for smaller deals, it requires marketing engagement, discovery and demo conversations, and ultimately proposals and approvals from multiple stakeholders in the company to move forward.
Unfortunately, a lot of the effort put in place to secure a customer does not always continue into the onboarding process. After a new customer has been acquired, many companies move on to the next opportunity. This is unfortunate as new customers typically expect the same amount of attention during the onboarding process as they received during the sales process.
Defined as the process of familiarizing a new customer or client with one’s products or services, onboarding is a very important part of the customer’s experience with your business. Beyond happy customers, a successful onboarding team can improve overall satisfaction and ultimately reduce customer churn.
What Does A Successful Onboarding Experience Look Like?
Similar to starting fresh with a brand-new employee, SaaS customer onboarding has many facets. The onboarding process goes beyond just training or setting up accounts and includes the entire process of introducing a new customer to your company. Tasks like helping the customer implement the software, training employees on how to use the software, configuring integrations, and ensuring the software meets the needs of the customer are all part of the onboarding process. During this time, you have an opportunity to leave a positive first impression of your company as an advocate for your customer’s success.
The Benefits Of A Successful Onboarding
As previously mentioned, more companies are beginning to understand the value of properly onboarding their customers. For SaaS companies, especially, they will notice the three core benefits below.
- Reduces Customer Churn
The hardest part of getting new software is learning how to use it. When companies take the time to guide customers through the onboarding process and clearly educate them on the solution, they are less likely to leave. This time investment not only helps build loyalty between you and the customer but it also reduces churn and showcases to your customer that you are committed to their success. In addition, excellent onboarding is often the foundation for product adoption and advocacy, both of which enable a customer success team to pursue renewal and expansion opportunities with confidence.
- Decreases Support Inquiries
When companies don’t take the time to properly train customers from the beginning, they set the rest of the customer relationship up for failure. A poor onboarding process could leave customers with more questions than answers. And, unfortunately, the responsibility of answering these questions lands on your customer support team. For SaaS companies, this can mean there are multiple employees asking the same routine questions, leading to customer support teams feeling bombarded and employees feeling confused. Without the right technology and training in place, customer support teams can be negatively impacted by these questions being asked over and over again.
For example, let’s say you’re responsible for purchasing new software at your company, and you recently purchased workflow management software. The sales process went great and now you’re excited for your team to use the platform. However, your onboarding only consisted of one virtual session and now it’s all left to you to figure out how to add dashboards, assign tasks, add in team members and more. With the platform already sent out to employees for use and no direction provided, multiple employees are reaching out to you and directly to the software’s customer support team with the same questions. This is frustrating not only for you and your employees but also for the vendor’s customer support team. This entire situation could have been avoided by a proper and thorough onboarding experience.
- Promotes Internal Training
Rather than onboarding one person, consider onboarding a small group of people to be the internal “champions” of your software. This can be helpful as many employees prefer to learn from their day-to-day colleagues rather than just a training expert. By having champions, employees can relate to the product with relevant use cases presented to them that are specific to their business. In addition, both the champion and the trainee also will gain a better understanding of how the software applies to the company’s overall operations.
By taking the time to provide B2B SaaS customers with a proper onboarding experience, you’ll be saving time and money in the future. Customers will feel capable of training internally on routine tasks, employees will be competent and avoid asking the same questions, and your customer support teams can focus on more complex issues. More importantly, successful onboarding allows companies to build trust and develop long-lasting customer relationships.
About The Author
Eric Harrington is the COO and cofounder of TeamSupport, the industry's top B2B customer support software solution. For more than 20 years, Eric has assembled teams of talented, passionate people, while building a culture of excellence that revolves around creating solutions that enable businesses to achieve great success. Prior to cofounding TeamSupport, he held leadership roles in customer support for Avid Technology and Sundance Digital, with a focus on trust, confidence, and success.