Onboarding introduces customers and users to the features and services they will enjoy as they use your products. It also includes coaching these individuals on how the product works, navigating the user interface, and performing basic task operations.
Effective onboarding leads to long-term consumer relationships and reduces the churn rate. It helps prevent subscription cancellations and helps convert leads into customers.
However, only 40% of companies can boast a positive onboarding process.
In this article, we’ll highlight the common challenges you’ll likely face as you onboard customers and users and explain how to solve them.
1. Misalignment between sales and onboarding teams
The customer handover process between the sales and onboarding teams is crucial to customer success. The loss of information and ambiguity often characterize handover.
For instance, the sales team may not effectively communicate the consumer’s goals, pain points, and realistic expectations to the customer success team, leading to an irrelevant onboarding process.
Solution: Create strategies and clear protocols that govern the client handover process between sales and onboarding teams. Consider having comprehensive knowledge transfer sessions between the two departments to help address potential information loss.
Use a CRM system to help reduce information loss and ambiguity. It helps the sales department document their interactions with customers, and all relevant departments have access to these notes.
2. Communication-related challenges
Communication is vital to a successful customer and user onboarding process. However, communication-related challenges are among the top onboarding challenges companies face.
Language barriers occur whenever you and they speak different languages, making it impossible for your company to share information effectively.
Then, there’s the communication challenge related to the platform used. Some users and customers prefer phone calls, while others prefer self-paced courses in text or video formats. If you use an unpreferred communication channel, they probably won’t be able to digest your messages as they should.
Some customers and users also miss onboarding sessions or ignore onboarding messages entirely. Again, these prevent you from effectively communicating critical onboarding concepts.
Solution: You can ask customers and users what their preferred communication channels and language are for onboarding. Then, incorporate these into your onboarding process.
Highlight that the onboarding will ultimately help them achieve success with your product from the get-go. When you emphasize the relationship between onboarding and achieving work goals from the start, you can reduce non-attendance and boost onboarding content engagement.
Examples: Simple Texting highlights what new users can expect from the onboarding process from the get-go.
The brand outlines these in its first onboarding email (see above), increasing the chances that new users will open its subsequent content.
3. Complex onboarding process
A complex onboarding process turns people away. More than 70% of potential customers will leave, while 55% of clients will stop using a product they don’t understand.
In general, a complex product can result in a complex onboarding process. However, a simple product can have a complex process, too. This type of onboarding happens when the user or customer has to go through multiple stages and layers before they can fully understand how the product works if at all they do.
Solution: If you have a say in product development, encourage product managers and developers to create one without all the bells and whistles. This will allow you to map out an onboarding process that’s also simple and easy to follow.
Whether you have control over how the product turns out, zero in on your onboarding, map out your current setup, and see which steps you can eliminate. When doing this, put yourself in the shoes of the user or customer.
Here’s an example of simplified onboarding:
Then, based on your revised process, you can create a defined onboarding email sequence. With an automated sequence, all your users and customers have to do is wait for the valuable onboarding resources to arrive.
Example: Landbot used Encharge to simplify the onboarding process for users. Its email sequence would automatically trigger when someone signed up to use its product. The emails were based on user behavior, which meant users didn’t have to take extra steps like looking for onboarding resources on the site or contacting Landbot support to get relevant information. When Landbot detected someone was using advanced features, it also offered help through in-app Intercom messages made possible by Encharge.
4. Insufficient staff training and resources
Your staff should have all the resources and training they need to transfer that knowledge to customers and users. If reps have insufficient resources or training, they’ll lack a solid understanding of the company’s products and services. Therefore, they will be unable to effectively handle user and customer onboarding.
A company may also lack sufficient resources for consumers to understand how to get the most out of the product. They will get frustrated without readily available videos and written documents addressing different use cases.
Solution: Invest in training your staff and the resources they can use for onboarding. But don’t just focus on the quantity. Make sure you focus on the quality, too.
Keep in mind that training a new employee is different from training a professional. In other words, their resource needs will vary. So, be sure to provide employees with training resources catering to their current expertise and knowledge.
Also, seek employee feedback so you can make changes and improve your training sessions and resources accordingly.
Remember to make training resources accessible to customers and users. Create a help center or knowledge base apart from your onboarding emails or sessions. This way, they can refer to these helpful resources whenever necessary. With this strategy, your reps can save time since users and customers solve common issues.
Example: 1Password, a password management app, has a help center where consumers (even staff) can get quick help with basic software tasks like setup. There’s also a community forum and a chatbot feature consumers can access if they require further assistance.
5. Customer and user resistance to change
Some people will have preconceived notions of what a product like yours should be and how it should work. This is especially true if they had already been using your competitor’s product in the workplace before their company decided to try out or buy yours.
Because of their preconceived notions, they might develop resistance to the adoption of new products required by their management. During the onboarding process, you might find them constantly comparing your product with what they were used to. These people might find some flaws in it to justify not making the product shift.
Solution: Ensure your reps know the ins and outs of your product. This way, they’ll know how to answer any questions from hesitant users and customers. They should be trained appropriately to highlight the product’s unique benefits while being respectful and empathetic.
6. Lack of personalization
Personalization is essential in all aspects of customer success. Creating a cookie-cutter onboarding process will not do. The process should fit consumer preferences if you want it to be effective. Companies that offer personalized onboarding processes enjoy a 12% higher retention rate than those that don’t.
When we discussed communication-related challenges, we discussed how you can personalize your onboarding. When you tailor the onboarding language and channel to user and customer preferences, you’re implementing personalization. Using the consumer’s first name in your onboarding messages is also personalization.
But you shouldn’t stop at that “superficial” level.
Consumers looking for a good experience don’t just expect companies to know who they are and to personalize their messages. As the graph shows above, more importantly, they expect brands to understand their needs.
Solution: Dig deeper to make your onboarding process even more specific to each user or customer. For instance, you can tailor your onboarding messages to their specific use cases and industries. Your onboarding content can also be based on their product interactions and level of proficiency.
Ask customers for this information that can help you further personalize. You can also leverage your product to track customer and user interactions.
Use the data you gather to create relevant messages for specific user and customer segments. Then, again, leverage technology to ensure the relevant messages can be triggered automatically based on your set criteria. Automation will help further boost your personalization efforts. After all, your personalized messages will also be sent at the most opportune time for the consumer.
Example: Aito, an AI startup, used Encharge to create automated successful onboarding campaigns based on users’ actions on the platform. This not only helped ensure a seamless onboarding process, but it also enhanced the company’s personalization efforts, with relevant onboarding messages reaching users at the right time.
7. Poor user and customer engagement by support team
Your support team may be overwhelmed by the number of inquiries they receive daily. They will, therefore, need help to properly engage customers and users throughout the onboarding process.
Responses to inquiries will be delayed, leading to frustrated consumers. This especially happens during high-volume customer onboarding seasons.
Solution: Provide consumers with self-help resources that address FAQs. You can also implement a chatbot that can answer simple queries in real time, giving your support reps some relief.
Ensure you still give your customer base and users the option to escalate complex queries to a human agent.
Example: Apart from a knowledge base, Swipe Pages has an AI chatbot that can respond to queries in real time. Consumers can reach a human agent if their questions can’t be answered by readily available self-help resources or the chatbot.
8. Absence of follow-up
Your job doesn’t end once users and customers receive all the basic and essential onboarding resources. For the best results, you need to make follow-ups. After all, your goal is to turn them into paying customers, get them to renew with you, or upgrade to the premium version.
Sometimes, however, it proves challenging to keep tabs on these consumers. The result? You end up not sending any follow-up at all.
Solution: Include your follow-up messages in your automated onboarding sequence. This way, you won’t have to worry about your team forgetting to send these crucial messages.
Example: Confect, a B2B SaaS ad tech company, leveraged Encharge to send emails based on a user’s activity on the platform. The tracking was done in real-time, which helped ensure that the company’s behavior emails were relevant and timely. With the strategy, the brand saw a 28% increase in active users on its platform.
Conclusion
A successful customer onboarding process is key to business success. It helps prevent subscription cancellations, boosts SaaS sales, and ensures long-term relationships.
However, user and customer onboarding challenges can hamper onboarding efforts. They include a misalignment between sales and onboarding teams that leads to ineffective onboarding processes, communication-related challenges, and complex onboarding. Insufficient staff training and resources, customer and user resistance to change, a lack of personalization, and poor consumer engagement by the support team are common user and customer onboarding challenges to look out for. Then, of course, there’s the absence of follow-ups.
The good news is, that these challenges can be easily overcome. We’ve highlighted a few ways to address each issue and ensure a smooth onboarding. We’ve also included some relevant case studies. You can learn from the experiences of these brands and apply their best practices to your own company.
Now, go ahead and proactively address those onboarding challenges. You’ll soon reap the rewards of user and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Good luck!
