Alexis Kestler
Hi friend! Getting customers is the primary objective of online stores, and it can be challenging! But using the right customer onboarding software can help you acquire more customers with ease.
As a fellow tech geek, I want to walk you through why customer onboarding is so critical for online businesses today. This guide will introduce some of the top customer onboarding software offering amazing experiences. I‘ll also provide my perspective as an analytics expert on the benefits of effective customer onboarding and what to look for in choosing the right solution.
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the initial and most essential step of a customer‘s buying journey. It forms a connection between the customer and the services you are offering.
As a result, new users are much more likely to become regular, repeat, satisfied customers. In essence, onboarding lays the groundwork for an ongoing positive relationship between your business and its customers.
According to research by McKinsey, companies with strong onboarding see:
- 50% higher new customer retention rates
- 25% faster ramp-up to full productivity per employee
- 170% faster achievement of break-even on sales costs
Onboarding done right is invaluable in converting interested visitors into paying customers and turning one-time buyers into raving fans.
The Customer Onboarding Process
The onboarding process guides customers sequentially from initial awareness of your product through purchase and setup. The four key phases are:
1. Awareness: The customer first learns about your product or service. Effective marketing introduces its benefits and value proposition.
2. Setup/Registration: Next, the customer creates an account or profile to access the product. Forms should be simple and only collect essential info.
3. Education: The customer learns how to use key features successfully. Interactive tutorials, demos, and FAQs build knowledge.
4. Adoption: The customer integrates the product into their workflow. Ongoing training and support facilitates full adoption.
Onboarding software provides automation and guidance at each phase, streamlining the entire customer journey.
Why is Customer Onboarding Software So Important?
Let‘s explore why customer onboarding software should be a top priority:
Low Effort, High Loyalty
Onboarding done right minimizes customer effort. People love convenience and are more loyal to brands that make their lives easier.
In fact, a study by the Corporate Executive Board found that customers are:
- 52% more likely to make additional purchases after a low-effort onboarding experience.
- 40% more likely to upgrade or purchase premium offerings
By automating administrative tasks and providing self-service help, onboarding software delivers extreme convenience.
Higher Activation and Retention
Many customers drop off during initial signup and education steps. Onboarding software guides users seamlessly through activation and teaches them to use your product successfully.
According to Appcues, companies using their onboarding product see:
- 3x higher product adoption rates
- 92% faster time to first value with the product
- 26% lower churn in the first 90 days
The result is more new customers fully onboarding and sticking around long-term.
Repeatable Brand Experience
Humans are inconsistent. Automated onboarding delivers the same excellent experience to every new customer. This builds trust in your brand and product.
According to research from Deloitte, companies that deliver a cohesive user journey at all touchpoints have 30% higher customer retention. Onboarding software is key to creating this consistent experience.
Faster Troubleshooting and Improvements
Onboarding analytics shine a spotlight on where customers struggle and drop off in the process. You can quickly fix pain points and optimize the experience over time.
A friendly conversational tone also makes it easy for customers to give feedback during onboarding. This helps identify issues and opportunities.
Enables Scalability
For fast-growing companies, manual onboarding can become a nightmare. Automated workflows allow you to onboard 100, 1000 or 10,000+ new customers every month consistently.
Onboarding tools also free up support staff for higher value activities by reducing repetitive questions and self-service. This enables business growth without ballooning headcount.
Top Benefits of Customer Onboarding Software
Let‘s summarize the main benefits effective onboarding software delivers:
- Higher customer satisfaction from a streamlined, low-effort experience
- Increased activation rates as more customers fully onboard
- Improved retention and loyalty due to positive first impressions
- Stronger brand reputation built through consistent excellent service
- Lower support costs via automation and self-service
- Better product feedback from contextual surveys and analytics
- Easy scalability to handle growing customer volumes
For any company seeking to accelerate growth in a competitive market, onboarding software is a powerful tool.
Next let‘s examine the must-have capabilities to look for as you evaluate your options.
Key Features of Effective Onboarding Software
Choosing the right onboarding software comes down to how well its features align to your business needs and customer journey. Here are 12 key capabilities to look for:
1. Branded Guided Tours
Interactive walkthroughs should educate customers on your product‘s core features and value. Tours should reflect your brand personality and visual style.
2. Tailored Onboarding Flows
The software should adapt onboarding paths based on customer segments and behaviors. For example, power users may get an accelerated experience vs. newbies.
3. Automated Triggers
Behaviors like signing up, completing a milestone, or hitting a usage threshold should automatically trigger relevant guided tours.
4. In-App Messaging
The ability to show targeted contextual messages helps guide customers at the exact moment of need.
5. Multichannel Support
Meet customers on their preferred channel – web, mobile, email, chat, help desk portals and more.
6. Customer Surveys
Quick in-app polls provide feedback to optimize onboarding. Exit surveys identify why customers might have churned.
7. Analytics and Reporting
Track key onboarding metrics like completion rate, drop-off points, feature adoption and funnel conversion.
8. Administrative Portal
Give admins control to build tours without coding, manage workflows and view adoption analytics.
9. API and CRM Integrations
Connect onboarding data with your CRM, marketing automation platform, help desk and other systems.
10. Customization Options
Tailor onboarding to match your brand, with options to set colors, fonts, themes and add your own media.
11. International Support
Onboarding content should be translatable into all languages your customers speak.
12. Robust Security
Vendor should comply with security best practices like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification to ensure safety of customer data.
Evaluating solutions that go beyond basic checklists to deliver the above capabilities results in the most impactful programs.
Now let‘s explore some of the top customer onboarding software options available and how they compare on these key criteria.
Top 10 Customer Onboarding Software Solutions
1. Appcues
Appcues is a robust customer onboarding and product adoption suite. It helps you engage users during onboarding and guide them to value with your product.
Appcues provides an easy drag-and-drop interface to create interactive tours, in-app messaging, surveys and workflows. These are triggered based on user behaviors and attributes to provide tailored guidance.
Powerful analytics give product teams insight into onboarding bottlenecks and opportunities. Appcues integrates easily with Salesforce, Zendesk and 100+ other platforms.
Key Capabilities:
- Interactive tours & checklists
- Personalized messaging & workflows
- In-app surveys & quizzes
- Funnel & cohort analysis
- A/B testing of onboarding flows
- CRM, helpdesk & marketing automation integrations
Ideal For: B2B SaaS, web and mobile apps looking for full-lifecycle onboarding.
Pricing: From $999/mo for up to 10,000 MAUs
2. WalkMe
WalkMe takes a bold visual approach, using highlighted spotlights and overlays to guide users through any web experience. The visual editor makes it easy for non-technical users to build interactive step-by-step walkthroughs.
Contextual guidance and messaging help your customers self-serve instead of contacting support. WalkMe integrates analytics on feature adoption and user paths to optimize experiences.
Key Capabilities:
- Visual editor to build interactive walkthroughs
- Spotlights, overlays & hints to guide users
- Analytics on feature adoption & user paths
- API to trigger guidance contextually
- Modules for surveys, forms and more
Ideal For: Websites and web apps wanting visual guided walkthroughs.
Pricing: Custom quote based on use case
3. WhatFix
WhatFix is a digital adoption platform focused on enabling users to utilize apps more efficiently. Interactive walkthroughs and guided tutorials make training and onboarding faster and more effective.
WhatFix provides developer-friendly tools to target guidance based on user attributes and actions. For example, displaying different tours for beginner vs. advanced personas.
Robust analytics highlight feature adoption and pinpoint where guidances boost KPIs like task completion rate. WhatFix can integrate onboarding data with ServiceNow, Salesforce and other enterprise systems.
Key Capabilities:
- Interactive walkthroughs & tutorials
- User segmentation for tailored guidances
- Analytics on feature adoption & task completion
- API to trigger guidances contextually
- Extensive 3rd party integrations
Ideal For: Complex internal apps requiring tailored training programs.
Pricing: Custom quotes
4. Userlane
Userlane is designed to get employees proficient quickly with internal tools. It overlays step-by-step interactive walkthroughs on any software UI using hotspots and tooltips.
Help docs are brought in-context to guide users. Adoption dashboards give admins insight into feature usage trends and pain points.
Userlane has 200+ app integrations and an intuitive editor for subject matter experts to create and update guides without coding. Pricing is per user per month based on app being onboarded.
Key Capabilities:
- Interactive overlays for software walkthroughs
- In-context help docs
- Guides editable without coding
- Usage analytics for training optimization
- 200+ integrations with apps like Salesforce, MS Teams
Ideal For: Onboarding employees onto complex software like ERPs.
Pricing: From $14/user/month
5. Inline Manual
Inline Manual focuses on bringing documentation in-context for users. Any help content or videos can be linked or overlaid on specific UI elements as they’re clicked.
Users stay productive in the tool vs. toggling between multiple docs and screens. Inline Manual provides analytics on guide views, popular topics, and documentation effectiveness.
There are no code widgets that let you embed surveys, chat, feedback forms and more. Pricing scales based on monthly active users on platform.
Key Capabilities:
- Contextual help overlays
- Interactive embedded widgets
- Analytics on guide performance
- Easy content tagging for targeting
- CRM integrations
Ideal For: Simple embedded documentation and contextual help.
Pricing: From $99/month for up to 1,000 MAUs
6. JoyRide
Joyride is an open source JavaScript library for websites that adds interactive walkthroughs with tooltips. It supports features like modal popups, custom styling, and callbacks on step changes.
JoyRide is developer-focused and requires customization to set up workflows and analytics. It‘s ideal for adding quick guided tours if you have the technical bandwidth.
Key Capabilities:
- Developer-focused library
- Tooltips & popups for walkthrough steps
- Customizable styling
- Step change callback functions
- Lightweight JS implementation
Ideal For: Sites with developer resources wanting basic tours
Pricing: Free & open source
7. Pendo
Pendo provides guidance for web and mobile apps via interactive walkthroughs, surveys, and tracking usage analytics. User sentiment analytics detect when they feel frustrated or delighted.
It connects data across your tech stack into a customer cloud that analyzes behavior and predicts churn risk. Pendo aims to increase user engagement, retention and expansion revenue.
Key Capabilities:
- In-app guidance walkthroughs
- Surveys to collect user feedback
- Usage analytics and forecasting
- Sentiment and churn analysis
- Customer data cloud
Ideal For: Apps wanting full-scale product cloud solution beyond just onboarding.
Pricing: Custom quotes
8. Chameleon
Chameleon is a codeless onboarding framework for developers to build interactive tours into any iOS mobile app. It provides custom animations, tooltips, coach marks, and sample onboarding flows out of the box.
You can easily define different tours for new vs. returning users. Chameleon handles all the state management logic and animations, freeing you to focus on authoring tour content.
Key Capabilities:
- Interactive mobile tours builder
- Custom coach marks & animations
- Onboarding state management
- Sample flows included
- iOS integration library
Ideal For: Native iOS developers wanting guided tours.
Pricing: Free & open source library
9. Hopscotch
Hopscotch is an open source JS library that provides developers an abstraction for building product tours and walkthroughs on websites. Features include tooltips, target element highlighting, smooth scrolling between steps and callbacks.
You‘ll need design resources to build out custom tooltips and style elements. Hopscotch provides building blocks to implement tours if you have some developer bandwidth.
Key Capabilities:
- Lightweight JS library
- Abstracted tour construction
- Tooltips, highlighting and callbacks
- Smooth scrolling between steps
- Developer focused
Ideal For: Sites with dev resources wanting basic tour capabilities.
Pricing: Free & open source
10. TourMyApp
TourMyApp focuses on quick video-based tours to demonstrate website and app functionality. You can quickly capture workflows with annotated screenshots, voiceover narration, spotlights and text captions.
The tours embed inline or as modals to guide users. You can track video analytics like plays, completion rate and drop-offs to optimize your content.
Key Capabilities:
- Quick video tour creation
- Annotations, voiceovers & spotlights
- View analytics on video tours
- Embed inline or as modal
- Interactive elements
Ideal For: Bite-sized video walkthrough creation.
Pricing: Free plan, pro plans from $20/month
Key Takeaways and Recommendations
And there you have an overview of top options for customer onboarding software today! Here are some key recommendations as you evaluate solutions:
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Deep platforms like Appcues, WalkMe and WhatFix work best for extensive onboarding needs with analytics.
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Solutions like Userlane and Inline Manual simplify embedded documentation.
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Chameleon and JoyRide are great open source libraries for devs building custom tours.
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TourMyApp enables easy video tour creation for bite-sized walkthroughs.
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Focus on capabilities that align with your customer journey needs and technical capabilities.
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Test out demos and free trials to validate ease of use and effectiveness.
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Don‘t just look at onboarding – evaluate wider capabilities for driving product adoption.
Well my friend, I hope this guide has provided you valuable insights into the world of customer onboarding software! Let me know if you have any other questions. I‘m always happy to chat more as a fellow tech enthusiast. Go wow your customers!
