8 Best Customer Onboarding Solutions for SaaS Businesses

Guest Blog Post from our friends at Custify! Want to decrease churn and increase NRR? Check out these 8 customer onboarding solutions for your business.

Customer Experience Trends 2023

You’ve shown your potential customers a demo, and they’ve decided that your tool is the right one for their business. What’s next? Well, it’s time to show your new users how to use your product for the best results. 

In this article, we are going to focus on customer onboarding tools that will help you guide your customers through the onboarding process. We’ve selected eight of the best customer onboarding solutions for SaaS businesses. 

Before we get started with our top picks, let’s see what customer onboarding is and how it impacts your business.

What is customer onboarding?

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing your customers to your product in an attempt to encourage product adoption. Customer onboarding is one of the most important stages of the customer journey. During this stage, customers discover how to use your solution, but more importantly, they get to have their “a-ha” moment. This is when they realize how your solution solves one (or more) of their pain points. Customer onboarding is a crucial process that needs to demonstrate the value of your product. For SaaS businesses, this stage has a major impact on customer experience and retention.

The impact of successful customer onboarding

Since the SaaS industry is a highly competitive one, customers know that they can turn to your competitors if they have a poor experience during the onboarding process. Actually, 89% of consumers that had a bad customer experience with a brand consequently turn to a competitor.

However, when the onboarding process is successful, it has a positive impact on various metrics, including net revenue retention. As you know, retention is essential for SaaS businesses, considering that it costs businesses around 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. 

A successful customer onboarding process leads to a better customer experience, which ultimately leads to a lower churn rate

Now, without further ado, let’s see how these eight customer onboarding solutions can help you provide a better experience for your customers.

#1

Custify

Custify

Custify is a complete customer success platform that can help you manage everything from customer onboarding to customer success management. For each stage of the customer lifecycle, you will find an easy-to-use feature in Custify that will make managing your clients simpler. Custify automates repetitive tasks and allows customer success managers (CSMs) to focus on creating long-lasting relationships with customers. 

Its Customer 360° feature is essential for customer onboarding, as it allows you to have a complete overview of all your customers and their journeys. Monitoring your customers’ lifecycles will help you figure out if they have issues with your onboarding process so that you can resolve those issues. 

Best features: 

  • Customer 360° 
  • Customer onboarding automation flows
  • Segmentation
  • Task management and alerts
#2

GuideCX

GuideCX

GuideCX is a platform designed for customer onboarding in various industries, but with a focus on the SaaS industry. This onboarding solution can help you create a seamless implementation and make the whole process simpler. 

With GuideCX, you will be able to improve the time to value (TTV) of your product for your customers. In a few easy steps, you can set up your onboarding project for each customer, without coding or complicated interfaces. Apart from guiding you and your customers through the onboarding process, GuideCX allows you to analyze project trends to see how to optimize future projects. 

Best features:

  • Project and task management
  • Customer engagement and communication features
  • Training sessions
  • Navigator Reporting Engine
#3

UserPilot

UserPilot

Userpilot is another onboarding solution you should take into consideration for your product. This tool allows you to provide a personalized onboarding experience for your customers. Unlike other similar solutions, Userpilot lets you offer tailored experiences based on the user persona. 

With Userpilot, you can identify and monitor whether your customers achieve the goals in their onboarding. Plus, the onboarding checklist helps you drive adoption by highlighting every step of the journey. 

Best features: 

  • Personalization
  • Optimized onboarding flows
  • Onboarding checklist
  • Contextual hints & tips
#4

UserGuiding

UserGuiding

Customer onboarding is all about showing your customers how to take advantage of your product features. What better way to show them than in a product walkthrough? UserGuiding is a user onboarding tool that provides product walkthroughs, allowing you to prompt the right in-app experience. 

The product walkthroughs are made without coding which makes this solution extremely user-friendly. In addition to walking your customers through your tool, UserGuiding also provides onboarding checklists and customer feedback surveys. 

Best features: 

  • Segmentation
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey
  • Goal Tracking
  • Codeless product tours
#5

UserFlow

UserFlow

Userflow is a tool that allows you to onboard your customers step by step with automated flows. Capture the attention of your customers and engage them with sophisticated flows that are easy to create. Apart from these codeless onboarding flows, Userflow helps you keep track of tasks during the onboarding process. 

Userflow comes with insightful analytics for you to see exactly how your onboarding process went for each customer. Finally, this onboarding tool allows you to discover what your customers thought about the whole process with various types of surveys. 

Best features: 

  • Codeless onboarding flows
  • Personalized resource center
  • Surveys and NPS
  • No-code event tracking
#6

Pendo

Pendo

Pendo provides a customer onboarding and in-app training solution that can improve your customers’ experiences. With this tool, you can provide your customers with customized guidance to make sure that each one of them achieves their particular onboarding goals.

The onboarding tool will help you demonstrate the value of your product faster and better, as well as engage with your customers during the onboarding phase. With Pendo, you can also deploy surveys to see how customers respond to your onboarding process.

Best features:

  • In-app training
  • Customer base segmentation
  • Roadmapping
#7

Rocketlane

Rocketlane

Rocketlane is a collaborative customer onboarding solution that provides total visibility across customers and projects. This tool helps you improve the onboarding experience thanks to the ability to easily communicate with customers from kick-off to value delivery. 

You can collaborate live on documents and tasks to easily help your customers when they get stuck. By communicating and working side by side with your colleagues and customers, you will be able to provide a great onboarding experience. 

Best features: 

  • Project 360 view
  • Real-time collaboration and communication
  • Automated alerts and nudges
  • Customizable experience
#8

Nickelled

Nickelled

Lastly, we have Nickelled. This is a tool that helps you create website tours, banners, and tooltips to easily onboard customers. Discover Nickelled’s interactive click-through guides that you can customize for a better customer experience. Nickelled allows you to display the necessary content in the website tours to give your customer a better understanding of how your product works.

Onboarding never truly stops since you are constantly updating your product. With Nickelled, you will be able to showcase the newest features for faster adoption. Plus, you can follow up with personalized messages to share helpful information or ask for feedback.

Best features: 

  • Customer base segmentation
  • Customizable product tours
  • Analytics
  • Documentation creator

Create a better onboarding experience

Find the right tool for your business and use it to improve the onboarding experience of your customers. A better onboarding experience translates into lower churn rates, better customer retention, and more satisfied customers. 

Author Bio:

Nicoleta Niculescu

Nicoleta Niculescu is the Content Marketing Specialist at Custify. With over 5 years of experience, she likes to write about innovative tech products and B2B marketing. Besides writing, Nicoleta enjoys painting and reading thriller books. 

Author