How to measure customer onboarding effectiveness

Customer onboarding is one of the most important parts of your sales process. It's a critical stage where people have doubts and remorse - often leading to cancelling their purchase or subscription within the first 48 hours.

The onboarding stage is a complex process because it has so many components to it, making it hard to exactly pinpoint what's working and what needs to be optimized or changed.

In the SaaS world, most companies barely do anything for their onboarding experience, and this is your advantage:

• Over 90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better with their customer onboarding

• More than 60% of customers say that their onboarding and post-sale support is important in their buying decision

• 55% of customers say they've requested a refund for products they didn't understand or got help with

Working on your customer onboarding won't only drastically reduce your churn, it will improve user retention, lifetime value, organic growth, and their overall engagement with your product.

Time to value

Time to value is the amount of time it takes for a customer to realize the value from your product, which could also be referred to as their "aha!" moment.

The longer it takes them to get to that value moment, the more often they will churn.

First, having a realistic landing page and marketing with testimonials already help filter out people who might not get the highest value out of your product.

The best fix is to look at your most successful customers, see what actions they took, what events happened in their journey with your product, and identify common traits.

You will compare those common and events with customers that have churned or weren't satisfied.

Whatever actions or events happened for the successful ones which didn't happen for the churned ones, you will include in your customer onboarding.

See if more customers are successful, and if they reach their time to value faster.

Another option is to create quick wins early on during the onboarding process - during a call, having clear next steps, or creating a gamified onboarding flow to reward small actions.

Cancellation within 24-48 hours

Most people will decide if they like or dislike a product within the first 24 hours.

The unsatisfied clients will often request a refund within the first 48 hours.

If you have a high cancellation rate post-purchase, there are several potential reasons as to why this is happening.

Your marketing might trick people into believing something about your product that is wrong.

Your features, UX, and overall app experience has too much friction, making it difficult to understand the product.

Your customer onboarding process is bad, not helping customers understand key features, build momentum, or help them know what the next steps are in their journey.

Remember there's no silver bullet to build an effective customer onboarding, it's a hundred small details by testing and identifying the constraints that are creating friction in your customer's journey.

Keep the process as frictionless as possible, get more people to that activation point, or time to value point, and don't care about anything else.

If the cancellation rate is still high, you still haven't found the biggest constraint yet - keep searching and evolving.

Targeted customer satisfaction survey

Another great way to track how good is your customer onboarding is to put into place a targeted satisfaction survey.

Targeted because you must trigger the survey right after your customer got value during their onboarding journey.

Try to identify where they get the highest value, where their good will is strong, to get their feedback.

During your survey, focus on what could be improved, not what's good - you will know if it's good by looking at the metrics changing overtime.

Ask your customers if anything is unclear, how smooth and frictionless was the onboarding process, if their next steps are clear, what was missing, etc…

Similar to the onboarding experience, the survey should be frictionless and fast to answer - you can even give them a reward to incentive people to complete it.

For unsatisfied customers, you could offer them a 1 on 1 call to dive deeper into what's wrong and get better insights.

A call will reduce your churn rate, when done correctly, since you can better onboard them and show that you care.

Feature engagement

Highlighting certain features during your onboarding process is a common way to build momentum and help people get to their activation point faster with your product.

It's also a great onboarding metric to track since you can see which features shown or not shown during your onboarding process are being used the most and the least.

Find the common friction points of your features, and while improving them with your product team, you can also better explain them during your onboarding process.

If another feature is being widely used by your customers, but it's not present in your onboarding flow, you might want to mention it to help new users go straight to it and potentially get their time to value faster.

Sometimes, your onboarding process or the amount of features within your product might also be too overwhelming, creating confusion and frustration for your new customers.

Removing features and streamlining your onboarding process are valid ways to optimize them and boost user engagement on the features that bring the biggest value to your customers.

Churn rate

Finally, the last metric that is effective in measuring your customer onboarding effectiveness is your churn rate.

While churn is a lagging indicator, meaning it shows past behaviors and actions of churned customers, rather than the current state of your customers, it is still directly impacted by your onboarding process.

There will be a lot of work to reverse-engineer the reasons that make the churn rate high - again, there's no silver bullet here, it's a hundred small changes that will improve it.

However, there are bigger constraints to your business than others, and your onboarding might be one of them.

A great solution to fi your churn rate is to jump on calls if churned clients and ask what was wrong.

You can solve about every business problems by talking to your customers.

Go on the phone to understand what went wrong, but don't minimize what they say, instead get more angry than they are about the reasons they churned.

During the call, what it would take for you to make things right for them.

Done hundreds of time will give you plenty of clues as to what should be improved during your onboarding process.

Want to optimize your customer onboarding to lower churn and grow revenue?

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