If You Build It, They Will Come: A Guide to Customer Onboarding
1. IF YOU BUILD IT,
THEY WILL COME: A
GUIDE TO CUSTOMER
ONBOARDING
NOVEMBER 15, 2022, AT 12:30
PM PT, 3:30 PM ET, 8:30 PM BST
Product Management Today
PLG for Durable Growth
2. 03
As the leading Customer Success platform provider,
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4. IF YOU BUILD IT,
THEY WILL COME: A
GUIDE TO CUSTOMER
ONBOARDING
Product Management Today
Empowering you to Empower Them
5. 5
“If you build it, they will come.”
A guide to customer onboarding
6. 6
Agenda
Subject Timebox
What is Customer Onboarding 5 mins
What is *Good* Customer Onboarding 10 mins
Pitfalls of Bad Customer Onboarding: Do
This, Not That
15 mins
Pivot Signals – When to Make a Change 15 mins
Q&A
8. 8
So, what exactly is a customer, what is onboarding, and why
should you care?
A customer is anyone who pays for, uses, supports, or derives value from
the product you create
Customer onboarding is the process we use to get new customers setup
and using the product you have created.
You should care, because you likely have one shot and one shot only to get it
right before those customers who did show up head to your competitor.
Onboarding is a critical setup for retention.
11. 11
“A poor onboarding experience is hard to
come back from and is the fastest way to lose
a customer.”
— Paul Philip,
Founder and CEO of Amity
12. 12
Considerations based on who is using your product
B2B, B2C…Who is your end user?
The way you communicate should be fluid
depending upon what your product is
solving for your user base
You have the job of finding and creating
champions inside an organization
More often than not, these people have no
choice but to use your product that went
through procurement
The way you communicate should be
broad enough to address a large swath of
demographics. In short: be clear.
You have the job of not running them off
to find another pain reliever from your
competition
These users have as many choices are there
are in the market that solves for the job
they’re trying to do
13. 13
Setting YOUR expectations
Good Customer Onboarding
We will review
1. Elements of good customer onboarding
2. Opportunities to approach things differently with B2B
customers
3. What it means to be a champion and how to create
them
14. 14
Before Onboarding
The Customer Strategy
After Onboarding
The Product Strategy
Be clear about the value proposition –
what promise are you making?
Don’t oversell.
Am I requiring a lot of work?
If you ask for too much too soon, stop it.
Are the claims you made in your pre-
onboarding content realistic?
Ensure the claims reflect reality.
Are you seeing churn or drop-off after
onboarding? Act on it!
Customer
Onboarding
It’s not about getting customers, it’s about keeping them
Look at the full picture of your onboarding.
15. 15
The Sign-Up Process
KEEP. IT. SIMPLE.
Integrate where it makes
sense
Minimum Necessary Rule
The Welcome
Email or Text
Short.
Drive them to First Use
Feedback
Give a way to let you know
you messed up
Actually look at it and
measure it
Act on it
First Login / First Use
No assumptions – hit the
highlights
Get them somewhere
valuable, quickly
Demo where it makes
sense
What are the key elements of customer onboarding?
16. 16
Good strategies for a sign-up process
What Mural did well:
1. Three pieces of information, likely
stored in your browser.
2. They made it clear that it’s free to
sign up and the customer can
continue to use the free version
forever.
17. 17
Good strategies for a sign-up process
What Etsy did well:
1. They allow you to integrate, but it’s
optional.
2. It’s one-click if you do integrate; if
you don’t, it’s 3 pieces of
information.
18. 18
Thank and welcome them!
Ok, they’ve signed up, now what?
Make it clear you want to
hear from them
Send a welcome email or
text
Ask the customer how
they want to
communicate
20. 20
Give them direction! Make first use count.
According to Pendo, approximately 80% of your
features in your product are not used
Pendo correlates this to roughly $29.5 Billion wasted on unused
features
You built it, and they came, but will they stay?
Show them what to do and what aligns with your
value proposition(s)
Make it easy to find help
First Use
What happens after they’re in?
21. 21
Good examples of first use:
What does Netflix do well:
1. You are immediately seeing popular
TV shows and movies.
2. You can begin to give feedback
immediately to teach them what to
show you.
22. 22
Good examples of first use:
What does Amazon do well:
1. They let me buy things instantly
2. They start to show me similar
products that might interest me
23. 23
Turn your customers into champions
Beginning the feedback cycle
Release based on the
customer first
Make product
trade-offs
Provide a way to
give feedback
Let the customer know
you’ve heard them
Plan and generate
excitement
Consume and analyze
metrics and customer
feedback
24. 24
Customer Onboarding Recap
2. Welcome and Thank you
Keep it simple
Tell your customers thank you and welcome them to
your product. Immediately illustrate value.
4. Capture Feedback
Measure
Capture qualitative and quantitative feedback
1. Sign up your customers
Get your customers signed up
Get the minimum necessary information to sign
them up – no one cares about a sexy login process
3. First Login / First Use
Make it clear
Get your customers to realizing value immediately and
demonstrate features when it makes sense
5. Repeat
Introduce new features as needed
Beginning at step 3, let your customers know what
value they can get out of using your product and
how they can get it.
6. Roadmap accordingly
Adjust your plans
Your roadmap is a plan that’s
predicting the future. Adjust it based
on the feedback you’re getting.
26. 26
Sign-up
Entirely Manual Reentry
Everything, Everywhere, All At
Once
• Capturing too much customer detail up
front
• More than one or two steps
• No save option
• Customers can’t integrate with existing
profiles
• You have disabled the ability to copy
and paste
• Your captcha is too difficult
• Customers can’t carry over the created
profile to future interactions
(particularly bad in healthcare)
• You ask for the same detail multiple
times
Sign-up screw-ups
27. 27
Welcome
Way too much information, too many words, too many big words, too
many things separated by commas
Vague and generic
You’re not welcome
Relying on handouts and user guides without interacting with your
business users being onboarded is a good way to lose steam
28. 28
Information Overload
First Use
Not focusing on the
primary source of value
for the customer
Making a long list of
things they can do
without telling them
what is important
Providing demos that
are far too long
Things to Avoid
29. 29
We don’t need no steenking feedback
Feedback
You don’t act on it
You don’t care
You don’t provide a way
for the customer to get
hold of you
30. 30
But we have 20,000 more users today than we did last month…
Metrics
You are measuring counts of things that do not indicate success. Vanity
Metrics can kill.
You are only measuring lagging indicators that are revenue based and not
considering how the customer is using your product during first use and beyond
31. 31
I’m sticking to the plan no matter what
Roadmap
Option 2 – Feedback driven change request
Option 1 – Thing we had in the roadmap already
Option 3 – Thing we had in the roadmap already
Not Making Trade-off Decisions
Ignoring metrics, feedback, and data in service of a
plan is a good way to illustrate how little you value
your customer
32. 32
ONBOARDING LITMUS TESTS
Good onboarding outcomes drive:
Bring customers back over and over
Leads to referrals
Converts to subscribers
33. 33
No regrets pivot signals:
Customers don’t complete the sign-up process
They go inactive almost immediately
Their company metrics are far below threshold
You aren’t meeting regularly with the person to whom you sold the suite/product
Your social media presence / analytics is not positive
Fast rate of unsubscribing to paid services
Your customer is complaining
Your champions are no longer championing
Signals to consider that indicate a pivot
34. 34
Customer Onboarding Recap
2. Welcome and Thank you
Keep it simple
Tell your customers thank you and welcome them to
your product. Immediately illustrate value.
4. Capture Feedback
Measure
Capture qualitative and quantitative feedback
1. Sign up your customers
Get your customers signed up
Get the minimum necessary information to sign
them up – no one cares about a sexy login process
3. First Login / First Use
Make it clear
Get your customers to realizing value immediately and
demonstrate features when it makes sense
5. Repeat
Introduce new features as needed
Beginning at step 3, let your customers know what
value they can get out of using your product and
how they can get it.
6. Roadmap accordingly
Adjust your plans
Your roadmap is a plan that’s
predicting the future. Adjust it based
on the feedback you’re getting.
36. Senior Product Director and Product
Management Practice Lead at
Nexient, an NTT Data Company
Jamie Bernard
/in/jamiecbernard/
kuroshiotraining.thinkific.com
/courses/practical-product-by-design
Q&A
Rayvonne Carter
Webinar Coordinator,
Product Management Today
/in/rayvonnecarter/
@ProdMgmtToday
productmanagement
today.com
Notas do Editor
I’m going to share with you an anecdote from very early on in my career.
Tell the story:
This is the moment. This is what you have been waiting for. You’ve built The Thing. It has hit MVP and you are ready to release your baby out into the wild.
This feeling is universal. This doesn’t matter whether you are in a startup or a fortune 10 company: launch day/week/month is always both wildly stressful and profoundly exciting.
Up to this point you have done research on product market fit, you’ve set your metrics strategy (please tell me you have a metrics strategy), your infrastructure and nonfunctionals are up to par. In short, you’re ready to rock and roll.
Where we are going to pick up today is when those humans you are targeting begin to trickle – or rush – in.
Why should we care about customer onboarding? How do we show value to the customer and to our business?
When we think about customers and who they are sometimes we over-rotate on the external person. As anyone in large enterprise knows: sometimes your toughest customers you have to get to adopt your product are internal customers! Some of your customers will not have a choice but to onboard, however the ease, speed, and fluidity of your onboarding process can make or break your product’s adoption rate. As a user myself I have abandoned products specifically because it had a cumbersome onboarding process. Internally, your biggest competitor seems to be pretty basic programs like excel. If you’ve made getting into and using your system so complex, time consuming, or cumbersome that it’s easier for your customers to use something else, then you probably should rethink your process.
Also, I want to highlight the underlined text: set up and using. This is not about getting someone signed up so you can increase your number of users. That’s an easily inflated vanity metric. Instead, we go past that to get them using the product. I could grandstand on the uselessness of vanity metrics, but that’s not what this talk is about, so I’ll save you from that – you’re welcome. Whether it’s an internal or external customer, ensuring that the user can simply get in and use the system to do what it was designed to do is critical to achieving the outcomes you are targeting in your metrics strategy (please tell me you are targeting outcomes).
How long does this one shot last? According to a BBC article by a guy named Michael Hall, you have roughly 3 seconds before you’ve lost someone on an ecommerce site. 3 seconds.
Once you’ve convinced someone to join you – or buy your product or service – you might think the hard part is done.
It isn’t. You still have several steps to consider as it relates to onboarding, but getting them up and running is not where it ends, especially if you’re a saas company or b2b company with whom you’d like a long relationship.
First, let me start out with a blanket statement. You are not the customer. I know, Product People, that we are the voice of the customer, but sometimes we get so buried in delivery that we convince ourselves that our product is solving something for the customer because we find it useful and we didn’t necessarily check with the folks who are using our product to do a job. That is a huge pitfall and is often the root cause of why certain features don’t get used and can often be the source of lots of churn around over-investing in a feature no one is using, customer churn, or customer loss. A feature we will talk about later on is the simple act of signing up – make that too complicated and you’ve already lost. I won’t rabbit hole us inside the importance of customer discovery, but I’ll just say…it’s important.
As they say – first impressions matter. A Harvard study revealed that it typically takes eight subsequent positive encounters to overcome a bad first impression.
EIGHT.
As we step into this conversation, I will be speaking back and forth about two main sets of users. I think a ton of time gets spent on the individual user, but I’d like to lean into that and see where we might approach onboarding with a larger group of people a bit differently to achieve the same results we seek with an individual user out in the wild.
I’ll also assert that this will apply to home-grown software products, too. If you’re building a tool that a department in your company will use, these are humans who also need to be onboarded.
Before we start talking about the onboarding itself, I want to zoom out for a second and think about the full picture of onboarding. This is going to include some level of retention, but we have to think about how our story is being consumed by our customer and whether we are living up to our end of the deal that convinced them to sign up in the first place.
How many of you might have gone through the process to sign up for a news source only to find out you’re being met with a paywall? You went through the process of attempting to curate your articles and then you can’t even access them unless you want to pay.
As you start to onboard, you should have a strategy that you’re following that takes the customer and pulls them through the onboarding and begins to overlap becoming a consumer of your product. You have a value proposition – or promise of value – that you’ve made clear to the customer and they’re onboarding because of it. How are you going to test that those value propositions are clear and aligned with the customers’ expectations?
Testing hypotheses with your target customers and incorporating feedback in your MVP and beyobnd is critical to your product’s success. If you don’t listen to your customers, you are leaving problems on the table for the competition to solve
These general elements apply to both types of users that we will be discussing today. One of the key components in your welcome process for your B2B customer is to ensure that you’re clear on understanding the problems you’re solving for the organization.
Part of the welcome – if you’re getting a good amount of concierge service – is going to be a success setting session with a leader from a key user group so you can start to quantify what those success criteria are and how they will be measured so the first login/first use can be a curated experience if you’re onboarding a larger group of people. There might be a set of features that are nice to haves, but the company may want to focus on the key features at first. Right size that plan so that your first use generates excitement or even relief.
I won’t really focus on the sign up for b2b or internal apps because, frankly, this is largely either a sales conversation or a product pitch to executives and that’s not a value-add for this discussion.
It’s important for the customer to know that you want them there and – more importantly – that you want to hear from them if necessary. Make it easy for them to give feedback, should they desire. That, along with your metrics, will help you make informed trade-off decisions as you further refine your product
I would also add to create champions at this point. There are going to be influential groups of people in your organization that can help ensure the adoption of the tool that you are implementing. I always like to have a mix of long-timers who have been there and know all of the workarounds who are also high performers and either new or low performing people. This will help you get a good impression on the spread of pains you might be dealing with (and your internal sponsor should be working with some level of OCM to alleviate any fear, etc. I always include low performers here because – assuming positive intent – they are likely the people who are in need of a better solution and giving them ownership and an opportunity to ask the questions they might have otherwise been afraid to ask is a good way to see where your processes might need some help or clarity.
People want to read long emails about as much as they want to talk on the phone these days. Think of a welcome email sort of like inviting an introvert to a party: they don’t really want to go, but they’d like to be invited. Same with the welcome email – we don’t really want to read it, but it’s nice to have it there especially if it’s useful.
Keep it simple and make your primary motivation to get them to first use – in other words, get your users to value, quickly.
So why do I mention this about features that aren’t used – when you get someone into your product it needs to be very clear what value they are there to obtain.
This is the time to ensure that you have a solid understanding of the customer’s pains, what processes are impacted by your tool, and how success will be measured. This can allow you to tailor and highlight the features that will relieve these pains for your new team(s) using your product you’ve sold.
Add verbal experience of the call center app that was rolled out and productboard.
While yes, this is the beginning, this should definitely continue. I would also assert that as you are creating new features it would we wise to revert to earlier steps in the onboarding process to ensure that your customers know about them, know why they should care, know how to use it, know how they can give you feedback on it.
Set up touchpoints if you are onboarding your business customers. Make sure you’re measuring the things you need to measure and touch base with the champions and manager to review the metrics and see how they might improve or whether they need to stay the course.
This is where I will address the sales cycle…
Overselling your low-code/no-code platform as “simple” when it isn’t is a good way to generate bad buzz.
Overselling your product to be able to do things that hasn’t gone live yet is a good way to sour a relationship with your customer. Your sales should be the beginning of a relationship – not a hit-it-and-quit-it transaction.
To protect the guilty, I will not share logos.
From the relationship side, this is probably the worst thing you can screw up.
There are a ton of mistakes you can make as a part of onboarding – if you’re only counting how many users you are signing up and not comparing that to users who went inactive, deactivated, or didn’t complete sign up you are missing opportunities to add value to your customers and you’re leaving money on the table.
The metrics that you are working with your business partners on as you’re onboarding a product into another business’s ecosystem should be a negotiation. One of the things I pride myself on is asking the hard question. Your customer might want to report the giant counts of widgets they are making. It’s your job to know the power of the metrics you capture and to help your users understand how to track and act on them. It’s also your job to question antipatterns.
This is the main source of angst between sales and your product teams. Sales might demand certain things because it sounds like a sexy thing to sell. This is where you should listen to the folks interfacing with your customers and your product people: trade-off decisions are key.
I’ll go back to what I said in one of my first slides: YOU ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMER. Listen to them and if you built it and they came, they will likely stay.
Metrics tell the tale. Metrics are a key element to successful onboarding and fixing it when you screw it up. These are some outcomes to measure as lagging indicators that your onboarding was successful.
