Introduction
Did you know that around 63% of customers just need to see the SaaS customer onboarding process before making a purchasing decision?
That makes a huge impact on your bottom line. Many companies still can't create an onboarding experience that works, which leaves users confused and increases churn. Salesforce data shows 70% of customers say understanding how to use products and services matters most to win their business.
Your customers become 50% more loyal when you have an onboarding process that works. That's why 74% of enterprise organizations now have complete teams dedicated to their customer's onboarding experience.
Numbers tell the real story - users who finish onboarding checklists are 3 times more likely to become paying customers. On top of that, more than 80% of executives told Harvard Business Review that good onboarding boosts revenue, referrals, renewals, and customer loyalty.
A well-laid-out SaaS onboarding strategy goes beyond automated emails. You need careful thought, planning, and regular progress checks on implementation, training, and goals. Your high-touch clients need more attention than what a simple email sequence can provide.
In this article, I'll show you how to build a SaaS customer onboarding process that delivers real results, complete with templates you can use right away.
Understanding the SaaS Onboarding Journey
SaaS products live or die by their onboarding. Your customers' decision to stay depends on their first experience with your product. A clear understanding of the onboarding scope becomes crucial.
Understanding the SaaS Onboarding Trip
SaaS customer onboarding goes beyond basic orientation. The strategic process helps new customers learn your product and become skilled users. Users move from signup to real value during this stage. Their relationship with your product depends on this experience.
Pre-onboarding vs onboarding vs post-onboarding
Breaking down the SaaS onboarding trip into three phases helps users succeed. Each phase serves a unique purpose.
Pre-onboarding happens between sales and implementation. This first phase starts right after purchase but before product use. Your team can:
Build the customer relationship
Work to tailor your onboarding program
Plan and collect information for kickoff
Set clear expectations about the onboarding process
Onboarding marks the phase where customers start using your product. This stage has:
Welcome calls or emails
Product walkthroughs and setup
Account configuration and testing
Training sessions and documentation
Implementation and needed integrations
The main goal guides users to their "aha moment" quickly. This moment happens when they see your product's true value. Studies show that faster time to value creates happier users who stay longer.
Post-onboarding builds long-term adoption and growth. Your team should:
Track account metrics and spot usage drops
Send follow-up messages
Find upsell opportunities
Keep knowledge bases updated
Create regular progress reports
In stark comparison to this common belief, onboarding doesn't end after the first session. The best SaaS onboarding experiences span multiple sessions and grow with user expertise.
How onboarding fits into the customer lifecycle
The customer lifecycle covers every interaction from awareness to advocacy. Onboarding might be one part of this trip, but it shapes overall success.
Most SaaS companies structure their customer success trip in these stages:
Awareness: Customers find your product
Comparison: They review your product against others
Consideration: They think about purchasing
Conversion: They sign up for your service
Adoption: They use your product (primary onboarding)
Retention: They become regular users (secondary onboarding)
Advocacy: They recommend your product (tertiary onboarding)
Customer onboarding starts with the first product interaction and runs until churn. Your focus moves from primary to secondary to tertiary onboarding during this time:
Primary onboarding: From sign-up to activation, showing initial value
Secondary onboarding: Making the product stick by revealing unused features
Tertiary onboarding: Keeping users engaged through new releases and feedback
Different product growth metrics match each onboarding stage. These include user activation, adoption, conversion, retention, and eventually advocacy and revenue growth.
Onboarding directly affects customer success metrics. A smooth onboarding experience keeps customers from leaving between signup and value realization. Quick wins lead to more daily and monthly active users as people keep coming back.
Customer onboarding sets the foundation for your entire customer relationship. Understanding these phases and their place in the customer trip helps create an onboarding process that delivers value throughout the customer lifecycle.
Who Owns the Onboarding Process?
The way teams hand over customer responsibility plays a key role in SaaS success. Yes, it is important to know who manages the onboarding process because it affects customer satisfaction, retention rates, and your bottom line.
Who Owns the Onboarding Process?
Multiple teams share the ownership of SaaS customer onboarding, so they need to work together. Research shows the responsibility gets distributed among product marketing, sales, and customer success teams, which creates coordination challenges. Let's get into how these roles come together to create a smooth experience.
Sales to customer success handoff
Your client relationship faces one of its most important tests during the transition from sales to customer success. A poorly managed onboarding process between these teams ranks among the top reasons why customers leave.
As Gillian Heltai, Chief Customer Officer at Lattice, explains, "Customers get so excited when they're buying. We're selling them the dream. If you don't deliver a great onboarding, it's like this trough of disillusionment".
Customers shouldn't feel like they're being passed around. The process should feel like a partnership that creates one smooth interaction with your company. Many successful SaaS businesses bring in their customer success team during sales talks to build relationship continuity.
To make handoffs work:
Sales and customer success should meet internally before reaching out to customers
Share important details about customer contacts, roles, purchase information, pain points, and goals
The salesperson should introduce CS team members and explain what they do
Account executives should join the first post-sale meeting
Complete the transition within 24-48 hours after closing the deal
Your customers don't really care about your internal processes. They see everything as one experience with your brand. Clear communication and setting the right expectations matter most during this transition.
Role of onboarding managers and CSMs
Customer success managers (CSMs) are vital to onboarding, but dedicated onboarding managers can really improve the process as organizations grow.
Onboarding managers work like "orchestra conductors" of the entire experience. They make sure all parts work together smoothly to help new customers transition easily, which drives both product adoption and retention.
Onboarding managers take care of:
The complete customer onboarding process
Making onboarding workflows better
Running onboarding meetings and product demos
Understanding what customers need and want
Teaching customers best practices
Spotting and removing barriers to customer success
CSMs focus more on consulting, working with senior stakeholders to set long-term goals, create metrics, and get executives on board. This split keeps decision-makers engaged during implementation, which helps with renewals and growth opportunities.
CSMs handle these tasks in companies without dedicated onboarding staff. Studies show 48% of CSMs juggle over 10 major tasks, and up to 75% handle onboarding, adoption, renewals, and churn at once. Many companies now create specialized onboarding roles once they reach the right size.
The best mix between self-serve, automated product-led onboarding and sales-led customized onboarding should be about 80:20. This balance lets you work efficiently while keeping the human touch needed for complex setups.
SaaS customer onboarding works best when roles are clear and teams work well together. Whether you have onboarding specialists or rely on CSMs, having clear handoff steps and defined responsibilities helps new customers get value from your solution quickly.
Planning Your SaaS Customer Onboarding Strategy
Planning your SaaS customer onboarding isn't just good—it's vital to succeed in the long run. Over 90% of customers believe companies could improve their onboarding processes for new users. This creates a great chance for SaaS businesses to excel.
Define customer goals and success metrics
Good onboarding starts when you understand what customers want to achieve with your product. You need to look into their jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) and specific goals right from the start.
Here's how to identify customer goals:
Use welcome surveys to learn about customer roles and use cases
Study existing users' behavior to spot patterns
Schedule onboarding calls to discuss goals in a relaxed way
Get data about desired outcomes and specific needs
Clear expectations help keep everyone on track. Studies show unclear goals cause 37% of project failures. This makes goal-setting a key part of success.
SMART goal-setting principles help establish meaningful metrics—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Here are examples of SMART onboarding goals:
"The customer completes the onboarding process in six weeks" or "After implementation, the customer achieves at least a 35% increase in project management capacity".
You can't understand what works in your onboarding process without data. Keep track of Time to Value (TTV), feature adoption rates, and customer satisfaction scores to make your approach better.
Map out onboarding stages and timelines
The customer experience forms the foundation of good SaaS onboarding. Break down the experience into small steps and stages to see how customers use your product.
The SaaS customer journey has six main stages:
Evaluation: Prospects become aware of your brand
Onboarding: New customers perform original steps to begin using your product
Adoption: Customers become regular users and derive value
Renewal: Customers decide whether to continue the subscription
Expansion: Satisfied customers upgrade or add features
Advocacy: Loyal customers recommend your product
Mark major milestones that shape your customer's experience at each stage. Think about their thoughts, feelings, and actions. These milestones relate to key events like pre-purchase trials, account activation, feature adoption, and renewals.
A clear timeline helps users know what to learn and when. Step-by-step processes help them become skilled at using your software. Celebrate progress with users, showing appreciation boosts their motivation.
Segment users for tailored experiences
Group your customers based on shared criteria to deliver individual-specific experiences. Good segmentation helps you boost customer loyalty, reduce churn, and find chances to upsell.
Here's how to segment your SaaS customers:
Demographic segmentation: Based on factors like age, gender, location
Behavioral segmentation: Based on feature usage, engagement levels, or task completion
Experience level segmentation: Based on familiarity with similar products
Customer journey stage: Based on whether they're new, trial, or returning users
Welcome surveys help collect user data to create custom onboarding flows that increase activation rates. This needs two steps:
Group users with similar traits and goals
Make their experience better by showing features they need
One company saw a 20% increase in activation rates and a 15% drop in churn after they started user segmentation.
Ask for customer feedback through contextual surveys during onboarding. This helps find problems, measure satisfaction, and make informed improvements to your strategy.
Set clear goals, map the customer experience, and segment users for individual-specific experiences. This creates a SaaS onboarding strategy that appeals to your customers and drives long-term success.
Executing the Onboarding Process Step-by-Step
The execution phase turns SaaS customer onboarding strategy into action. A well-planned approach needs careful attention to detail. Here's what you should know about putting your onboarding process into practice.
Welcome call or email
The welcome stage shapes your entire customer relationship. Research shows that 85% of people stay loyal to businesses that put effort into welcome content. This moment means more than just a simple formality.
Your welcome calls should follow these best practices:
Gather personalized data from sign-up information and welcome surveys
Allow flexible scheduling in different time zones for easy access
Assign dedicated specialists to speed up the process with targeted advice
Set clear expectations about the customer's trip ahead
Welcome emails deserve equal attention. Keep them short, precise, and celebratory—treat each purchase as a win. These personalized emails bring in 320% more revenue compared to regular promotional emails. They also see better engagement with a 23% read rate and 26.9% click-through rate versus 2.62% for standard emails.
A series of automated emails can guide users through their onboarding trip. These emails highlight key features and prompt specific actions.
Product walkthroughs and checklists
Interactive product walkthroughs help users find value after the welcome phase. Step-by-step tours help users complete important tasks within your platform. This approach reduces support tickets by clearing up feature confusion.
Interactive walkthroughs work better than static documentation:
93% of marketers say interactive content teaches users well
89% of users try interactive demos on landing pages
Companies using interactive walkthroughs see 1.5x more activations
Onboarding checklists make the experience fun and show clear progress. Progress bars show users how much setup remains, which motivates them to continue.
Your walkthrough should guide users to their "aha moment" or first quick win. This works better than showing every feature at once. Remember to celebrate user achievements to keep the momentum going throughout onboarding.
Training sessions and documentation
Detailed training creates successful SaaS customer onboarding. About 86% of customers stick with businesses that provide good onboarding content.
Different learning styles need different training options:
Live sessions let users ask questions in real-time
Recorded webinars help users learn at their own speed
Interactive tutorials make complex features easier to understand
Asana built an Academy that brings together various learning resources. This choice improved customer satisfaction with a 19-point increase in NPS scores compared to non-users.
Automox University cut manual onboarding time by 75% with on-demand training. Their Customer Success Engineers now focus on complex product discussions instead of simple setup.
Users need access to support whatever the training format. Questions will come up even with the best onboarding process. Multiple support channels like live chat, knowledge bases, or community forums help users get answers.
Self-service support helps growing organizations. Zenefits proved this by creating a detailed customer education program with 50 training courses. They saw 13% of new users taking training and 5% fewer support tickets.
A good SaaS customer onboarding process needs both automation and personal touch. The best mix uses 80% self-serve, automated onboarding and 20% personalized help. This balance brings efficiency while keeping human connection.
Providing Ongoing Support During Onboarding
SaaS products need ongoing support during onboarding, even when they seem straightforward. Research reveals that 86% of customers remain loyal to businesses that invest in complete onboarding content. Multiple support channels will give users constant help as they learn your platform.
Live chat and chatbot support
Real-time help changes everything for SaaS onboarding. Live chat solves problems right when users need assistance, which cuts down frustration and prevents them from giving up. You can place chat widgets at known friction points to offer help before users ask for it.
AI-powered chatbots have transformed onboarding support by delivering:
24/7 assistance whatever the time zone
Customized guidance based on user behavior
Quick answers to common questions
Automated handling of routine onboarding tasks
Chatbots prove their worth clearly, 70% of businesses report an increase in customer interactions with high-quality chatbot experiences. Adding chatbots to your onboarding process will boost user satisfaction without straining your support team.
Knowledge base and tutorials
Users often prefer to find answers on their own before reaching out to support. A well-laid-out knowledge base serves as a central library where customers can get help instantly.
Knowledge bases offer better self-service support, less pressure on customer success teams, and happier users through quick responses. Here's how to build an effective knowledge base:
Start by organizing content logically with clear categories and subcategories based on features. Add a smart search function that anticipates what customers type. Include different content formats that suit various learning styles—from articles and FAQs to video tutorials and interactive walkthroughs.
Keep users within your platform for the best results. One source points out, "When customers use the in-app help center, sending them outside of the product to watch a video tutorial only adds friction".
Community forums and peer help
Peer-to-peer learning helps supplement your formal support channels cost-effectively. Community forums let customers discuss issues, share experiences, and learn from each other while keeping your support team's workload manageable.
This shared space brings special benefits during onboarding. Users explain things in everyday language and share practical solutions that might not appear in official guides. The community builds relationships between customers and creates a sense of belonging that makes your product stickier.
SaaS community platforms work alongside formal onboarding by opening direct communication beyond the sales process. These communities become central hubs where users find support, advice, best practices, and share feedback. They help customers help themselves while reducing support tickets.
Your support resources should grow based on common questions and pain points. Track chat history and forum discussions to spot patterns that show ways to improve your product. This constant improvement keeps your support systems in step with customer needs.
Using Automation to Scale Onboarding
Your customer base growth makes manual onboarding harder to manage. Automation reshapes how SaaS businesses scale their onboarding while keeping quality and tailored experiences intact. Research shows automated onboarding cuts manual time by 75%. This lets customer success teams spend more time on valuable interactions.
Automate repetitive tasks
The first step to work with automation is spotting time-consuming tasks that keep repeating. The ICE framework (Impact, Confidence, Ease) helps you pick which processes need automation first:
Data collection and entry: Speed up sign-ups and reduce errors by automating forms and document processing
Welcome messages: Create email sequences that help users through their onboarding experience
Follow-ups and reminders: Set up notifications that remind users about work to be done
Repetitive workflows: Build step sequences that guide customers without manual help
Automation brings real benefits. Webinar automation saves precious time for customer success managers who run multiple live sessions weekly. The sweet spot between automated and tailored onboarding should be around 80:20. This ratio helps maintain human connection.
Trigger in-app messages and tooltips
In-app messaging helps you talk to users at different points in their experience. These messages come in various forms:
Modals (pop-ups) grab attention and excel at welcoming users or showing new features. Tooltips provide specific guidance for elements like buttons or form fields.
Product tours mix modals and tooltips to show core features. Interactive walkthroughs work better because they guide users only when they try features for the first time. One company's data showed interactive walkthroughs created 1.5x more activations.
These automated messages do more than guide users - they create tailored experiences based on user groups. You can create different flows by checking welcome survey answers. One flow might work for managers while another suits team members.
Set up onboarding flows without code
No-code onboarding helps you create complete onboarding experiences without coding. Users get a better experience because you can quickly build and change tailored flows.
No-code platforms let you:
Create interactive walkthroughs quickly
Update flows without developers
See and launch flows right from the tool
Create specific experiences for different users
These tools come with drag-and-drop builders and templates. You can match tooltips and modals with your app's look. User segments help trigger the right experience at the right time, making onboarding relevant for everyone.
Most no-code platforms work well with existing tools. They connect to CRMs like HubSpot, project tools, and payment systems to handle everything. Look at how well tools integrate when choosing automation software. Budget and growth potential matter too.
Tracking Success with Onboarding Metrics
Your SaaS customer onboarding success depends on tracking specific metrics that show user value recognition. The right strategies combined with understanding their effects give you informed ways to make your process better.
Time to value
Time to value (TTV) shows how quickly customers experience your product's benefits after signup. This metric tracks the user's trip from onboarding start to the "aha moment" when they first see your product's value. Quick customer value recognition leads to higher loyalty rates.
Lower TTV numbers point to smooth onboarding. Research shows mobile apps lose 90% of daily users within 30 days. You can improve TTV by:
Using welcome screens that segment users by role and goals
Creating tailored onboarding paths based on specific needs
Making complex processes simpler to deliver value faster
Feature adoption rate
Feature adoption rate (FAR) represents the percentage of users who actively engage with specific product features. The calculation divides feature users by total users and multiplies by 100. A group of 50 users from a total of 200 gives you a 25% FAR.
SaaS companies average 24.5% core feature adoption, with variations by industry. HR products lead at 31%, while FinTech trails at 22.6%.
Strong feature adoption rates show that customers find real value in your product, which supports satisfaction and keeps them longer. This metric helps you spot features that appeal to users and identifies areas needing improvement or better visibility.
Customer satisfaction and NPS
Net Promoter Score (NPS) reveals your customers' product sentiment. The metric asks users to rate: "How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?" from 0-10.
Scores of 9-10 identify Promoters, 7-8 mark Passives, and 0-6 indicate Detractors. Your NPS comes from subtracting Detractor percentage from Promoter percentage. Scores above 0 show good performance, above 20 excellence, and above 50 exceptional results.
SaaS companies average an NPS of 36, which serves as a measure for your performance. Smart teams collect NPS feedback from active users familiar with the product rather than inactive ones still learning its value.
These metrics work together to give you a complete view of your onboarding effectiveness. They guide improvements that affect customer success and your revenue directly.
Overcoming Common Onboarding Challenges
SaaS companies face many hurdles during customer onboarding. Some obstacles appear consistently and can derail even the best-planned processes. The good news is that companies can tackle these challenges with proper awareness and the right strategies.
Lack of internal coordination
Poor coordination between sales and onboarding teams remains one of the most critical obstacles to successful customer onboarding. Customers often feel like they're starting over when sales and onboarding teams work in isolation. They end up repeating information they've already shared. This disconnect creates friction that can hurt the customer's experience from day one.
Misaligned incentives often cause this problem. Sales teams typically focus on closing deals, while onboarding teams handle customer activation and long-term success. The vital information from sales conversations never reaches the onboarding team without strong communication processes.
Teams can solve this by having sales and onboarding members shadow each other's roles to build mutual understanding. Sales goals should include retention metrics, and regular feedback loops between teams need implementation.
Outdated onboarding materials
Your platform and onboarding flow must evolve with the SaaS market. Many companies treat onboarding as a "set it and forget it" part of their product. This approach quickly makes materials outdated and ineffective.
New features, interface changes, or pricing updates require regular material updates. Users encounter friction that leads to early abandonment without current guidance.
A systematic review process ensures all onboarding content stays relevant. Someone needs to own the responsibility of keeping materials updated, and customer feedback helps identify needed improvements.
Limited resources or tooling
Budget constraints and limited resources challenge onboarding teams regularly. Teams depend on developers to complete simple tasks without proper tools, which makes the entire process slow and inefficient.
Resource-limited teams should prioritize documentation, tutorials, and automation to reduce CSM workloads. One expert suggests: "Don't be afraid to put some of the 'work' on the client as part of the process".
Dedicated onboarding software helps teams build and test their flows continuously while offering personalization and tracking important metrics. These platforms let you create walkthroughs, tooltips, videos, and other resources without extensive development support.
Conclusion
SaaS customer onboarding is a vital differentiator in today's competitive market. The experience from sign-up to adoption needs thoughtful planning, smooth execution, and continuous refinement. Companies that become skilled at this process see substantially higher retention rates, better customer satisfaction, and greater lifetime value from each client.
Teams can achieve successful onboarding through considered strategy and dedicated resources, despite common challenges like team misalignment and resource limitations. They must balance automation with personalization to maintain that vital 80:20 ratio we discussed in this piece.
Customer onboarding goes way beyond the reach and influence of the original setup. This ongoing process needs attention throughout the customer's lifecycle, from pre-onboarding preparation to post-onboarding growth opportunities. Your metrics reveal the story - shorter time to value, higher feature adoption rates, and improved NPS scores point to onboarding strategies that work.
Many SaaS companies rush through onboarding because they're eager to move users toward conversion. But patience during this vital phase brings huge rewards through lower churn and increased customer advocacy. The templates and frameworks we outlined will turn your onboarding from a potential pain point into a competitive edge.
Note that customers build lasting impressions during their first experiences with your product. A well-laid-out, intuitive onboarding process doesn't just please new users, it shapes your company's growth path for years ahead.
