By Navneet Yadav Feb 18, 2020
Have you been in a situation when you signed up for a product with a lot of excitement but that excitement faded away quickly because of the lack of the right support or product education? Being able to adopt a product quickly is one of the determining factors for your productivity, cost-saving and business success. While choosing a product, it is important to evaluate what resources and support are available to you to learn the product so you can expand your activities and get the maximum value out of it. The path to your success has many touchpoints; one of them is customer onboarding. It is a critical step in your product adoption journey but often undervalued. Many researchers claim that trained customers use products more often and more independently.
Customer onboarding is commonly misinterpreted as simply teaching users how to use a product/platform/app; however, the success of your product adoption journey is determined by the user not only knowing how to use features but also understanding the benefits those features provide.
“We need to educate people on not just how to use our product, but quite frankly that they need the product.”
Lincoln Murphy, Venture Capitalist at Sixteen Ventures
Customer onboarding, also called Product education, is a staple to a business - especially in a SaaS business model where success lies beyond sign-ups. A good onboarding program is key to better customer experience and an enabler for the adoption of a product. Beyond this, a good onboarding program makes a business impact - for both customers and service providers - by improving customer retention, boosting revenue, creating upsell opportunities, and reducing customer support load and cost.
If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. - Jeff Bezos
You will experience these benefits when your customer onboarding program has a strong foundation, which is content and delivery strategy.
Content Strategy
A good content strategy should be centered around the benefits of a product, not just around its features. It should:
- Inform users how they will benefit from the product.
- Demonstrate core concepts with real-world examples.
- Guide users about best practices and troubleshooting tips.
- Encourage users to try out more.
- Make the best use of various media types - such as videos, graphics, gifs, text - for different learning preferences.
Delivery Strategy
A good delivery strategy – in a SaaS business model – should embrace the mantra of Any type, Anytime, Anywhere Learning.
Since one size doesn’t fit all, a good education program should work for users with different learning styles. For example, whether they like to learn at their own pace or in a classroom with their peers or in the product or outside of the product.
Based on the preferences of users, the results may favor one category or spread across categories. In the case of the latter, it is best to have a strategy that works for all.
Customer Onboarding at Qubole
At Qubole, we take a holistic approach to achieve this. By expanding our surface area through a combination of eLearning, hands-on labs, classroom presentation, and in-product training, we have added multiple touchpoints in our customer onboarding – to ensure product education is available wherever users are.
Please bookmark our learning portal, Qubole University, to visit again and register yourself for a course. For more information on our education offerings, click here. Also, please contact your customer success manager.
