In today’s webinar, Efehan Çelik, customer success manager at UserGuiding, debunks some of the most common user onboarding myths. In this comprehensive article, you’ll be able to find out more about user onboarding and product adoption.
The main topics discussed in this webinar are:
- User onboarding and its importance
- User onboarding myths
- Onboarding and customer success
- How to validate the success of a product’s onboarding process
Intro
Irina 00:02
Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for attending our webinar session today. I’m Irina Cismas, Head of Marketing here at Custify. And I’m going to be your host for the following one hour. Together with me, I have our special guest Efehan Çelik, Customer Success Manager from UserGuiding. Efehan, thank you for accepting our invitation and being our guest today!
Efehan 00:32
No, thank you. I appreciate your invitation.
Irina 00:35
You are more than welcome. I want to also say hello to Carrie, and Alanda. Amy, James. Kevin. Julie, thank you all! I suggest we wait a few more minutes until we start. Until then, we wanted to know where are you guys listening from? I’m in Bucharest and Efehan is in Istanbul. I’m curious to see. Where are you guys? Seattle. Hello from Bucharest. Hello, Delia! Dublin. We are a pretty international crew today.
Irina 01:28
Hello, Bill from Chicago. Hello, Angel from North Carolina! Yash from Mumbai. Oh, hi, everyone from Istanbul. I want to walk you through some housekeeping items. All the lines are muted for a better listening experience. This event is recorded and everyone who registered will receive a recording link at the end of the webinar. We reserved 10-15 minutes for the Q&A session. Use the question tab, at the bottom right of your device. And I think I’m also going to do a shameless promo because we have some bills to pay.
So if you are curious to see how Custify can actually help you scale your customer success operations, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, drop us a line at custify.com. We want to know which are your customer success challenges. And I know for sure that together we can help you overcome those. So get in touch with us.
Irina 06:22
So shall we actually kick off our conversation about the onboarding myths?
Efehan 06:32
Yeah, for sure. Okay.
Irina 06:38
I’m gonna pass the mic to you. We are just diving into our main topic.
Efehan 06:54
Yes. Hi, everyone. Again, I’m really excited to be with you today and talk about user onboarding, and of course, debunk some common myths together. Today, I want to briefly talk about what user onboarding actually is, and why it matters, so that we can actually establish a clear understanding together. As I talk about user onboarding, we will see that it is pretty much linked with the further stages of the customer journey, especially the product adoption part.
Then, I’ll bring a few common user onboarding myths, and showcase some examples to demonstrate what can be done to actually tackle those myths as you build or improve your onboarding processes. Then, I’ll briefly mention ways to go while validating the success of an onboarding process with a real-life example from our company, UserGuiding.
Before jumping into the actual content, let me give you an introduction. My name is Efehan Çelik and I’m the Customer Success Manager at UserGuiding. In fact, I am a Civil Engineer by education, which is a completely different domain from what I chose to do. However, as I got into the startup ecosystem and started to work at UserGuiding, which is a B2B SaaS platform, I realized that I feel much better working in an industry where everything is fast-paced and open to experiments, unlike, you know, construction industry, which requires time-consuming and complex operations. I am based in Istanbul, Turkey.
Irina 08:39
Funny enough, our audience is speaking today with an ex-developer and an ex-civil engineer, I actually dropped the developer path because the bugs were chasing me overnight. They were my worst nightmare.
Efehan 08:59
I could relate actually, yeah. The Civil Engineer part is the same. You know, it’s always about the sights and everything. I realized that I really loved my work right now.
Irina 09:11
Same here.
What is user onboarding and why is it important
Efehan 09:14
So yeah, as I mentioned before, I am the Customer Success Manager at User Guiding, which is basically a digital adoption solution where you can create experiences to reach business goals, such as, you know, increasing trial conversions, or improving the future and product adoption rates and so on.
Here, I wanted to just sprinkle some tangible benefits on how we help our customers reach their goals during their subscription. And as you might guess, to help them reach their goals, we had to have a well-functioning onboarding process. This gets us to our main topic, what is user onboarding and why is it important. However, before we enter this part, I want to hear more about your organization’s alignment on user onboarding. So we have a quick survey where we’ll ask if you have a company-wide definition for your onboarding processes. Just take your time and we can move forward.
Irina 10:19
I have a few votes. There are mainly “Yes” responses. Let’s give it a few more seconds. It’s a very interesting distribution.
Let’s hope that by the end of this presentation, we’re gonna change some of those Nos and not sure. Okay, so I’d say I think it’s 63% on Yes. 21% on Not sure and 17% on No.
Efehan 11:29
So let’s just dive right into the onboarding definition. You know, you can find many definitions, many different ones for this highly important term. Definitions that revolve around valid points, key actions, aha moments, educating users, and so on.
However, in my opinion, Samuel Hulick, who is the founder of Useronboard.com, gives a very straightforward and very effective definition of user onboarding. He says: “user onboarding is a process where you improve the chances that users will be successful when adopting your product.” So user onboarding actually matters, because it is a key milestone where a good user experience may flourish. It’s also your time to help users understand how your product can support them by providing constant value throughout the journey. And also, it can result in improved retention, customer satisfaction, and upsell opportunities if well planned and implemented.
As I mentioned, with a well-planned and executed user onboarding process, we aim to have the highest chances possible to make users stick around. We see that 86% of consumers will actually pay more for a better customer experience. This means that although you have a competitive product with a price advantage, the chances are high that you will lose your lease to a competitor with a better customer experience. Or even if those users stick around for a while, it is possible that you might encounter churns caused by poor onboarding.
So what is needed for a good user onboarding experience in the most simplistic way?
In my opinion, there is no other way than to extend it for the behavior model because it fits the user onboarding case perfectly. It suggests that, for the desired action to be taken, there needs to be enough motivation, ability, and also a correct trigger in place. For users to find value in habitual behavior, they need to go above the action line in the graph. And naturally, as you can see on the left-hand side of your screens, an user onboarding process that teaches users long, overwhelming tutorials, which just explain how your tool actually functions is located below the action line.
That is because it interrupts the user experience, harms their ability, and also the fact that it is bothering users with irrelevant information. This demotivates them in the end. So, in my opinion, it’s not a good idea to focus too much on the UI elements, spend too much time, and force users into a long onboarding flow. On the other hand, on the right-hand side, we see that interactive content that guides users to their own goals at their own time is actually placed above the action line.
Of course, it is vital not to leave users on their own while they are dealing with your product or starting to understand how it can actually help. But it is also important to not be with them all the time. So it is a good idea to focus on what users desire to do, instead of, you know, cool features and their capabilities.
Onboarding at the end of the day needs to be contextual. And it should speak to the user’s desired outcomes. However, we know all these or at least heard about best practices, good onboarding is actually still not known. 97% of companies say a good user onboarding is necessary for a product’s growth. However, almost 60% of those say they are not satisfied with the current user onboarding experience for their product. There might be many different reasons for that, but I believe the most prominent one is that we need to understand and debunk some myths about user onboarding that actually hinders us from planning and designing a good user onboarding experience.
User onboarding myths
Efehan 16:10
I want to just jump into the first myth, which is: “Onboarding starts when the user starts using the application, or onboarding starts when the user signs up for your product.” This is, of course, a general misconception.
However, it is really, really hard to pinpoint when exactly an onboarding process begins and ends. Actually, this is the sole reason why all touchpoints with your users or potential customers should be treated like your first and last, because if we can show the value of the product from the very start, how can we guarantee that they will see the next step in the customer journey, right?!
So I want to just reinforce this idea with a few good examples that demonstrate value even before the signup processes so that it can spark some ideas in your mind about how you can rebuild your onboarding processes right now.
The first one actually comes from Grammarly. I believe most of us saw this advertisement of them at least once around 2017, especially on YouTube. To be honest, this tool is indispensable in my tech stack as a CSM. This example actually demonstrates a good value proposition from the very beginning as early as the first touchpoint with the potential customers. It is good that you can relate to the ad because you’ll see professionals dealing with day-to-day communications. It’s also showing how it can add value to your communication with your colleagues or your partner.
Another way of demonstrating value by speaking potential customers’ language can be seen in this example, from Bubble’s landing page. For those of you who might not know, Bubble is a tool that lets you build SaaS platforms, marketplaces, and CRMs without any need for coding. Their landing page generates a sense of curiosity among potential users on how the tool can actually help without even signing up. So it is a good example of an interactive onboarding, without a need to sign up and actually, being inside the tool.
The third example is an interactive example which comes from Genially, an online tool that enables users to create fun and interactive content. Without the need of signing up again, genuinely provides an opportunity to try out the tool in an almost eccentric and familiar way with great user experience. I would suggest focusing on each and every moment that your users encounter and interact with your brand while building an onboarding experience with the help of these three examples.
Irina 19:09
Based on what you are seeing, it feels like the onboarding is not a solo game. I see it more like a sports team. So my question to you would be how do you create an environment where everyone and that means marketing, sales, product, Customer Success, and support is actually aligned around the onboarding definition?
Efehan 19:36
Yeah, that’s really great question. And, yeah, I want to mention it through my slides, to be honest, in the second myth, because I’m just touching that point, where you know, the general misbelief or general misconception that the “customer success team is the only responsible team for user onboarding.”
As you mentioned, onboarding should be considered a team sport. It requires a valid established company-wide definition of customer success and strategy. That is why all teams should focus their efforts around that definition, to overcome different expectations, which may cause a value gap in the eyes of your potential users or potential customers. By value gap, I mean, the difference between the promised value, before the actual processes, before signing up or after signing up, and the actual value the users are getting from your platform as they are getting used to it.
So, since you asked, I want to just share the UserGuiding case as an example, to make it more solid. In our case, we do not have a very well-established, official onboarding team. But we all, the teams in UserGuiding, actually have a certain responsibility around the onboarding process. In our case, the product team actually creates, manages, and also constantly iterates, the in-app onboarding experience for our end-users in the light of the customer’s feedback and their behaviors. For example, once the user signs up, they get to customize the appearance of the content that they will create, with our no-code tool, which is a point by which they realize some value via personalization.
After this step, we welcome users to their UserGuiding panel. And just let them know that the steps that they can take are available within our onboarding checklist, just in case they need them on their own time. As I mentioned, since the product team is the team that knows the actual product best, they have the responsibility to prompt users where appropriate inside the application.
Now, let’s jump into the marketing team, which is your domain. At UserGuiding, the marketing team actually initiates the onboarding process with advertisements, landing pages, and also by setting the tone of our brand in the eyes of our users. They run email campaigns of the signup to demonstrate value outside the product, with a clear call to action, of course, so that users consider coming back to the product and take the key actions that will help them eventually stick around.
Of course, personalization is an important aspect of onboarding, just like a careful approach to avoid interrupting the user experience. That is why our sales team approaches our users or tries out to see if it is a fit through the in-app or On-Demand demo booking module within UserGuiding, our very own resource center. So as you can see in the slide-out on the left-hand side, we are just letting them know that we are there with a clear pain point of the target persona, which is boosting or increasing product adoption. You know, with the difficulties of coding, we just say you don’t need to call, you don’t need to code. But we are always here to help you just in case you need it, or you can just play around with the tool.
Efehan 23:31
Lastly, as a customer success team, it is natural for us to have the most insights into user behaviors, desires, and pain points. We are, of course, the customer-facing part of the onboarding team. And this actually requires us to constantly improve the company-wide definition of product users. While we can run quantitative analysis to assess the performance of the onboarding process, we also have the option to run quality research and get users’ feedback on how they’re onboarded and get to learn more about the friction points so that we can eliminate them. Here you see an example of our in-app survey where we ask our users how their implementation period passed and which areas they actually required the most out.
Of course, while asking for that information, since this is again, a touchpoint with the user, it is important to still provide value. So we just let them know that we are available for project assessment meetings to share our insights based on what they did up to now and the outcomes that they actually got, comparing them with the previously agreed goals that they have said at the beginning of the journey. These meetings are, in my opinion, extremely beneficial for demonstrating the value that they desire back to the customer, which is, unfortunately, an often overlooked place in our own stage of user onboarding. So this is our case, in UserGuiding, I’m really wondering about how Custify handles the interdepartmental aspect of user onboarding.
Irina 25:14
So yeah, in the case of Custify, onboarding is at the center of everything that we do as a team because, in the end, we are a customer success platform. So as you mentioned, it starts way before it starts actually, with marketing, with my team by making sure that we are targeting the right people with the right message or the right channels, with the right frequency. And then it continues with the sales team, who is actually making sure from the very first interactions with our potential customers, and they’re just making sure that we are the right fit for them.
Because in some cases, were not the right fit. And they aren’t actually afraid to say no or to recommend other solutions if that works best for them. Our customer success team actually comes into this journey earlier. And the handover process between sales and customer success is actually smooth for our customers. The mission of our CS team is to actually understand what is the main reason customers need a customer success platform, what are their main objectives? This is top of mind from the moment they’re first interacting with a potential customer. And they’re using this information on their initial onboarding and implementation calls. Also later in the adoption phase, they’re making sure that our customers are using and adopting the product in a way that actually serves their business objectives. Because in the end, if you’re just using a tool, and you are somehow adopting it, but you don’t move the needle on the business side, at some point, you are gonna churn. So this is what we call a successful onboarding definition, actually, at the moment that the user reached his business goals, the one which they actually had, when they said, maybe Custify can actually help us.
Efehan 27:38
Exactly like, just like you mentioned, I think the key point here is setting the desired goal and outcome before starting the project, whatever it is, and in this case, in user onboarding, is the same thing. And as you mentioned, also, you know, it doesn’t have to be a low touch or a high touch, it can just be a mix of everything. I think it’s really valuable to hear about the Custify aspect as well.
The third myth that I want to mention is, again, the misconception that “onboarding is a process to teach users how to use the features.” So focusing on just the capabilities of your product, and setting an almost teaching tone to the customers often won’t work, since they come to your product to reach their desired goals and outcomes. That is why instead of the features, the tone should be set to revolve around the benefits that they will actually get by understanding how your product can actually help them. So when thinking about benefits and the desired outcomes, I would suggest working on determining different use cases that your product offers. Of course, link the user personas to those use cases.
Actually, Canva provides a perfectly smooth example for that. When you first sign up for the product, it provides different tests that come with a short and really concise value proposition that is strongly linked with the reason why that user type uses Canva. Gathering this information, in my opinion, helps Canva in two different ways. One, they provide a personalized experience to their end-users, and this gives the sense of being cared about by the platform. And the second is they are continuously feeding the use case and personal research that they’re always conducting so that they can strengthen the aspects of the hypothesis that they have put forward.
Another example is coming from Wattpad actually. Is a similar example to Canva, but a much simpler one. In this signup segmentation model, we see that there are just three distinct user paths. If a user selects one, they will be just experiencing the desire to experience and also be able to recommend the related resources. And it also gives the sense of being given the right direction to the users, which is a great thing. So, greatly in user experience.
Irina 30:36
Well, one comment here: If this is something that cannot be accommodated into the product, this can fall under either sales or CS responsibilities. And they can actually help segment into this by properly segmenting the users, making sure that they have a tailored onboarding experience, at least in our case.
Irina 31:09
Yeah, it can be the in-a-meeting interactions or you know, emails and support interactions maybe, and also in-app experiences, as you mentioned. The fourth, and actually, the last myth of our presentation is the common misbelief: “Onboarding is something that you roll out once and then forget” In reality, onboarding is something that requires constant iteration, because of two main reasons. One, your product is constantly evolving based on your customer’s feedback and the market conditions. And the second is, the type of new users that you target evolves as, as time passes, basically.
So onboarding, in my opinion, should be considered a cyclical and never-ending process instead of a linear one, and since this is the case, we can simply deem onboarding as completed. Once a user regularly uses the product, it can only imply that you might have a good onboarding process that is working, but we’ll still need to deliver value during their entire journey. One approach can be interacting with the customers, as you mentioned before, where emails, calls, or inside the application are based on the actions that they have taken. This way, we might actually ease their way through more secure parts of your product.
In this example, you see, in one of the lifecycle emails that we send to the paying customers, we actually know that in UserGuiding creating segments and curating personalized experiences for different types of end-users is something that is favored by our users who utilize the tool very effectively. Because it paves the way for better engagement with our product, as well as a better user experience for their product as well, because they are segmenting the experience, they are showing the correct content to the correct audience. That is why, based on the previous sections that our users are getting, we are applying different paths during their journey. As they take those actions, we actually feed them various content so that they can just stick around.
The second example of this myth actually comes from Notion, which is an essential tool for our organization’s knowledge management, as well as, day-to-day tasks. At UserGuiding, we have the habit of using Notion every day. Getting to know more about the latest updates actually enables us to engage people with Notion. This model that you see is a great user experience example, in various ways, because it just informs you about the near future that they have posted. But it also gives you the opportunity to skip all the steps so that you can just move forward in your day-to-day tasks with Notion or if you’re more interested, you can just click on Learn More and just learn more about it.
Onboarding and customer success
Efehan 34:55
Now that we even covered a few of the most common user onboarding myths and saw some reasons why all onboarding experiences cannot be actually good onboarding experiences, we need to take a step back and understand why onboarding is directly linked with the customer success domain. Again, I would love to hear from you guys, our audience, on whether customer onboarding is important for your organization or not. So I will be glad if you can just fill out the survey.
Efehan 35:34
I was expecting this. It looks like user onboarding is very, very important for our audience as we expected it, Irina. But if this is great to clear our minds about it, as we are getting votes.
Irina 36:01
I think in this case, we have a clear winner.
Efehan 36:10
You see that 94% say it’s very important and 6% actually say somewhat important. Actually, one of the most common practices that I see in different companies is they generally focus on the very end of the funnel when dealing with churn, which is the silent killer of businesses, as we all know it. However, in my opinion, having this firefighter-like approach will not work. Now, I’m not saying that the churn reasons and feedback of churn users should be ignored. Of course, they are highly vital. However, I can confidently say that the actions to find churn should be taken not through the end of the customer journey, but at the right beginning while onboarding them.
Because good onboarding will actually result in less churn, higher retention, and higher customer success in the long run. According to Wyzowl, 86% of people tend to become loyal customers of a company that actually provides a good user onboarding, experience, and invests in it, which in my opinion, says a lot. Not only this aspect, I mean, not only that aspect of churn or retention, but good user onboarding actually increases the likelihood of feature adoption of your users. I wanted to point out a real-life example from Indicata, which is a part of Autorola Group. Autorola group is a car dealership platform operating in 13 different markets and 11 different languages. They used to have regional representatives that onboard users via you one on one calls and meetings, which was very time-consuming for them. After adopting UserGuiding and changing the way they onboard their customers, and interact with them inside the application, on top of the best working practices, they saw not only a good user onboarding experience but a 47% new feature adoption rate increase in only one week. So a good onboarding can actually affect many different metrics in your organization.
Yeah, I want to briefly mention the difference between the success perception of users and the product itself when it comes to user onboarding before jumping into the validation process of how a good user onboarding is successful or not with UserGuiding’s example again. This is honestly an intertwined concept for our case because our aim is to apply a consultative approach while onboarding our customers. At the same time, eventually one of the main use cases of UserGuiding is providing a well-functioning user onboarding experience for our users and business. That is why we had the opportunity to differentiate between the perception of success of end-users and the platform itself. However, first things first, an organization’s success should not be fully focused on improving business KPIs. I mean, they are highly important, but they should also be focused on the success definition of their end-users. Again, CS operations can be deemed successful if the users reach the desired goals and the outcomes that they have said before.
How to validate the success of a product’s onboarding process
Efehan 40:24
I want to jump right into the two sides of the coin with the users part, and their understanding of onboarding success, of course. I mean, what is required for a user to consider themselves to be successfully onboarded to a product. The primary experience users are innately looking for in any product is the infamous word aha moment, the embodiment of immediate value. Let’s just give a simple definition.
“The AHA moment is the point at which a user meets the proposed value of a product and perceives not only how it works, but also how it can add value to their lives.” It is the consequence of your users’ interaction with your product, whether before signing up, inside the application or through email and support interactions.
And the second thing users are caring about is that they do not want to be lectured on, something they don’t know, for example, a cool feature of your platform. Rather than that, they are willing to be introduced to new opportunities and new ways of doing things that will help them to reach their goals.
As we mentioned before, instead of having set a teacher’s tone while interacting with them, you can do this and that, we need to talk more about the solutions they are looking for and how you can actually help them. Lastly, all the users eventually want to have a self-serving experience, they want to be independent in your product. It is best to chase the frictions throughout their journey of the onboarding process, and eventually, you know, eliminate them through iteration.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, what we care about when a user first interacts with the product is that they find their aha moment quickly, and have the best possible experience before and after it. We also want to figure out a way of overseeing long-term success while implementing our onboarding processes. So we look for a pattern of success or failure. Here, if it fails, no worries, we look for ways to fix it. If it’s successful, we try to preserve it. In any case, we need to have constant iteration and improvement within our processes. And for that, we need to pick the right metrics to track which are, of course, pretty unique to each organization.
By mentioning the uniqueness of these metrics while validating success, I want to point out how we came up with our way of assessing the performance of our onboarding process at UserGuiding. So when our company was founded in 2018, we needed to come up with a structure to grow. We were a small team and learning on the way. We were always open to experiments, building hypotheses based on correlations, and of course, eventually chose to challenge them to find actual causations as we are doing it now. So let’s take a look at our previous approach to give the idea and I will just move forward to the next approach, which should be adopted after this one.
The first one is the OMTM approach, which stands for “one metric that matters” which we came up with inside our organization. OMTM basically stands for the code. And so what I mean by this is to install UserGuiding, our users need to install a small JavaScript snippet, which we call container code so that they can show the content they created with our tool to their end-users. Once the user completes the installation, they are able to set up for Skype Live, which is one of the major aha moments for them as we learn through user interviews and customer meetings in the early days. So we tracked OMTM, embedding the code into segments for 14-day free trial users and for subscribers, and lastly came up with the aha moment of setting a guideline. We adopted the backward thinking approach and came up with a few key actions that actually pave the way for this aha moment and eliminate the friction which is very important. So these key actions in UserGuiding’s case are signing up for UserGuiding, installing the extension, using the extension to create the guide, and eventually completing the installation. As a result, with this approach, we saw a positive impact on our acquisition channels. However, at the same time, we also experienced a discrepancy in the teams regarding the customer success definition. Although there is a positive correlation between this approach and the conversion rates back at the time, we figured out that our main goal should be actually to increase the chances for our users to adopt our product. While they achieve this, increased conversion can only be a byproduct of the process itself. So with this understanding, we move forward to the next step, which is PQL Tracking which stands for “product qualified lead”.
Efehan 46:01
With this approach, we worked hard on designating the target audience, the customer personas, and the differences between them so that we could come up with the main user personas, their behaviors, and of course, their use cases. We involved all teams in this process, and review all the meeting notes with our customers, or the users, which is very precious. And, of course, on top of this qualitative analysis, our BI team analyzed the behavior quantitatively to support the hypothesis itself. In the light of their analysis, we came up with this product-qualified lead definition, which is among all the actions that can be performed within our tool, creating a guide with at least one step that has a strong correlation with conversion, and more importantly, a longer customer lifetime. This way, we came up with a company-wide success definition for our users revealed all of our interactions with them, read all the touchpoints, and focused on use cases and what is achievable with Userguiding, instead of again, focusing on the capabilities. We kept the onboarding checklist that I mentioned before. But implementing the gamification approach to see if it affects activation and engagement.
I think the most important part that I want to emphasize is that we constantly asked for feedback from our users at major milestones throughout their journey, whether they became paying customers or not because it is important for them to feel like they are being cared about. And at the same time, their complaints, or their feedback are highly vital for our case. So this way, we saw a substantial improvement in the usage of our product, and engagement as well as a 25% increase in the free trial to customer conversion in six months, on top of the decrease in churn, and everything. So yeah, that would be our case in UserGuiding, and also the end of my presentation.
Irina 48:16
I really, really liked the case study. And I’m sure that the 25% increase in free to paid conversion had an impact also on the revenue side.
Efehan 48:30
Yes, exactly.
Q&A
Irina 48:34
I think we are now ready to take a few questions I’m gonna start with. So Carrie asked: Will there be a recording shared? Yes, for sure. Everyone will receive a recording immediately after this event is finished. Again, the same thing was asked by Chris. And then we have a question from Louisa:
What if we don’t even have a process in place? Is it not too immature to get a tool when one wouldn’t know where to start with using it?
Efehan 49:16
Yeah, I wouldn’t just decide on whether adopting a tool is being immature or not. But if you don’t have a process in place for user onboarding, I would definitely suggest you get in touch with your customers and learn more about how they’re actually implementing your solution, especially the power users as you call it, so that you can understand the patterns and pave the way for the newcomers with a new onboarding sequence. Within this part, I mean, you can use meetings, one on one calls, as I mentioned, there is no true or false in high touch or low touch, but of course, adopting a tool inside the application or a tool like Custify really helps to onboard your users a lot.
Irina 50:09
But I think Louisa has a very valid point, it’s very important before picking any tool to set up your own objectives, to decide what you want to track. What’s your definition? What are you actually gonna measure? And then, okay, iterate on it. And as you mentioned, talking to customers, and trying to iterate on their feedback, it’s actually a very valid way of combining the quantitative with qualitative because you can dig into the data. But what the data owner tells you is, why did the user do what he did. So you can see that he is actually trying to do something he is trying to use feature A in one way, but you don’t understand the motivation behind it.
And I think, combining the tool will actually help you craft the onboarding definition that will help you iterate on your product strategy moving forward, and it’ll actually bring you closer to your audience.
Efehan 51:19
Exactly. And I want to add one more thing to that, especially for small startups or small companies that have, for now, a really small user base. For those it is very important to interact with the customers, of course, if you have thousands of users, thousands of customers, you might want to look for data and stuff. However, if you have the chance, just speak to the customers and have the success definition, have a proper onboarding definition from them, listen to their complaints, listen to the friction points, and then start implementing the onboarding.
Irina 51:58
And one more thing, I don’t think you will have the pixel-perfect definition from the very beginning. This is something that you definitely iterate on, you start with something and then you adjust, you modify, don’t be afraid to do this. Hopefully, we answered Louisa’s question. And then we also have a question:
How is gamification important in user onboarding?
Efehan 52:28
That’s a great question, actually. In the nature of user onboarding, we see that users come to your product for various reasons, they might just want to have the perfect product or perfect solution for them, or they are just looking for ways, or they’re just randomly registered to your product. So they have limited time to adopt a product. Gamification really helps you with that. Even if they don’t find anything interactive, or anything interesting, with the gamification approach, of course, the correct one, you can just make them stick around more for a while. Also, it can impact if they turn out to be a customer, it can really impact their way of engaging with your product, if you consider extending the gamification approach to them, of course, At UserGuiding, as I mentioned, we are testing the gamification approach on top of the onboarding checklist that I mentioned, which we really love. And yeah, we are still testing, we are still learning from it. And I will be glad to chat more about gamification if you’d like, after the webinar.
Irina 53:46
I have a question here:
Do you think that gamification is something that is suitable for any type of product, something that any type of product can actually implement?
Efehan 54:06
Actually, I’m not really sure. What was your opinion about it? I’m not really sure.
Irina 54:14
I’m just asking you, if you saw this gamification, only in product-led organizations. Is gamification an approach, a route if you have a very complicated product?
Efehan 54:47
Yeah, I think that it’s about the way that you interact with your customers. If you think the interaction can actually handle the gamification processes, it can actually help the onboarding process. So for all businesses to answer this question is a general concept. So I think we need to deep dive into each organization to understand whether gamification is valid for their product or not. And, of course, testing, as I said, iterating. And testing is always open, you can just test it. If you feel like it’s suitable for your company.
Irina 55:31
Hopefully, we did manage even did manage to answer your question. Feel free to add more in the meantime, as a follow-up question where maybe something to actually help more on building up on what Louisa actually asked:
How do you actually start creating an onboarding definition when you don’t have one? How do you pull it together? How do you start this process?
Efehan 56:05
Yeah, it’s again, I think it’s in parallel with Louisa’s question, as you mentioned. So the thing is I will give the same example. The first thing that you should do is to listen to your customers or your users, whether they become paying customers or not. Especially the complaints, you have to listen to them because you have a live product, but you don’t have an onboarding process, you’ll just give it a go and be open for testing. And after that, you can just listen to them, learn about friction points, and learn about how actually the proficient users handled their friction points and their way through your product. And then you can just come up with a prototype, and then constantly tweak that to have the best possible user onboarding experience.
Of course, this is for companies that have a huge customer base or lower customer base, but especially for huge customer base companies, I would also suggest taking a deep dive into the actions of their users inside the product and taking a look at the product adoption or engagement phase. To understand which actions actually led to a healthier customer relationship and more longer customer lifetime. That will be my answer.
Irina 57:40
Thank you. There are no more questions. I suggest we give it one more minute. And while we wait for other questions, I will remind you all that we would really like to stay in touch, and don’t hesitate to drop us a line for onboarding questions or Customer Success questions. Just get in touch. And we’ll really want to know more about your day-to-day challenges and how we can actually help.
Irina 58:24
Thank you all for joining us. As I said earlier, a recording of this event will be shared with everyone and I really enjoyed having this conversation with you. I would like to say: Have an awesome day and see you in August, at our next webinar session. We will be going to announce the theme pretty soon. Keep in touch. Thank you all!
Do you have any topic requests you’d like us to cover in future webinars? Reach out to us and let us know.
