User onboarding: What is it and best practices

Do you want your customers to be able to hit the ground running with new products, tools, and systems? Clear, concise, and effective user onboarding is vital in any business, and here at Omniplex Guide, we know how to do just that.

So, if you’re looking for a way to streamline your user onboarding process, engage your customers, and push those adoption numbers through the roof, you’re in the right place.

What is user onboarding?

First, user onboarding is when a customer or client gets to grips with a new product, system or piece of software. This is a process that we use every day all around the world, so getting it right is important. Whether we’re downloading a new game, logging into a new social media platform, or learning a new system at work, the user onboarding process needs to be as seamless as possible, otherwise people won’t be bothered using your product.

You can onboard a user in many ways including in-person seminars, video walkthroughs, interactive product tours, and more.

Common examples of user onboarding can be found when:

• You sign up for a new SaaS product
• Opening a new app
• Signing up for an educational course
• Trying to use a new system

What are the stages of user onboarding?

Fundamentally, there are four key stages to user onboarding:

1. Requirement gathering
2. Implementation
3. Training
4. Go-live

These different stages are all crucial to the success of your user onboarding progress. With Omniplex Guide’s project walkthroughs, customer personalisation segments, and automated product tours, your user onboarding is all in hand.

Why is user onboarding important?

As with anything in business, time is money, so the longer it takes someone to onboard themselves and the more inconvenient onboarding is for a user, the less likely it is they will fully adopt your product or tool. User onboarding is massively important for the following reasons.

• A positive first impression of your business
• Improve efficiency
• Increase retention
• Improve user experience
• Fewer barriers to entry

A positive first impression of your business

As the saying goes, you never get another chance at a first impression. For many people, your onboarding process is the first glimpse they’ll get of your branding, style, and technology. If the user onboarding is clunky, unsightly, or has issues, this is not going to create a good impression of your brand as a whole. With so many options for customers nowadays, you need to get that first impression right, and seamless user onboarding is the way to do that.

Improve efficiency

If your user onboarding is intuitive, empowering to your clients, and effective, you can dramatically cut down your onboarding timelines, which improves engagement and uptake numbers. Traditional user onboarding, especially in the world of tech, takes days of capacity away from key departments like account management –  with Omniplex Guide’s user onboarding, we’re giving you that valuable time back!

Increase retention

Marketing is one of the most expensive costs to a business, and finding new customers is tough. So, when you have clients on board, you want to make sure they stay. With effective onboarding, that’s convenient, easy-to-follow, and intuitive, retention rates are likely to be a lot higher.

Improve user experience

When it comes to user onboarding it’s the first time that a client is going to experience your product. First impressions count. If the onboarding is clunky, dated, or tricky to use, the user experience is not going to be good. Having a positive user experience is massively important and leads to good reviews, increased retention, and continued engagement from users.

Fewer barriers to entry

In SaaS, ensuring that you have as few barriers to entry as possible is one of the golden rules. No one wants to fill in a census to open an account or sit through hours of onboarding to be able to use a product. Having concise, integrated and interactive user onboarding like Omniplex Guide’s on-page walkthroughs and product tours gives users a barrierless experience that gets them to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

User onboarding best practices

As with any user-centric process, there are plenty of user onboarding best practices that you should keep in mind. Of course, if you use Omniplex Guide, these best practices are naturally woven into your user onboarding process.

• Segmentation: Make sure you can personalise your user onboarding processes for different job roles, marketing personas, departments, or seniorities.
• Interactivity: Make the user physically click through or interact with the onboarding process to increase engagement and knowledge retention. Having reams of documents to read through is not a good way to onboard!
• Concise: Try not to overwhelm users with information. Be concise and to the point. A 20-minute onboarding video won’t keep people engaged all the way through.

Onboarding metrics

To see whether your user onboarding strategy is successful, you have to be able to measure it. If you use Omniplex Guide, you can simply check out the metric reports that we automatically compile for you. Otherwise, these are the metrics that you need to look out for.

Engagement Rates

The top user onboarding metric you should be looking at is engagement. This includes how many people have logged in, and started using the software, tool, or product, and how long they spend on it at a time. If people aren’t engaged, your user onboarding process isn’t working, it’s as simple as that.

Retention Rates

In terms of customer-facing metrics, retention is a great way to measure a new onboarding service. Once you’ve launched your new user onboarding process, did you retain more customers than before? If the answer is yes, it’s working!

Completion Rates

Completion rates are often overlooked, but they’re vitally important. Even if adoption and uptake are high, it doesn’t mean that your users are going through the whole onboarding process. Completion rates tell you the percentage who’ve finished the onboarding process and where the drop-off points are so you can fine-tune your user journey.

Qualitative Feedback

Many onboarding processes include an optional survey or feedback form as standard. This is a good gauge of how the process is being received and gives users the opportunity to tell you what they like and don’t like about the new system.

How can Omniplex Guide support your onboarding process?

Omniplex Guide’s intuitive and interactive user onboarding software takes all the guesswork and heavy lifting out of your onboarding process. With a blend of personalisable video tours, clickable walkthroughs, product tours, and more, your team has plenty of options to engage, train, and educate your users.

Complete with reporting insights, segmented workflows and pathways for different user groups, and easy-to-install browser extensions to display walkthroughs without having to switch tabs, it’s a holistic approach to user onboarding.

To learn more and get a free demo, book a call with the Omniplex Guide team today.