Onboarding is the process through which new employees learn the information, skills, and behaviors to become effective and productive organizational members. It refers to the process of involving a new employee in the business and its culture. Employee onboarding is a phase between interviewing potential candidates and converting them into full-fledged employees.
Most often, Onboarding is confused with orientation while both are entirely different. Orientation is a “One-time” event to welcome an employee into the organization. Onboarding is a series of events and training to help employees with the day-to-day responsibilities of job roles and work processes. Onboarding focuses more on the job and team dynamics.
Let’s understand how vital your employee onboarding experience is.
According to BambooHR’s study, employees who feel a positive onboarding experience are 18 times more committed to their organization and reported 50% higher benefits utilization.
Clearly, creating an exceptional employee onboarding experience is key to empowering employees from Day-1 and driving the organization towards success. Here are the 4 best employee onboarding examples to include in your employee onboarding process:
- Gamification
- Keeping managers in the loop
- Focus on the long run rather than a short one
- Try out company products
A. Gamification:
A good employee onboarding process must be fun, playful, and informative at the same time. It makes newly hired employees get accustomed to the workplace without any pressure, and gamifying the onboarding process is one of them.
Gamification refers to adding components that make your employee onboarding process more fun, challenging, or motivated through various rewards. It gives the same experience as a video game, making the whole process engaging. It sets out goals to achieve, fun to make them pursue, and rewards to motivate them.
Let’s look at how Essar included gamification in their onboarding process.
Essar, India’s leading corporate delivering world-class services in sectors of energy, infrastructure, metals & mining, and in verticals of technology, has collaborated with Indusgeeks to make a 3D onboarding gamification solution. They gamified their onboarding process, resulting in increased productivity and higher profit.
Even if your organization has any financial constraints to make the whole onboarding process gamified, try to make at least a few phases of it gamified. This can help you ensure successful onboarding and improved productivity.
B. Keeping managers in the loop:
Managers play a vital role in the employee onboarding process but cannot always devote enough time. Employee onboarding is not only about paperwork, meets & greets. It is an initiative with several agendas to it. But taking things into their hands, managers must get involved in the process and ensure the new hires are familiar with it and feel at ease.
Let’s take a look at how Google is doing this:
Google is a company that focuses on Artificial Intelligence, Search Engines, Online Advertising, Cloud Computing, Computer Software, and more. Google leverages the method of including Managers in its onboarding process.
But taking things into their hands, managers must get involved in the process and ensure the new hires are familiar with it and feel at ease. These are a few aspects which a manager must do for the new hire,
- Match Noggler (Noogler is the affectionate term Google uses to refer to new hires) to a buddy on day-1.
- Encourage them to speak about potential issues, if any.
- Monthly check-ins during the first six months of the new employee.
- Set their roles and responsibilities.
- Have an open-door policy in the workplace.
By following this set of functions, google increased its new hire productivity by 25%.
C. Try out company products:
The new employees may be familiar with the product, but they may lack hands-on experience with that product. Make sure that the employee tries out at least significant products of the company so that they are familiar with it and at the same time may come up with a few suggestions that can help in the overall development of the product.
Pepsi is doing this here to ensure that its employees understand significant products.
Pepsi, an American multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation, ensures that all the new hires try out their significant products and give feedback. Based on their feedback, Pepsi makes corresponding improvements to the product and training procedures.
Also, Pepsi is into employee health and wellness. They provide them with food & drinks and fitness trackers to keep track of their health.
New employees are most likely simply thinking about your organization and product in the abstract on their first day. Everything else about the job might become blurry as a result of this. So, if you can get them to use your items right away, that will give them a better feel for what you’re talking about & give them a better employee onboarding experience.
D. Aim for the long run rather than the short one:
Without any fun elements, Onboarding can be complex. Make your employees learn about the history and core values of the company from scratch. Try creating a bond with co-workers through various activities, games & projects. Ensure the onboarding process is customized for every individual, from entry-level positions to seasoned veterans.
“The original motivation for doing it was to ensure that people were there for reasons beyond a short-term paycheck.”
Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO.
Zappos, an American online shoe & clothing retailer, have decided to incentivize recruits by offering them $4000 to quit if they are not up for the job. Employees must question their commitment to the company and make sure to believe them in the longer-run.
Organizations don’t want their employees to quit in the initial months after Onboarding, as it costs a lot to hire a new one. Through this strategy, Zappos could enhance commitment and screen out individuals who are not culturally compatible at a very early stage.
Conclusion:
Employee onboarding is a continuous process, and getting it right is tricky. But organizations can strive to do better and create an onboarding experience that can make the employee productive from Day -1.
This is where Apty comes into the picture. Apty not only ensures seamless Onboarding but also ensures business process compliance. Therefore, the action performed by your employees within the application is in accordance with the organization’s guidelines.
Apty Analytics allows managers to identify where their employees get stuck and need assistance. You can create customized walkthroughs and announcements to guide your employees in the right direction and optimize the complete onboarding process. Apty ensures a 300% faster adoption, 40% increase in employee performance & productivity, and saves 80% of the training and support cost.
Successful businesses are built by people; building a trusted and effective team is essential for ongoing growth and sustained success. While there are many ways to positively impact employee satisfaction and retention, one frequently overlooked aspect is the employee onboarding process.
An effective employee onboarding checklist can help you keep your onboarding process on the right track. An onboarding plan can help companies train new hires and turn them into effective and valuable long-term employees.
From the perspective of the employer, the onboarding process involves completing paperwork, educating the new employee on procedures and expectations, and setting them on the path to productivity. But from the employee’s perspective, this process is much more rich and meaningful and sets the tone for their long-term satisfaction at their new place of employment.
The employee onboarding guide will help employees develop confidence in their new role, integrate them into the social environment of the office, and demonstrate their employer’s commitment to setting them up for long-term success in the workplace.
Employers spend a great deal of time and resources on the hiring process. In fact, it costs a company about $4,000 for each new hire. The actual costs – including reduced productivity of new hires in the early months, purchasing supplies for new employees, and administrative costs associated with the hiring and onboarding process – can send that figure considerably higher.
5 To-do’s While Onboarding your Employees
Let’s have a look at the 5 steps that you can include as a part of your employee onboarding checklist:
1. Get paperwork ready beforehand
Before the new hire starts, set up all of the office equipment and programs needed to perform their role. Have them fill out the necessary paperwork ahead of time so that they can hit the ground running on their first day of work.
Get all the paperwork ready before the employee’s joining date. Mention the basic details like roles and responsibilities in the organization, benefits entitled to the payrolls, agreements, etc.
2. Involve HR early on
Before onboarding can begin, you must first submit a job requisition paperwork to the human resources department for approval. Before a new employee can be formally hired, recruiters may help identify qualified candidates, while HR may need a completed background check and other required tests.
3. Organize a welcome session
The first thing you should do is set up a welcoming session for your new employee. A warm welcome will make the new employee feel at ease and appreciated by the firm. There are numerous ways to organize the welcome. Recording a welcome video, participating in group activities, and introducing the new member to their co-workers can make a big difference to them.
4. Schedule pivotal orientation events
Schedule a new hire orientation for the employee’s first day on the job. This will ease the process of signing documents and also help the new hire to learn about the company’s culture, see the organization chart, and see how different departments communicate.
5. Set clear expectations
You must set clear expectations and goals for the new employee so that they fully understand how to excel in their role. In addition, provide the new employee “how-to” guides or videos during the onboarding process that they can refer to whenever needed. This is pivotal in terms of efficiency in the long term.
How Long Should Employee Onboarding Last?
According to Gallup’s workplace report, up to half of all new hires don’t stay with a company longer than a year and a half, and it’s clear that poor retention can have significant financial implications.
Three months is about the minimum time it takes to fully onboard a new employee. Businesses that extend the process through six months or the first year tend to see better retention rates and faster time-to-productivity for new hires. However, few companies extend their onboarding activities beyond the first week or month.
While the intensity of the process may wane after the initial period, both the employer and the employee should have a full understanding that the onboarding process is still underway, even well after the employee has started.
New Employee Onboarding Checklist
The following is a sample checklist for employee onboarding:
Before the First Day:
- Communicate start/end time of the first day
- Advise employee of any documents they will need to provide to HR
- Give employee information about workplace “unknowns” to make them feel comfortable (attire, lunch/kitchen availability, parking)
First Week:
- Meet with HR/complete forms
- Read Employee Handbook
- Review job description/duties/work schedule
- Familiarize employee with workspace
- Conduct a campus tour
- Establish access for facilities and technology systems
- Introduce employee to coworkers
- Assign a mentor
- Give employee their first assignment
- Meet one-on-one with supervisor
First Month:
- Complete trainings on essential systems
- Meet regularly with mentor and supervisor
- Give feedback on performance
- Advise employee to keep running list of issues/questions
- Assess employee knowledge gaps, and make a plan to address them
- Assess employee comfort level in workplace culture
Ongoing:
- Complete regular performance reviews
- Set performance goals
- Set training goals
Use this employee onboarding process checklist as a simple guide to effectively onboard new employees and help them excel in their job roles. After the hiring process and onboarding is complete, make a conscious effort to check in regularly with the employee to ensure that their transition in their new role and work environment goes smoothly.
A New Way to Onboard Your New Employees
Technology systems are some of the most complex parts of the employee onboarding process. They are critical to business success, but complex programs and operations can be difficult for new employees to master quickly. This can result in frustration, errors, and slow productivity.
Apty significantly cuts down on the time needed for employees to develop mastery, providing personalized dialogue boxes and in-application guidance as the need arises, new employees can quickly develop skill and confidence without needing to consult a manual or ask a co-worker for help.
Employees can learn new software on the job in real-time – increasing their confidence, efficiency, and skill. Apty can help you reduce onboarding time and get your new employees up to speed quickly!
The first week of onboarding is done. Your new hire watched all the training videos, finished the compliance modules, and completed every item on the checklist.
In the second week, they are on their own in Salesforce updating a customer record, in NetSuite creating their first invoice, or in Workday submitting a timesheet.
The training explained what the system does, but it did not show them:
- Which fields are important for their job?
- What happens if they click the wrong button?
- Who should they ask if the screen looks different from the training screenshots?
So they guess. They skip fields that look optional, submit forms they should have saved as drafts, and update records they were not supposed to change.
Three days later, someone in operations is fixing their mistakes. After a week, the new hire is still asking the same basic questions. By the end of the month, they start to wonder if this job is harder than it should be.
This is where most traditional onboarding programs fall short: not during training, but when employees begin real work in live systems.
This guide shows how digital employee onboarding can solve these problems. It covers the main benefits, common challenges, types of onboarding tools, and strategies to help new hires feel confident in their work.
TL;DR
Most onboarding programs cover training and documentation, but often fall short when employees begin real work in live systems. The gap between finishing training and working confidently is where onboarding usually fails. Digital onboarding can solve this by adding guidance into daily workflows, helping employees right when they need support instead of days before they try new tasks.
What is Digital Employee Onboarding?
Digital employee onboarding uses software to deliver, guide, track, and support onboarding activities. It is more than just uploading orientation slides or sending automated welcome emails.
Digital onboarding helps employees on remote, hybrid, and global teams as soon as they access company systems. It replaces ad-hoc sessions, scattered documents, and one-time training calls with a structured, software-led experience.
Digital employee onboarding typically includes:
- Role-based training for specific roles, teams, or functions
- Process guidance showing how tasks and workflows are completed
- Compliance enablement supporting internal policies and standard operating procedures
- Performance readiness so employees can work independently with confidence
Common misconception: Digital employee onboarding is often confused with simply digitizing training content. Here’s the difference:
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Why Digital Employee Onboarding Matters for Modern Enterprises
Onboarding is now under more pressure than ever. Methods like orientation sessions, desk-side training, and informal shadowing that worked five years ago are no longer enough for today’s fast-paced environment. That’s why digital employee onboarding is now essential:
- Rise of distributed and hybrid teams: Teams no longer sit in the same office or time zone. Digital onboarding creates a consistent experience for every new hire, regardless of location, without relying on in-person sessions or constant manager availability.
- Increasing complexity of enterprise software stacks: New hires are expected to use multiple systems from day one, including HCM platforms, CRM tools, finance systems, and internal applications. Digital onboarding helps employees understand how these tools fit into their role and how to use them correctly in daily workflows.
- Faster hiring cycles and less patience for slow ramp-ups: Businesses hire quickly to meet growth demands, but long ramp-up times slow teams. Digital onboarding offers early structured guidance, helping employees become productive sooner without repeated hand-holding.
- Regulatory and governance expectations: Enterprises operate with defined internal policies, approval flows, and governance standards. Digital onboarding supports these requirements by guiding employees through the correct steps and reducing reliance on memory or manual checks.
- The cost of poor onboarding: When onboarding falls short, employees struggle, make avoidable mistakes, and rely on peers and managers for support. Over time, this leads to rework, inconsistent execution, and higher attrition, making onboarding quality a direct business concern.
Key Benefits of Using Digital Employee Onboarding Software
When onboarding is well-organized, its positive effects last well beyond the first days. Here are some of the main benefits.
1. Faster time-to-productivity
Digital onboarding helps new hires get started faster. They spend less time waiting for training or trying to learn tools by themselves, and more time working on real tasks with clear guidance.
For example, a new operations analyst can use a guided onboarding process to create their first report within a few days, instead of spending the first week asking coworkers for help.
2. Consistent onboarding experience across teams and regions
Digital onboarding gives every new hire the same starting point, no matter where they are or who their manager is. Everyone learns the main workflows, expectations, and tools consistently.
For instance, two employees starting the same job in different regions can follow the same onboarding steps and be equally prepared, even if their managers have different approaches.
3. Reduced errors and compliance risks
Clear onboarding instructions help employees do things right from the start, leading to fewer mistakes early on. Getting everyone on the same page early also reduces the chance of having to redo work or break company rules later.
For example, when a finance team member starts using a billing system, the onboarding process guides them through the required fields and approvals to help them avoid mistakes on their first entries.
4. Lower training and support costs
Digital onboarding means less need for repeated live training and one-on-one help. It answers common questions and explains key tasks from the start, so experienced team members have more time for other work.
For example, teams don’t have to show every new hire the same setup steps, because the onboarding process covers these tasks for everyone.
5. Improved employee engagement and retention
When employees get clear guidance and support early on, they feel more confident and productive in their jobs. This early confidence helps them stay engaged over time.
A new hire who can handle important tasks independently early on is more likely to stay motivated and committed, rather than feeling lost or frustrated.
Key Challenges Organizations Face With Digital Employee Onboarding
Even with digital onboarding tools in place, many organizations continue to face gaps once new hires start using systems and processes. Some of the most common challenges show up in the following areas:
1. Onboarding content exists, but employees don’t follow it
Most organizations already have onboarding material in place, but new hires often struggle to apply it once real work begins. Content lives in decks, documents, or portals that employees rarely revisit while working in live systems, trying to complete tasks.
The fix: Bring onboarding guidance closer to where work happens, so employees can follow it while performing tasks rather than recalling it later.
2. Too many tools, not enough guidance
New hires are introduced to multiple systems on Day 1, but there is little support to explain how these tools connect or which actions matter most. The result is confusion, guesswork, and frequent interruptions to teammates for help.
The fix: Connect onboarding across tools with clear, step-by-step guidance that helps employees understand what to do and in what order.
3. One-size-fits-all onboarding programs
Generic onboarding programs often ignore role-specific workflows, team responsibilities, or regional variations. Employees are asked to sit through information that does not apply to their role while missing guidance that does.
The fix: Design onboarding paths that adapt to role, function, or workflow, rather than using a single program for everyone.
4. No visibility into where new hires struggle
Managers often know onboarding is “complete” but have little insight into where employees hesitate, make mistakes, or require repeated help. Issues surface only after errors or delays become visible.
The fix: Track onboarding progress and execution signals to identify friction points early and adjust support accordingly.
5. Manual follow-ups and shadow training
Onboarding frequently depends on senior employees repeating the same explanations or walking new hires through screens. This process can be streamlined by integrating shared mailbox solutions, allowing teams to centralize communication and reduce repetitive guidance. The approach does not scale and places additional load on already stretched teams.
The fix: Replace repeated manual guidance with structured, self-serve onboarding support that employees can access as needed.
Types of Digital Employee Onboarding Tools Companies Use Today
These tools sit within broader HCM systems and focus on managing employee information, documentation, and lifecycle events. They typically handle pre-boarding tasks, policy acknowledgements, and basic onboarding workflows.
1. BambooHR
Source: BambooHR
Best for: Small to mid-sized companies that want to give new hires a consistent pre-boarding experience without requiring much IT support or complex integrations.
G2 rating: 4.4/5
BambooHR is an HR management platform designed for mid-sized organizations, typically those with 50 to 1,000 employees. It helps manage employee records, onboarding forms, and task checklists in one place. HR teams can create onboarding checklists, automate task assignments, and track progress for multiple new hires simultaneously.
BambooHR effectively organizes paperwork and administrative tasks, ensuring everything is signed and submitted before a new employee begins. However, it focuses on HR logistics and does not help employees learn how to use the systems they will need for their jobs.
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Pricing: Enterprise pricing, typically licensed per user, with costs varying by features and scale
A customer’s perspective
Source: G2
Expert opinion
The platform gets people into your systems, but it doesn’t prepare them for what happens next, when they need to actually use those systems to do their job. Pair it with training and execution-focused tools for complete onboarding coverage.
2. Rippling
Source: Rippling
Best for: Mid-to-large enterprises looking for an integrated HR and IT platform that combines employee onboarding with device management, app provisioning, and benefits administration in one system.
G2 rating: 4.8/5
Rippling is a comprehensive workforce management platform that goes beyond traditional HR onboarding by integrating identity management, device provisioning, and application access. It automates employee setup, from creating accounts across systems to shipping hardware and enrolling employees in benefits.
For onboarding, Rippling automatically provisions access to necessary applications like email, Slack, and CRM based on the employee’s role and department, making employee access management a key part of an efficient onboarding process.
Many companies use it for zero-touch onboarding, so new hires receive a pre-configured laptop and access to all systems on day one.
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Pricing: Enterprise pricing, typically licensed per employee per month, with costs varying based on modules and integrations
A customer’s perspective
Source: G2
Expert opinion
Rippling excels at removing the administrative friction of onboarding. Nobody waits days for account access or hardware. But getting someone logged in is not the same as making them productive. You still need a plan to teach them what to do once they are inside those systems.
3. Docebo
Source: Docebo
Best for: Mid-to-large enterprises with complex training needs, multiple departments needing role-specific learning paths, and organizations prioritizing compliance training and certification tracking for distributed teams
G2 rating: 4.3/5
Docebo is a learning management system that helps deliver role-based learning paths, compliance training, and onboarding. The platform uses artificial intelligence to suggest personalized learning, automate content assignments, and identify skill gaps based on employee roles and performance.
Docebo offers various learning options, including video courses, interactive modules, SCORM packages, and virtual instructor-led training. Many of those video courses are now built and refreshed with tools like an AI video editor, since keeping a training video library current used to be the slower part of the process.
Many companies use Docebo to ensure employees complete and track required training, especially in fields like healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, where compliance matters. While Docebo excels at delivering structured education, the learning remains separated from real-time task execution inside business applications.
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Pricing: Enterprise pricing, typically licensed per user, with costs varying by features and scale
A customer’s perspective
Source: G2
Expert opinion
Docebo is excellent at delivering structured learning content and tracking completion. But there’s a gap: employees watch a course on processing invoices in your ERP system, and two weeks later, they’re looking at the real ERP screen without knowing where to begin. The best onboarding programs use the LMS for basic knowledge, then add real-time guidance as employees start working.
4. TalentLMS
Source: TalentLMS
Best for: Small to mid-sized companies seeking a straightforward, easy-to-implement LMS for employee training and onboarding without extensive technical requirements
G2 rating: 4.6/5
TalentLMS is a cloud-based learning management system designed for quick setup and ease of use. It helps organizations create training courses, assign learning paths, and track employee progress through an intuitive interface that requires minimal technical expertise to manage.
The platform supports multiple content formats, including videos, presentations, SCORM files, and quizzes. Companies use TalentLMS to build onboarding programs that guide new hires through company policies, product knowledge, and role-specific training. The system’s branching logic allows organizations to create different learning paths based on department, role, or location.
TalentLMS also integrates with common HR systems and collaboration tools, making it easier to enroll new hires automatically and notify managers when training is complete. Its mobile app lets employees complete training on any device, which is useful for distributed teams.
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Pricing: Tiered pricing starting with a free plan for up to 5 users, paid plans priced per active user per month
A customer’s perspective
Source: G2
Expert opinion
TalentLMS excels at delivering training content efficiently and tracking completion. It works well for smaller organizations that need something simple and effective. However, a transfer problem remains. Employees watch training on Monday and forget much of it by Friday when they need to use the system. The most effective approach is to use TalentLMS for foundational knowledge, then add in-app guidance when employees start real tasks.
5. Confluence
Source: Atlassian
Best for: Technology companies, product teams, and organizations with technical documentation needs and seeking collaborative, searchable knowledge bases.
G2 rating: 4.1/5
Confluence is Atlassian’s collaborative documentation platform used by enterprises to create, organize, and share internal knowledge. It allows multiple contributors to build and maintain documentation collaboratively, with version control tracking changes over time.
For onboarding, companies create dedicated “spaces” with role-specific guides, FAQs, and process walkthroughs. New hires can search documentation, bookmark important pages, and reference materials as needed.
However, Confluence operates as a passive resource. Employees must leave their workflow, remember to check it, find the right documentation, and then apply what they read back into the system where they are working.
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Pricing: Tiered pricing per user, with free and paid plans based on team size and features
A customer’s perspective
Source: G2
Expert opinion
Confluence works best as a supporting knowledge base for onboarding and process reference. It is most effective when paired with tools that provide contextual guidance inside applications. This reduces the need for employees to pause work and search for answers.
7. Slack
Source: Slack
Best for: Teams using real-time messaging to support onboarding questions, quick clarifications, and informal guidance
G2 rating: 4.5/5
Slack is a real-time messaging platform central to workplace communication, especially for distributed and hybrid teams. During onboarding, organizations create dedicated channels like #new-hires, #ask-hr, or team-specific channels where new employees can ask questions, share updates, and connect with colleagues.
Many companies assign onboarding buddies who communicate mainly through Slack direct messages, providing informal guidance and answering day-to-day questions. Slack’s search functionality also lets employees find previous conversations where similar questions were answered.
However, onboarding support through Slack is reactive and inconsistent. The quality and speed of help depend on who is online, how busy they are, and whether they see the message.
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Pricing: Free and paid plans, priced per user with additional features at higher tiers
A customer’s perspective
Source: G2
Expert opinion
Slack is great for building culture and helping people connect during onboarding, but it should not replace structured guidance. If you rely on Slack for onboarding, you crowd-source support and hope someone notices the question, has time to reply, and gives the right answer. So, use Slack to help people build relationships and solve unique problems, but do not make it your main tool for onboarding support.
Why Digital Onboarding Tools Often Fall Short in Practice
Even with multiple onboarding tools in place, many organizations find that outcomes fall short once new hires start working independently. The gaps usually do not come from lack of effort, but from how onboarding is designed and measured.
Here’s why it happens:
1. Too much focus on content delivery
Many onboarding tools prioritize distributing information through courses, documents, or checklists. While this helps share knowledge, it does not guarantee employees know how to apply it during real tasks.
As a result, onboarding appears complete on paper, even though employees still struggle when performing actual work.
2. Training disconnected from real work
Training often happens before employees begin using live systems. By the time new hires start working on applications, earlier instructions are forgotten or feel abstract. Without guidance during execution, employees resort to trial-and-error or repeated questions, slowing productivity.
3. No real-time validation
Most onboarding tools explain the steps, but do not confirm whether they are followed correctly. Errors surface only after tasks are completed, reviewed, or escalated. This delay leads to rework and makes it harder to correct behaviors early, when onboarding support is most effective.
4. Poor employee adoption
Onboarding tools that require employees to leave their workflow, search for help, or remember where information lives often see low usage. When support is not available at the moment of need, employees default to informal help or workarounds instead of using onboarding resources.
5. Metrics focused on completion, not outcomes
Success is often measured by task completion, course progress, or checklist status. These metrics show activity, but not readiness or execution quality. Without insight into how employees perform tasks, onboarding improvements remain reactive rather than informed by real outcomes.
How Leading Enterprises Improve Employee Onboarding Outcomes
After identifying where onboarding tools fail, many enterprises adjust their approach rather than adding more tools. The focus shifts from onboarding as a one-time event to an ongoing enablement process closely tied to how work gets done.
Here’s what can help:
1. Combine HR onboarding, training, and in-app guidance
Leading organizations treat onboarding as a connected experience, not separate handoffs between systems.
- HR onboarding handles access and documentation
- Training introduces processes and concepts
- In-app guidance supports employees when they perform tasks inside live systems
Each layer builds on the previous one, creating a continuous support system rather than disconnected activities.
2. Shift from “train once” to continuous reinforcement
Initial training provides context, but real understanding develops through repetition and use. High-performing teams reinforce correct behavior over time instead of assuming onboarding is complete after the first few sessions.
Ongoing guidance helps employees apply what they learned as workflows repeat and responsibilities grow. For example, a new customer success manager might complete CRM training in week one, then receive reinforcement prompts during weeks 2-6 as they handle different account scenarios. This approach recognizes that learning happens through doing, not just watching.
3. Use execution data to improve onboarding
Rather than relying only on completion status, leading enterprises look at how employees actually perform tasks. Execution signals highlight where employees hesitate, repeat steps, or make common mistakes.
This insight allows teams to refine onboarding content based on real behavior rather than assumptions. If analytics show that 70% of new hires struggle with a specific workflow step, that’s where onboarding support gets enhanced.
| Example: IBM uses analytics from its onboarding platform to track where new hires struggle during their first 90 days. They identified that new sales reps consistently made errors in opportunity classification, leading to forecast inaccuracies. They refined onboarding guidance for that specific workflow and saw a 35% reduction in classification errors within the first month. |
4. Align onboarding with productivity and quality metrics
Onboarding success is evaluated based on readiness and execution quality. Teams connect onboarding outcomes to how quickly employees become productive, how consistently work is performed, and how often errors occur.
For example, a customer operations team shifted from measuring “training completion rate” to tracking “time to first independent case resolution” and “accuracy rate in first 50 cases.” This revealed that employees who received in-app guidance reached independence faster.
How Apty Helps Enterprises Succeed With Digital Employee Onboarding
Most digital onboarding tools focus on preparing employees through training content and documentation. That preparation is important, but it stops short once employees start using live systems. This becomes particularly relevant as organizations manage IT lifecycle management alongside the ongoing onboarding, support and adoption of business applications.
Apty addresses this gap by focusing on execution inside the applications where work actually happens.
Apty is a digital adoption platform that provides in-app guidance and support on top of enterprise tools like CRM systems, ERP platforms, HCM tools, and other internal applications. This way, new hires can learn as they work and complete tasks correctly from day one.
Here’s how it helps:
1. Embeds onboarding directly into real workflows
A new sales operations hire logs into the CRM for the first time. Instead of completing a training module beforehand, guidance appears directly inside the CRM:
- Apty highlights where the workflow starts
- Indicates which fields must be completed before moving ahead
- Walks through the correct sequence to create and qualify a lead
The employee completes a real task correctly on the first attempt, without leaving the application.
2. Enforces correct process execution
A new finance hire uses an ERP system to create vendor records. When a mandatory field is skipped or data is entered in the wrong order, Apty intervenes before the record can be saved.
This way, errors are corrected during execution, not discovered later through reviews or clean-up efforts.
3. Supports role-based and workflow-specific onboarding
Employees interact with systems differently depending on their role, responsibilities, and region. Apty allows onboarding to adapt to those differences, ensuring guidance stays relevant.
For example, two employees join the same organization. A customer support agent receives guidance on ticket-resolution workflows, while a sales manager is guided through forecasting and pipeline review.
In other words, each onboarding experience aligns with daily responsibilities.
4. Reduces dependency on shadow training and manual support
Onboarding often relies on experienced employees repeatedly answering questions or walking new hires through screens. Apty reduces this dependency by acting as a self-serve onboarding assistant inside applications.
Guidance is always available when tasks are performed, regardless of time zone or team availability time. The result? Teams spend less time repeating explanations and more time on core work.
How Apty Supports Onboarding Across Key Stages
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Conclusion
The execution gap—the space between “training complete” and “working confidently”—is where most onboarding programs quietly fail.
Checklists get marked as finished. Training videos get watched. But none of that guarantees a new hire can correctly complete their first real task when they’re alone in a live system.
Organizations that treat onboarding as content delivery will keep seeing the same outcomes: new hires struggling for weeks, avoidable errors creating rework, and early turnover from employees who never felt equipped to succeed.
The solution is to shift onboarding support into the applications where work happens, at the exact moment employees need guidance. Platforms like Apty make this possible by embedding onboarding directly into workflows, preventing errors in real-time, and adapting to role-specific needs.
Ready to close the execution gap in your onboarding?
FAQs
1. What is digital employee onboarding software?
Digital employee onboarding software helps organizations deliver, guide, and support onboarding activities. This enables employees to learn and perform tasks correctly as they start using systems and tools.
2. How is digital onboarding different from traditional onboarding?
Traditional onboarding relies on in-person sessions and static materials. Digital onboarding supports employees continuously through software, making onboarding accessible across remote, hybrid, and global teams.
3. Which tools are best for remote employee onboarding?
Remote onboarding typically combines HR onboarding platforms, training systems, collaboration tools, and in-app guidance to support employees across locations and time zones.
4. How long does it take to implement digital employee onboarding software?
Implementation timelines vary by tool type and scope. Administrative and training tools can be set up quickly, while execution-focused onboarding may be rolled out gradually across workflows.
5. How can companies measure onboarding success?
Onboarding success is measured by how quickly employees become productive, how consistently tasks are performed, and how often errors or support requests occur during the early stages of work.
Employee Onboarding challenges could hinder the growth of an organization. One of the fundamental responsibilities of any organization’s HR team and the respective managers is to ensure smooth onboarding of the new hire.
The major onboarding challenge is that companies focus think of onboarding as a week-long process at the most, post which they dust their hands off it and call it a day. Whereas, in reality, it is a long-term process and it can go from a few weeks to months until the employees feel comfortable in their role.
In fact, this stat puts things in perspective for anyone who is may assume that they have the new employee onboarding game all figured out.
“88% of the new hires feel that their organization does not do a great job of onboarding employees and there is room for improvement.”
The employee onboarding process should focus on reducing paperwork and increasing the employee engagement rate as it can boost the retention rate by 82% and productivity by 70%.
They say “The first impression is the best impression” is especially true when you are onboarding a new hire. You can potentially lose a great talent just because the proper process was not in place.
A scenario like this can be avoided by addressing the biggest employee onboarding challenges, and subsequently, proactively avoiding them.
Top Employee Onboarding Challenges
- Information bombardment on Day 1
- Lack of clarity on the role & expectations
- Assuming the new hire is up to date
- Right onboarding content for right roles
- Not familiar with the primary applications
1. Information Bombardment on Day 1
It is human to feel a little nervous, overwhelmed or even ecstatic on Day 1 of a new job. It’s a new workplace, new colleagues, the culture is unfamiliar, you aren’t very sure of your exact role, who your peers are going to be – It’s the adult version of first day at school, which we will all agree is a feeling like no other!
This being the case, it is insensitive to expect employees to absorb and retain all the key information about their new job, the company, its culture and everything else in between on the very first day!
In a fast-moving organization, you could be tempted to bring your employee up to speed as soon as possible but this could overwhelm them and could pose as an onboarding challenge. A new employee has tons of documents to fill, loads of names to memorize, multiple applications to learn, and in some cases huge shoes to fill. Achieving all this in a day or even a week is not possible.
For starters, you can automate paperwork with an electronic solution as part of Digital Onboarding. Doing so will help you to focus on other important onboarding activities and guide employees to seamlessly fill the documentation without any manual errors. Not just that, the documents are stored in the cloud which eliminates the risk of misplacement.
Relevant Read: Employee Onboarding Questions that Apty helps you Answer
2. Lack of Role Clarity
One common onboarding challenges during onboarding is that most new hires have lack of clarity of their role.
They usually think that they signed up for some specific role but doing something else. The new employee might be in a dilemma and could be disappointed by the assigned role.
It is the job of HR to ensure that team leads or managers meet with the new employees to discuss this. The discussion should give clarity to the employee, it must help them to understand how their current role will boost their career.
Relevant Read: Employee Onboarding Process – HR’s Finishing Touch
3. Assuming the newly acquired skills will stay relevant forever
You hire great talent and provide them with all the necessary skills to excel in their role, and Bam! You assume they will perform incredibly well for the rest of their life and stay with the company forever, right?
Wrong.
Even the brightest talent goes through a knowledge drain and it is your responsibility to ensure continuous learning by enabling on-demand, micro, and virtual form of training to reinforce the initial training.
Regular training will help your employee to be engaged in their jobs, reduce the retention rate, and will encourage them to stay with the organization for a longer period. It always better to have a checklist of things to have by your side while onboarding a new employee as it will help you to avoid assumption and overcome the new hire onboarding challenges.
Relevant Read: The Important Employee Onboarding Checklist that HR should follow
4. Right Onboarding Content for Right Roles
Onboarding flows should be tailored for specific job roles. Training everyone for everything is not judicious and is definitely an overkill.
For example, Joe is hired for sales. He should be trained on how the product that he is going to sell works. But he shouldn’t be trained to customize the product, it is the job of the Developer.
The same analogy applies to all the applications and processes for which the new employee will be trained. The Onboarding process should be relevant to the new employee and they shouldn’t feel overwhelmed.
Providing them with unnecessary information could suggest that the organization wants them to do other jobs as well and could lead to a lower employee retention rate.
Delve Deep: Best Practices of Employee Onboarding
5. Employees aren’t familiar with All the Applications
35 job critical applications are used by employees for over 1100 times in a day based on Pega Research.
Let me drop another bomb.
100% of the employees who participated in this research are humans.
When your workforce has to use so many applications, it becomes challenging to train employees to master all of them. And expecting them to know how to use them all instantly is unfair. Training and Onboarding the new employees on all the applications is practically impossible and is a waste of time, money, and effort.
It is ideal if the employees can be guided with relevant documents, videos, and on-demand Walkthroughs that can be accessed by them as and when required. It will reduce their dependency on HR, L&D, Managers, and colleagues as they can become self-sufficient.
Apty is a modern solution where each employee is contextually guided within the application with the help of walkthroughs and relevant resources. It reduces dependencies and help you overcome onboarding challenges.
Organizations are always on the lookout for talented employees, and the need is greater than ever. Most enterprises are changing; they need intelligent and adaptable people who can fit with their culture and add value to it.
But the supply and demand in the job market are uneven; this results in the company shelling out a lot of money to get a talented hire onboard. But getting a nod from a great talent is just the first step in the right direction; you need to onboard and make them comfortable.
Sometimes new hires commit to joining, but they back off at the last minute or, in some cases, leave the company after a couple of months for a better opportunity. It ruins all the work that went into hiring the right candidate.
Some may advise increasing the facilities, and maybe they are right but will it solve the problem?
Maybe not.
We live in an era of experience, and it is important to keep the new hire engaged from the time you send them the offer letter until they complete their first year with the organization.
An employee onboarding structured around engagement can help you reduce the churn rate and motivate the employees to stay for a longer haul.
What is employee onboarding?
Employee onboarding is the process of involving a new hire in the organization’s culture and values. It is also a process through which new employees acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to become active contributing members of the organization.
The onboarding process may vary from one company to another. However, the basic onboarding program should ensure that new hire achieves their potential in the shortest time.
If you love the horror genre, then search for the term ’employee onboarding horror stories.’ You will read instances that may look unreal, but you might find them closer to reality in retrospect.
One such horror story from the internet-
“When I got to the office, my supervisor told me I needed to go all the way to another office within a different building to visit HR and get my benefits paperwork.
“When I arrived in the HR office, they didn’t have my name on file, and they handed me a generic packet of information and told me to fill it out in the next few weeks. It was my first professional job with benefits, so I asked if they could sit down with me and talk about my options. They seemed very annoyed and told me they couldn’t suggest anything because that was the law. No one in my department seemed to know any more information either.”
It shows that onboarding is just not about completing paperwork; rather, it is to make the new hire comfortable and make them a part of your thriving culture.
It is important to collaborate with department managers, IT, and Finance team to create a process that can make employees understand the organization better within the first 90 days. Create a feedback loop to gather the input from the new hires about their experience and improvement.
Important questions to ask before creating employee onboarding
Before you start creating the employee onboarding program, it is important to understand the struggle the employees face.
You can get your first step right by asking the right questions.
- Hassle-free message search and in-built reminders features
- Walks you through the onboarding with Slack bots, provides an interactive product tour
- Slack is a one-size-fits-all solution pertaining to communication and file sharing
- Users are allowed to do practice messaging and explore different Slack features
- Slack channel bridges the communication gap and helps to keep your customers in the loop
- Instead of bombarding with features, they are straight to the point, thereby minimizing the users from getting overwhelmed and confused
Create the set of questions and try to find the answers either by interviewing the employees or using tools that can help you uncover the employee behavior during the onboarding phase.
1. What is the current state of the employee onboarding program?
This question helps you learn about where the current program stands and its impact on the employees.
2. Where do we start with the onboarding program?
You could be swamped with opinions, and it could be difficult to draft the first iteration of the employee onboarding program. So, it is important to decide on the first step of the training program based on the available data.
3. How do we provide important information to employees?
Many projects fail because of poor communication, and it is especially true when you are onboarding a new hire. Check the communication channels that the organization is using currently and analyze whether they are enough.
4. How do we guide the employees during and after the onboarding process?
The first week is merely the beginning of onboarding. The HR team must plan an end-to-end onboarding experience for employees to drive long-term success.
5. How to provide knowledge to a newly onboarded employee?
Organizations usually want their employees to be productive within a week, but at times it could add pressure on a new hire. It is important to find the right training methods that can immediately help them get started while ensuring that they aren’t overwhelmed.
By now, we know it is important to ask the right questions but to get the right answers, it is crucial to use the right set of tools and methods.
Delve deep- Get answers for 8 critical employee onboarding questions
Create a perfect employee onboarding process
Designing a flawless employee onboarding process is impossible but should it stop you from striving for one? Creating an employee onboarding process takes time as there are many ifs and buts involved for which you may or may not have answers. But continuous analysis and regular optimization can help you to improve the process to create an incredible onboarding experience.
- Send the offer letter- The onboarding process must kickstart the moment an employee gets selected for an interview. The organization should assist the new hire and address their queries to make them feel comfortable during the process.
- The First Day- In some organizations, employees are on their own, and they may feel out of place and confused. It could even lead to frustration; it is important to give a warm welcome to the new hire and help them understand the new environment.
- Show potential for growth- Everyone wants to grow in their career; it is important to show what lies ahead and how they can achieve it. This will motivate them to stay longer with the organization and put the effort in the right direction.
- Regular checks- HR Managers must interview the new hire regularly to quantify their success. It will help them to identify the gaps in their existing employee onboarding program and improve it.
A quick employee onboarding checklist
A well-designed employee onboarding process can be challenging to follow. The HR Manager should create an onboarding checklist to track the progress and ensure that the onboarding is sequentially executed.
Here are the quick to-do list-
- complete the paperwork before time
- immediately initiate the background check
- prepare to give a warm welcome
- schedule orientation session
- set the right expectations
- structure a training program
- set performance goals
Now that we understand that employee onboarding is the backbone of any organization as it helps employees to achieve success.
But the question remains- What is employee onboarding?
There is no clear answer to this question, perhaps a case of different strokes for different folks.
Organizations must create customized onboarding processes based on job roles, departments, and locations. This will help make onboarding real and palpable to the people who are joining the organization. It adds value to your employee onboarding program.
However, use both qualitative and quantitative data to your advantage. It will assist you in taking the insights into the real and visceral. And that’s where a solution like the Digital Adoption Platform comes to play that helps to convert insights into actionable steps and set employees for success.
While employee onboarding practices have seen several changes over the last decade and are still evolving, its core value remains the same. The benefits of a good employee onboarding experience are immense.
According to this research by Glassdoor*, a great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%. In most cases, a great employee experience is what sets a company apart from its competitors and employee onboarding plays a huge role in that experience.
Employee Onboarding Best Practices:
To create an effective onboarding program and provide a great experience to your employees, follow these employee onboarding best practices:
1. Start From Day Zero
The Employee onboarding process begins the moment a candidate interviews with your company. Once they are selected, provide them with onboarding forms and other documents which they are expected to fill.
Develop a culture of no transparency with your employee from the get-go and communicate clearly to build trust in them. Once they are selected, share all required details that they will need to know about the job and also share points of contact for any queries they may have.
Communicate with them all the requirements, benefits, and expectations of the job role. Once they accept the offer, arrange a call with the manager or the team lead to welcome them to the team. During this time, be prepared to solve any query or concern they may have about the job.
Quick Checklist of all the details that you would ideally share with the employee before they join the company:
- The job role
- Location of the office
- Date of joining
- Activities on day 1
- Key results expected
- Department’s goals
- Organization’s goals
2. Introduce to Co-Workers
The HR team members are the first point of contact that the employee has with the company and they must make the new employee feel comfortable on their first day. On the employee’s first day, introduce them to their new co-workers, whom they will have to interact with regularly.
Initiating conversations between them right from the new hire’s first day will speed things up the team’s communication process. Assign a mentor or a buddy who can show the new hire around and make them feel at ease during their initial days.
Once you lay the foundation for good communication in the early stages, it will be easier for them to connect with the rest of the team.
3. Provide All Resources
Make sure that the employee has everything they need for their work to ensure smooth onboarding. Keep their work computer ready with all the software and tools that they will use.
Also, provide them with an onboarding kit with gifts from the company to welcome them – consider including practical, high-quality branded items like a stress ball to help new hires feel comfortable as they settle in.
Share the contact for IT and support teams so they can reach out to them in case they need assistance with the computer or software.
4. Introduce the Company’s Culture
On the employee’s first day, communicate the organization’s mission, vision, values, and goals and help them understand more about the organization. Help them get familiar with the organization’s culture in order to develop a strong connection with them.
There is no better time to communicate these values to an employee than during onboarding. When an employee sees value in the company’s culture, they will be more invested in the company’s goals and be more engaged at work.
5. Promote a Pleasant Work Environment
It is important to provide a warm and comfortable environment in order for the new hire to feel at ease in the organization. Arrange team lunches and other events to create a less formal environment where they can get to know the team members. Help them share their thoughts and opinions so the team understands the unique perspective the new hire brings to the table.
Onboarding is a complex task and it can be easy to forget a few steps in between. Keeping a new employee onboarding checklist handy helps you document all the tasks that need to be completed wit
6. Prepare an Onboarding Checklist
hout missing anything.
Not only will a checklist streamline the onboarding process but the employee will also have a smooth experience and a great first impression of the company.
7. Provide Effective Training
Once the introductions are done, it is time to start training them. The training technique and tools must be chosen with careful consideration. If they are only involved in traditional classroom-style training, there is very less chance of it being effective n the long run.
These methods take up a lot of the employee’s time and they usually forget 70% of what they learn within a day. Not to mention that classroom training is not very costly, resource, or time effective for the organization.
There are many other effective ways of training employees. Enabling self-learning is one of the most effective training techniques. Employees can get assistance with the software whenever they want, right on the platform, they are working on.
On-screen guidance and walkthroughs are also effective since they show employees how to perform tasks in the real world, enabling on-the-job training. A digital adoption platform combines all these features to deliver efficient and effective training to your employees.
8. Make It Remote Friendly
In the recent past, a majority of companies have their workforces working from home. It can get very difficult to onboard employees successfully into an organization and get them adjusted to the work culture when they are working remotely.
Leverage new technologies that make remote work and collaboration easier. Use video conferencing tools to conduct all meetings during onboarding, and pairing these with a meeting note taker means new hires can revisit key details afterward instead of trying to absorb everything in real time.
A digital adoption platform is a perfect solution for onboarding employees to new software without anyone having to be physically present, on-site. It guides them step-by-step through software with the help of walkthroughs and tooltips.
9. Invest in the Employee’s Growth
From day 1, the employee must know that the organization is investing in the employee’s growth as well. Inform them that they will be provided with any training that empowers them to grow in their careers.
Employee development is a proven strategy for an organization’s continual growth, productivity, and ability to retain valuable employees.
Upskilling and reskilling can help employees grow, benefiting both the organization and the employee. When employees with the right skillsets are encouraged to grow and take up bigger roles and responsibilities, they advance in their careers.
Show your employees the value that they can add to the company and present them with all the opportunities to learn and grow along with the organization.
10. Celebrate Milestones
It is common for the new employee to feel unsure about the quality of work and their contribution to the company.
The management must take the responsibility of appreciating the efforts of each employee, celebrating milestones that they have achieved, and providing feedback for their work. Using digital signage, companies can instantly showcase achievements or recognition messages across the office. These free digital signage templates can help managers create professional updates quickly.
Discuss the expectations the company has from them, regularly. This will motivate them to work towards a common goal that benefits them as well as the company.
11. Review and Improve
Without regular reviews and checks on your onboarding process, it is likely to fall apart. Establish monthly and yearly goals for the employee to achieve. It is also important to have monthly check-ins during the first 6 months of the new hire to understand their progress at their job and their role. Be honest with feedback, regardless of what it is but make sure to encourage them as much as possible.
Assess the growth the new hires have achieved during the whole process and use this data along with their feedback to remove friction points in the process. HR managers can also use Apty to measure how well employees have mastered software and processes to identify roadblocks and fix them.
*Source: Glassdoor
The key to retaining users and customers for any application is onboarding. Properly onboarding users help them master and fall in love with your software. Think of user onboarding as leading your users on a journey of a series of simple tasks, to reveal the benefits of your software.
To improve your user onboarding experience, we’ve compiled the top 10 best practices for onboarding new SaaS users
Top 10 best practices for onboarding new SaaS users
1) Learn your customers’ behaviors and their specific needs
The first step to a successful onboarding process is determining why’ customers are looking for your product, and then finding a way to fulfill this particular need. Utilize surveys and other research tools to determine your users’ primary pain point and be sure to highlight how your application solves that problem during their onboarding.
2) Leverage multiple touchpoints
In order to increase user interaction and retention, you need to put in place multiple channels of communication . Obviously, in-application messaging will play a vital role in your onboarding strategy, but you should consider what other user onboarding channels to use outside of the application including:
- Automated email sequences (be sure to run an inbox placement test to ensure these reach the user during the critical first 24 hours)
- Live chat
- Text messages
3) Make the Aha! moment obvious
The ‘Aha moment’ is when the customer starts to comprehend the value of your software. Don’t wait to wow them. Your onboarding process should get them to the Aha! moment as quickly as possible. Complicated sign-up forms or a painful login experience create a barrier between your new user and their Aha moment. Create an onboarding experience that seamlessly guides them and allows them to discover the value of what your platform does. Onboarding isn’t about telling someone why they’ll love your software. It’s about showing them. During the onboarding, new users should think, ‘Wow this is going to save me so much time,” or “this is so much easier,” or whatever the unique value your software adds.
4) Customize each user’s experience
Not every user has the same needs. Don’t waste someone’s time onboarding them to a feature they’ll never use. Create unique onboarding experiences that are custom-tailored by different user types.
5) Give a personal touch
To encourage long-term commitment, try developing personal rapport with your users. Customers want their products to be relatable. You can achieve this by adding some funny lines or comments in your chats and messaging that give your onboarding sequence some personality.
6) Establish metrics to measure your success
It’s important to measure how users are interacting with your software and your onboarding sequence. Stats to track include:
- Churn rate
- Time to complete onboarding
- Percent of people who abandon onboarding
- Login frequency
7) Remind people when they haven’t finished onboarding
So if you’re following tip 6 and you’re tracking who hasn’t completed onboarding, leverage that data to remind people to finish the process. Setup automated alerts that nudge people to complete their onboarding.
8) Break onboarding down into bite-sized chunks
Don’t overwhelm your users with a 20-item checklist the first time they log in. Create some milestones as a part of your onboarding sequences so that users feel like they’re making progress. Break down onboarding into chunks and wait to introduce the next journey until after users complete the first.
9) Test and revamp your onboarding as needed
You’ll need to recruit some volunteers to test your onboarding process. Make tweaks based on their feedback and the stats you have from tracking the process. Test the tweaks and repeat the process again.
10) Onboard existing users to new features
Onboarding is not a once and done process. It’s for more than just new users. When you roll out new features and updates, you’ll need to make a plan to onboard your existing users to the new features. The same principles apply to onboarding people to new features. Make sure your onboarding illustrates the value of how the new feature makes a task easier or saves them time.
How you onboard users could make or break your software. Make sure you’re setting your application and your users up for success. Be sure to subscribe to our blog for more tips on SaaS onboarding.
Image Source: Photo by Brad Javernick
SaaS companies need reliable, efficient, and fast ways to onboard new customers. SaaS onboarding software can drastically reduce the time and resources spent on customer onboarding.
The best onboarding tools for SaaS companies will allow you to quickly and easily create custom product tours and on-screen guidance to show new customers how to use your application.
In this blog, we’ll cover the importance of user onboarding for SaaS products, what onboarding tools are available, and highlight the features you should look at when evaluating what SaaS user onboarding software is right for your SaaS product.
What is Onboarding in Saas?
Onboarding is the process of introducing new users to an application and helping them get acquainted with how it works.
After completing onboarding, customers should:
- Be able to complete basic tasks in the application,
- Recognize the value the application provides, and
- Begin regularly using the software.
Read More:- The Definitive Guide for Using Onboarding
Why is User Onboarding Important?
Using onboarding is the key to improving your product adoption. If people don’t use your software, they won’t renew their subscription. Thus onboarding and adoption are the keys to decreasing or preventing churn.
When you sell a product that people don’t know how to use, you have to offer some onboarding for customers to be successful. When people buy a car, most of them already know how to drive because they learned using someone else’s car or previously owned a vehicle themselves.
For SaaS products, no one has used your product before buying it, so you have to teach them how to use it and get the value out of it. For more tips on the importance of driving product adoption through onboarding, check out our detailed guide on product adoption for SaaS products.
What is SaaS Onboarding Software?
SaaS onboarding software is a part of a growing solutions category called digital adoption platforms. Individual features may vary, but in general, a DAP provides on-screen guidance, user communication tools, and analytics. DAPs serve two main markets: enterprises and SaaS products. Companies will use a DAP to help with the onboarding and implementation of enterprise applications like an ERP, CRM, or HCM system. SaaS products use a DAP primarily for user onboarding and product adoption.
Read More:- Walkthrough Software: Why You Need It and How Interactive Walkthroughs Help Users
Top SaaS Onboarding Software Solutions in 2026
To determine the best SaaS onboarding software, you’ll find it helpful to examine user reviews and ratings. As the leading software review site, G2 can offer valuable insights on which platforms could work best for you.
As of July 2020, the Highest-rated Digital Adoption Platforms or SaaS Onboarding Tools are:
- Apty
- Appcues
- Intercom
- Whatfix
- Pendo
- Userguiding
- Spekit
- Userpilot
- EdCast My Guide
- HelpHero
- UserIQ
- Gainsight PX
- Userlane
- Chameleon
- Toonimo
- WalkMe
- Inline Manual
- Newired
SaaS Customer Onboarding Software Comparison
As we’ve already mentioned, Digital Adoption Platforms tend to focus on either enterprise software or SaaS products. Some platforms work for both. We’ve categorized the top platforms in the table below:
| Onboarding Tools Focused on Enterprise Software Adoption for Employees | Tools focused on SaaS User Onboarding | Onboarding Tools for both Enterprises and SaaS Products |
| Whatfix
Spekit Edcast My Guide Newired |
Appcues
Intercom Pendo Userguiding Userpilot HelpHero UserIQ Gainsight PX Chameleon |
Apty
Userlane Toonimo WalkMe Inline Manual |
You’ll want to pick a SaaS customer onboarding tool that focuses on SaaS products or both SaaS and enterprises. You’ll also want to ask about pricing options. Frequently as startups, SaaS companies are looking for the best bargain.
Make sure you invest in a platform that’s both affordable and feature-rich. Customer onboarding is one of the most important functions for a SaaS product. Don’t skimp on your onboarding tool. You need to deliver the best user experience possible.
Feature to Look for in SaaS Onboarding Software
There are several factors to consider when choosing the right onboarding tool to use in conjunction with your SaaS product. Things like functionality, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness are naturally some of the most sought after features.
Before you decide, let’s take a look at some of the features you should be sure to consider when doing your SaaS user onboarding tool research.
A. Easily Accessible Guides
You never know when your users will have questions or need guidance. Having an onboarding tool that implements easily accessible guides will save time and cut costs. These guides should be available 24/7, making it easy for users to find solutions at any time of the day. Extended availability allows for continued work and the ability for users to expand their knowledge base continually.
B. Segmentation
Not all roles are equal when it comes to onboarding. Users have different needs. Segmentation by a user’s native language or their user role can dictate what content they see and the method in which it is delivered to them. Finding an onboarding tool that allows for segmentation will give users a better experience while also enhancing their overall onboarding outcomes.
C. Custom Walkthroughs And Product Tours
SaaS onboarding software with a code-free editor will allow for easy content creation and streamlined walkthroughs and product tours. Having a software with this capability will significantly cut costs without cutting quality. Look for an easy code-free editor so you can create and publish new tours and walkthroughs in a matter of minutes. Teams can pair walkthroughs with AI video summaries to reinforce product tours using real demo or webinar content.
Read More:- Tips for Using Product Tours to Reveal Your ‘Aha Moment’
D. Advanced Analytics
Perhaps one of the most effective tools within onboarding software is advanced analytics. Having the ability to track and measure how people are using your onboarding content will give you the insight necessary to optimize your process. These analytics hold the power to pinpoint weak areas and offer solutions to improve user engagement.
E. Communication Capabilities
Open lines of communication are crucial to success. When choosing onboarding tools, look for options that allow for in-app communication with users. This feature will let you remind users to complete the onboarding process as well as solicit their feedback regarding content. With this feature, you’ll be able to help keep users on track while also building rapport and generating valuable first-hand feedback to improve the user experience.
What is the Best SaaS Onboarding Software?
When you evaluate the features and user ratings, Apty comes out on top as the best SaaS onboarding software.
Apty outranks the competition by:
- Being rated as highest for satisfaction on G2,
- Offering the easiest and fasted editor for creating and publishing walkthroughs, and
- Having a proven track record of reducing support tickets and costs.
What our SaaS Clients Have to Say:
“Apty helps us empower our Customers”
“Apty is an intuitive and robust Digital Adoption platform with very powerful capabilities. Our customers have been able to successfully navigate through and use our product without raising support tickets or making frantic calls to us for help. This is a dream tool for every SaaS product that wishes to empower their customers.” – Recent G2 Review
What are the Benefits of Apty’s SaaS Onboarding Software?
User onboarding is time-consuming and expensive. Companies have to devote resources to individual training and onboarding sessions or invest heavily in video and support content development. Apty allows companies to significantly reduce costs by using on-screen guidance and guided product tours to get users up and running quickly.
To learn more about reducing the time and money you spend on creating onboarding and support content, check out this blog post on using the COPE method for developing content with Apty. The blog post shows how Apty helps learning and development teams create content quickly to train new employees on enterprise software.
Still, the same principles apply to producing content for new SaaS customers.
In addition to cost savings, Apty also helps SaaS companies provide a better user experience. Apty is available 24/7, so users can start their onboarding on their schedule. With Apty, customers can begin using new software on the first day without any additional training.
By accelerating the onboarding process, Apty helps your users recognize the value of your application sooner and decreases the chance they’ll cancel or stop using the product.
Understand Your Options for SaaS Onboarding Tools
When it comes to choosing an onboarding tool for your SaaS products, be sure to do your due diligence, and fully understand your options. A thorough and engaging onboarding experience will have more significant long-term effects that can decrease churn and increase user engagement and customer satisfaction.
Investing in software that is a good fit for users is critical to long-term success for both the user and your SaaS product.
A Great User Onboarding Experience can spell long-term success for your business. In the same breath, it is wise to also acknowledge that a shoddy one can put your business in jeopardy.
The User Onboarding experience is your users’ first encounter with your product. This is why it is absolutely crucial that your onboarding process is impeccable and impactful.
Onboarding users effectively also helps you quickly drive them to their aha moment which, as we all will agree, is the goal. It also helps you improve activation rates and ‘free-trial to paid customer’ conversion rate. And these are just the initial benefits of providing a solid user onboarding flow.
Research says companies with a great User Onboarding experience have 50% higher new-hire productivity. Providing a smooth User onboarding is not easy. Many SaaS companies face difficulties in providing a smooth User Onboarding experience.
In this blog, we are going to focus on the 10 best ways that you can provide a great first product experience to your end-users.
What is User Onboarding Experience or UX Onboarding?
User Onboarding experience or UX onboarding is the process of making end-users experience aha moment while making them understand your product.
Why User Onboarding Experience is important?
Imagine, you suddenly waking up in space station. How many of us can claim to be at complete ease trying to figure our way through it? Almost none!
Likewise, when people start using your product, they will not be aware of what they should be doing.
So, it is your responsibility to make them understand how to navigate your product and provide them with a smooth User Onboarding Experience.
The primary objective is to make your end-users understand how to use your product or application. This helps your users to:
- achieve their goals & objectives
- realize the ‘wow’ moment
- understand the value of your product
How to Create the Best User Onboarding Experience? What are the Tips to Follow?
Here’re the 10 tips to create smooth & effective User Onboarding Experience:
- Be simple and contextual
- Give a good head start
- Provide appealing Welcome messages
- Create value for your user
- Put your users in driver’s seat
- Use a Checklist or Progress bars
- Set Objectives and Target Metrics
- Focus on Individual Personas
- Provide Product Tour
- Be consistent and predictable
1. Be simple and contextual:
The mantra in providing the best User Onboarding experience is to keep it simple.
Create the content by putting yourself in the shoes of your end-users. Introduce your product and explain to users how they add value to them.
Ask yourself…
- How complex is your product?
- How much time it will take to understand?
- How much have you invested upfront?
- What is the Return on Investment (ROI)?
- What is your user persona?
- How savvy your users are?
All these questions help you in understanding your end-users and to provide a smooth User Onboarding Experience.
2. Give a good head start:
Initial experience matters a lot. Make your first impression the best to have a smooth User Onboarding experience. Don’t dump too much information right from the get go. Provide the most important information that helps your users to achieve their primary goals.
Try to minimize the number of steps wherever possible and keep your Onboarding process short.
For example, let us see how Quora onboarding happens,
- Asks for sign up
- Select your area of interests
- Create an account
- Build your profile(optional)
- Explore questions
- Start Answering
Since there are only a few steps involved, Quora users feel very comfortable and engaged.
But SaaS companies might have complex products wherein users must go through many steps to understand the product. In that case, SaaS companies must give a good head start and make their users get what they want as early as possible.
3. Provide appealing Welcome messages:
Welcome messages are the User Interface (UI) element that visually separates your User Onboarding experience from the products’ interface itself.
Welcome messages are like a transparent layer that enables your users to peek into the main application. They not only motivate individuals to complete their onboarding but also keeps an eye towards their end goals.
There are full-screen takeover messages, which coves your users’ entire screen and make them focus on the message. This can be disruptive in some instances, can be used sparingly.
How to create Appealing Welcome messages?
- Start with a great sign-up process
- Set the right expectations
- Personalize the messages
- Establish a connection
- Develop Engagement with images & gifs
- Allow individuals to express their preferences
- Grant access to explore all resources
- Easy to identify the Call to Action (CTA)
4. Create value for the user:
The most important element in providing the best User Onboarding experience is creating value for your users.
First, remember your core value proposition and communicate that to your users. During the SaaS onboarding process, tell your users what’s in it for them & why your product or application is the best. Show them how they can meet their needs with your product at the earliest.
In the introduction phase of the User Onboarding process, they can learn highly essential features. It is good to let your end-users understand the significant features at the initial stage and learn the extras as & when required.
Ways to create value:
- Clearly define your Value Proposition (VP)
- Keep VP simple and easy to understand
- Make your first impression as the best
- Don’t include complex technical jargon
- Try to understand user pain points
5. Put your users in driver’s seat:
Let your users have control over the SaaS onboarding flow. Though it might sound strange, giving your end-users the liberty to skip some steps in the User Onboarding process engages them more.
The reason is simple. Not every user has the desire to follow the entire Onboarding process. Some individuals prefer exploring it by themselves rather than reading the information you provide.
For example, instead of going against the tide and forcing someone to learn, give them the option to skip certain steps. By doing this, you can get to know which step most of your users skip.
Now, if you find that a particular step creating confusion among users consider replacing it. Else, you can go ahead and start making engaging content to attract end-users.
6. Use Progress bars:
Progress bars help a lot in providing a great User Onboarding experience.A Progress bar acts as a visual indicator that tells you how far along you’ve come and assures you that you are on the right track can put anyone at ease.
Many SaaS companies use progress bars in their User Interface to engage end-users and to complete the onboarding process sooner. A progress bar also helps in reminding users that they haven’t completed the given task yet.
Also, you can start the progress bar at 20 or 30%, this indirectly motivates your end-users to feel like they have accomplished something.
For example, LinkedIn does this job perfectly.
LinkedIn progress bars clearly show how strong your profile is as you continue updating it. This progress bar helps you complete your profile step-by-step and keeps you engaged throughout the process. It also breaks down complex tasks into simpler ones, making the optimization process easier. For a deeper understanding of how to enhance your LinkedIn workflow, you can also explore this HubSpot LinkedIn integration guide to connect your tools and improve overall efficiency.
Used effectively, progress bars can provide a smooth User Onboarding experience. You can also use some other checklists to engage your users but make sure you leverage something like this to increase user engagement.
7. Set Objectives and Target Metrics:
Each step in the User Onboarding journey must focus on Value Creation, User engagement, and Product Adoption. To achieve smooth User Onboarding experience clearly define objectives, key metrics, and targets. Only if you have clear objectives defined, you can achieve success or desirable outcomes.
How does this help in providing smooth UX onboarding?
Once goals and metrics are set, communicate to your users and show them how their contribution will have an impact.
Frame your onboarding process based on your SaaS goals. Before rolling out the onboarding process, do A/B testing using the best ab testing tools. Try different approaches or processes and make sure you create customized UX for different user personas to meet their specific needs.
8. Focus on Individual Personas:
Persona-based User onboarding is the need of the hour. It helps your end-users have a great product experience with higher User Engagement.
For example, some of your new users might have a basic idea of what they need to do with your application or product. So, you need not waste your time in explaining things from scratch.
To avoid such situations, you can have different onboarding options based on personas wherein each one has a unique course of action.
Alternatively, you can create persona-based User Onboarding with the Digital Adoption Platform like Apty.
9. Provide Product Tour:
With the help of a Product Tour, you can show your users instead of telling them what they should do. The Product tour walks your users throughout the product and helps to create their moment of value at the earliest.
Product tours or walkthroughs pave way for smooth User Onboarding experience. It is like an experienced guide sitting with you and guiding you on the right path. Users feel very comfortable as they can get hands-on experience with your product.
Note:- A Digital Adoption Platform like Apty is a powerful walkthrough software which helps to create codeless workflows in a few simple steps. Also, Apty helps in User Onboarding, Product Adoption, and more.
10. Be consistent and predictable:
From start to end, you must make keep track of your product consistency. You must be consistent in the
- language & tone that you use in the onboarding flow
- progress bars or navigation icons
- other visual components
In short, be consistent in everything that users experience on your product.
Being consistent in your onboarding process will make your product’s navigation predictable to your end-users. This gives your end-users a clear picture of what kind of User onboarding experience they are about to get.
The 10 tips that we discussed above will help you to provide a great User Onboarding experience to your product’s users. Irrespective of the complexity of your SaaS product, you can leverage the Digital Adoption Platform to create smooth UX and UI to your end-users.
If you are actively looking for a tool, you must definitely try Apty.
Acquiring new customers and retaining the existing ones are the biggest business goals. Especially in the new normal that is now upon us, it is of paramount importance that companies walk the extra mile to keep their customers, new or otherwise, fully engaged to make sure they don’t take their business elsewhere.
One of the most effective ways to inspire delight in customers and prevent churn is to make sure that you have a flawless customer onboarding process in place. This is crucial because a detailed onboarding gives them the confidence they need initially to get started with using your application.
This apart, it also helps you built product usage and adoption rather quickly because your customers get familiar with it sooner when onboarded properly.
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer Onboarding is the process of introducing your customer to your product, making them understand it completely, and use and adopt it to the fullest potential.
According to wyzowl, approximately 63% of customers say that onboarding – the level of support they are likely to receive post-sale – is an important consideration in whether they make the decision in the first place.
This only reiterates the importance of customer onboarding. With effective customer onboarding in place, you can lower your churn rate, increase customer retention, provide a better customer experience, reduce support costs, and increase your revenue.
What is a Customer Onboarding platform?
A Customer Onboarding software is a tool that helps you to onboard your customers quickly and make them realize the WOW moment of your solution. A Customer Onboarding platform ensures that customers find value in every little feature and offering of your tech solution and that your product is being used to the fullest potential.
Top 8 Customer Onboarding software
- Apty
- WalkMe
- Whatfix
- Userpilot
- Appcues
- Nickelled
- Inline Manual
- Chameleon
1. Apty
Apty is the world’s fasted growing Digital Adoption Platform which helps companies of all sizes transform their onboarding initiatives. Apty’s Customer Onboarding Platform is as powerful as it is easy-to-use.
With its code-free editor, creating onboarding material is quick and hassle-free. As a one-stop solution for all software adoption needs, Apty empowers organizations and employees alike.
Apty follows the Digital Adoption Platform(DAP) cycle, that helps you understand your employees’ interactions with the application and analyze the way it is being used. It gives you a complete picture of where your users are getting stuck so you can proactively resolve challenges by providing them with the right help content as and where needed.
Apty’s advanced analytics gives you detailed information on how your workflows, tooltips, announcements, launchers are being used, and basis these actionable insights you can deliver a superior software training experience to your workforce.
2. WalkMe
WalkMe is a Digital Adoption Platform that makes your customer onboarding effortless. They provide various solutions such as customer onboarding, customer care, and customer success. Combined with proactive, step-by-step guidance and automation your employees can finish their tasks easily and effectively.
With a customer onboarding platform like WalkMe, you can onboard new employees, improve employee engagement, and reduce churn rates and enhance UX. WalkMe’s key features include comprehensive analytics, effective user onboarding, improved customer experience, and seamless digital transformation.
3. Whatfix
Whatfix is a customer onboarding platform that helps you to unlock the full potential of your web-based application. Make your digital adoption journey a successful one by empowering your employees to derive maximum value from your software investments. Use Whatfix metrics to see what flows are used most and identify the ones that must be further built or need to be altered.
Whatfix, a SaaS solution, make your employee training effective by adding instructions and helps your end-users with customized in-app contexts. Some key benefits of Whatfix include a personalized user onboarding experience, omnichannel presence, on-the-job training, and useful widgets.
4. Userpilot
Userpilot is a code-free customer onboarding platform that helps you to increase user adoption by allowing you to provide the right in-app experience at the right time during their journey. Userpilot provides you with a customized product experience that will blend seamlessly with the application.
The best part is the customized in-app messaging that helps keep your users engaged with timely hints and tips. Userpilot allows you to test your hypotheses to identify dropouts in the user journey. It provides a seamless user onboarding experience based on their persona and helps them achieve company goals.
5. Appcues
Appcues is a product-led growth platform that provides better UX that leads to faster adoption and more profitable growth. Appcues make it easy to get actionable insights that help optimize your user onboarding experience. Leverage in-product announcements features that outperform your email campaigns.
With a customer onboarding platform like Appcues you can onboard and engage your new users, drive your product adoption, collect feedback and user data, deliver personalized in-product campaigns, and provide self-service support. Also, you can provide on-demand support – when & where your users need it.
6. Nickelled
Nickelled is a customer onboarding platform that provides onboarding experiences that are interactive, self-paced, and completely immersive.
With Nickelled, you do not need any software or code installation, as they are delivered from the cloud. Launch a guided tour in minutes without any file change requests or coding skills.
With a platform like Nickelled, you can get good insights into how your customers are using the product and understand where they need help. Create new workflows, without recording the entire workflows again, and update the new version in minutes.
7. Inline Manual
Inline Manual is a SaaS onboarding platform that allows onboarding teams to build product tours, videos, interactive tutorials, announcements, and support articles that are all incorporated right into your app. You can also work together with your team to produce onboarding content.
A suitable alternative for small software companies to onboard customers more practically, based on pricing. It allows you to quickly save and change onboarding content to accommodate updated versions of your app. Provides several onboarding contents and displays content to customers according to the path they take.
8. Loom
Loom happens to be another great customer onboarding software. Loom is a video recording format supported beneficial for your product’s informational message and step-by-step guide. Also, it can access and operate different device specifications that businesses can use for their external and internal communication, which is the most necessary feature for their customer’s interaction and support.
Loom helps business personnel to create a platform where video sessions are being done and the customers get to know about their product features. It promotes good communication between the team and customers with the extra aid of sharing important videos through different platforms if necessary.
Best Practices of Customer Onboarding
The Customer onboarding experience should be specific to your employees and their needs. Each account should be individualized through valuable experiences, client portals, personal profiles, and readily available support.
It’s not enough to have a good product, you need to make sure that your customers know how to use it, otherwise they’ll be lost and frustrated.
- Define what you expect from the customers to the employees and set appropriate and achievable milestones rather than unachievable ones.
Customize the experience, onboard your team, and gather sufficient data associated with the onboarding process. Ensure that the onboarding process you set is accessible to all, repeatable, and flexible. - Focus on building the relationship with the customers, try to communicate with them as much as possible, and follow up once the onboarding process is complete. Assess the customer needs continuously and onboard product add-ons.
- Make it as easy as possible. If the onboarding process is difficult or complicated, customers are much more likely to decide to walk away altogether. Provide assistance at their disposal. If they have a question or need help, they should be able to reach out and get the assistance they need right away.
- Allow users to bypass extensive, detailed explanations if they are not interested. This gets them into the swing of things and gives them the option to depart if they aren’t comfortable with the onboarding process.
Why is customer onboarding software so important?
Customer onboarding software increases user adoption and reduction rates by teaching the new users how to use the app and get the most out of it, decreases customer support costs by offering self-help services to the customers in the form of tooltips, videos, and walkthroughs to understand the features of your product better.
Customer Onboarding Software Benefits
Helping your customers be more successful can be achieved with onboarding software. Customer onboarding software enables you to teach new users how to use the app and extract more value from it, boosting their likelihood of utilizing it regularly and increasing product adoption.
The onboarding software has a robust and intuitive user interface that allows employee onboarding to be effortless. It also has a user portal that is easy to navigate around and great customer service. It offers in-depth analytics on user activity, allowing you to see how your employees are performing.
Based on user behavior in your product, customer onboarding software gives you information on which aspects new customers are utilizing and which features they’re most interested in. They also provide customers with self-service support in the form of videos, walkthroughs, and tooltips, decreasing the need to contact customer care.
Why Apty is the best customer onboarding software:
Apty has been the highest-rated Digital Adoption Platform on G2, for the last four quarters consecutively. Apty powers the onboarding efforts of several Fortune 500 giants, helping them overcome challenges relating to not just onboarding but also digital adoption, digital transformation, change management and more.
With Apty, you can reduce your onboarding & training costs up to 60%. If you’re still on the fence about which Onboarding tool to invest in, we recommend seeing Apty in action and find out for yourself why Apty is the best one around.
Remote working, which once had several taboos associated with it has become an integral part of today’s business landscape. The millennial corporate world observed a gradual but constant surge in remote working since the early 2000s.
A report by Global Workspace Analytics suggests that even before the world was hit by the pandemic, employees were not at their office desks 60% of the time, they were already mobile. Remote working, however, skyrocketed further after the emergence of the recent pandemic.
Today, almost all businesses support remote work and it is now a mainstream corporate lifestyle. Because remote working is currently dominating the corporate world, businesses need to know the strengths and challenges that it brings about.
Business benefits of remote working
The corporate world has experienced several benefits of remote working from the perspectives of both, the employees and the employers. Employees have enjoyed the liberty to work from anywhere, attain higher levels of work-life balance and save time on the daily commute to the office.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that employers have witnessed.
- Costs saved on office spaces – Adopting a remote working environment means allowing your employees to work from their homes or any location of their choice. While this is an obvious benefit to the employees, businesses too benefit greatly since it helps them cut back on their hefty rents paid for office spaces. Leasing office spaces involves huge investments, with a completely remote workforce, businesses save a considerable amount of money.
- Reduced equipment costs – Another major trend that the corporate world has witnessed as a part of the remote work culture is the BYOD (Bring-your-own-devices) adoption, which allows employees to access corporate information and resources on their personal devices for work. BYOD is largely preferred by employees owing to the device familiarity, but businesses save huge costs as well, on purchasing individual smart devices for their entire workforce. Not just the costs of purchasing new devices, but also the costs involved in routine maintenance, updates, and repairs.
- Increased productivity – Allowing employees to work from home has helped them gain an added level of flexibility and save massive time and efforts spent traveling back and forth from the office. Moreover, allowing employees to use their personal devices for work, means allowing them to use a device of their choice. This has not only helped employees use familiar devices but also the most latest versions to help speed up processes and improve overall output. Improved productivity leads to improved profits.
- Access to a larger talent pool – Not being confined to specific office locations means that businesses can hire professionals from anywhere in the world. Remote working has opened up doors to a greater talent pool. Businesses are no more restricted to hiring just local residents, they can employ the best professionals in their field from any location in the world.
Challenges faced by businesses in remote working
In changing gear from traditional office working to remote working, global businesses have experienced both pros and cons of the remote work environment. While there are several benefits, as discussed earlier, there are also some critical challenges.
Allowing employees to step outside office premises with sensitive business information, poses huge risks of a data breach. Furthermore, as the workforce is spread across geographies, businesses find it difficult to provision and deploy employees’ devices with corporate settings remotely.
Assessing employees’ performances was easier with traditional office culture. Remote working poses yet another challenge. Monitoring employees’ performance, tracking employee productivity is a great challenge for businesses. While some businesses have observed a spike in employee productivity owing to workplace flexibility, several others have seen a massive drop in productivity due to a lack of monitoring and increased distractions.
Corporate data protection, device security, simpler remote device provisioning can all be achieved with automation and software. However, it is crucial for businesses to understand the reason behind the productivity drop in their remotely working employees.
Let’s look at a few strong factors that lower employee productivity in a remote environment.
Reasons for productivity loss in remote employees
Working from home or any other location is a great benefit for employees worldwide since it helps them gain a work-life balance, saves time on the commute, and offers greater flexibility of work in terms of space and timings.
Yet, several businesses have experienced a drop in employee productivity. Let’s understand why.
- Increased distractions – Working from offices meant being surrounded by professionals, all driven towards a common goal. However, working from home or any other remote location brings along the risk of distractions. Whether it is your family who lives in the same space as you work, or it is the comfort of working from your couch, all these factors can be huge distractions when working remotely.
- Reduced monitoring – Speaking of distractions, employees working from home sense a lowered monitoring of their performance or processes. It is always easier to monitor your workforce face to face, but remote working diminishes performance monitoring to a great extent. Employees may feel drawn towards spending excessive time with family or using entertainment apps and other websites that may not be related to work during their shift timings.
- Heightened feeling of disengagement – Businesses has a way of engaging their employees when working from offices. In the traditional office culture, employees meet their colleagues daily, enterprises have employee engagement programs, and much more. Alternatively, when working remotely, employees may feel detached and unheard, they may experience delays or obstacles in reaching out to their colleagues and superiors for guidance which may demotivate them and affect their performance.
- Inability to quickly fix technical issues – Remote working relies heavily on technology and digital devices. One can always expect device and network errors when using technology. In traditional office culture, your IT teams are responsible 24×7 to ensure the proper functioning of your systems and networks. But what happens when employees face a technical glitch when working remotely? Not all employees are tech-savvy enough to fix device and network issues by themselves. The inability to quickly resolve device errors leads to extended system downtime, followed by a loss in productivity.
- Lack of information access – Corporate information is extremely sensitive and businesses are constantly on the roll to keep their corporate data safe. A traditional office workplace is reinforced with several layers of security to ensure data protection. Access and exchange of information are relatively easy in an office workspace. However, when working remotely, businesses generally prefer the zero-trust approach in which employees have to undergo multiple steps of verification before they can lay hands on the business data. This makes accessing information complex, Furthermore, with employees scattered in multiple locations, there is always a possibility of data being siloed and improperly shared with every member of the team.
What can businesses do to improve their employee productivity
Employers have the ultimate power to bring about changes that help their business improve their productivity. On ascertaining the reasons behind the drop in productivity, employers and managers can take measures such as organizing frequent catch-up sessions to improve employee engagement, creating well-defined work structures for better time management and preventing employee burn-out, offering timely encouragement and motivation to their employees.
However, these productivity improvement efforts can be taken miles ahead with the implementation of the right technology. Training and onboarding remote employees can be a huge challenge for enterprises. But with the help of a Digital Adoption Platform, you can be assured that your remote employees are onboarded quickly, effectively, and almost independently.
Training them is also a piece of cake with a DAP because they no longer have to raise tickets to resolve every little issue they face while using the software required to perform their tasks. A DAP helps build employee productivity by eliminating learning dependency and making them self-learn with the help of on-demand walkthroughs and training material. You can also ensure absolute process compliance among remote employees with the help of a DAP.
Modern-day cloud-based tools, such as Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions help businesses to a great extent to secure, monitor, and manage their devices in remote environments. You can adopt BYOD management to enable your employees to use their personal devices for work, you can remotely provision multiple devices or various types and OS with your corporate policies and resources.
MDM software also helps you to monitor the locations of your employees’ devices, restrict usage of inappropriate apps and websites on work devices, lock employees’ devices in a single or multiple selective apps with Kiosk Lockdown and even reach out instantly when your employees encounter device issues.
We have compiled a reviewed and compared best remote onboarding tools to fast track your employee productivity.
Closing thoughts
The switch to remote working has not been easy for the corporate world. While businesses struggled to stay afloat, employees struggled to get accustomed to the “new normal”. Lowered employee productivity can be tackled with some changes in the management methods, as well as the implementation of the right tools such as a DAP tool and MDM solutions.
To successfully improve employee productivity, it is important for businesses to first identify and understand the underlying causes.
No matter how good a product is, you cannot expect new users to get it right away without any direction. That’s where the necessity of User Onboarding comes into play.
Research says, 63% of customers say that onboarding – the quality of support users receive post-sale – is a significant consideration before they make the decision in the first place.
Since two-thirds of customers around the world consider User Onboarding in decision making, businesses need to focus on how to deliver the best onboarding experience.
In this blog, we’ll explore what User Onboarding is and then dive into some best User Onboarding examples.
What is User Onboarding?
User Onboarding is the process of making new users understand your product, providing an aha moment where users realize the value of your application, and guide them to activate faster.
If done right, users will become loyal to your brand and stay with you for a longer period. Done poorly, you are losing your game and will quickly end up in churn.
Before jumping into best User Onboarding examples, you should be familiar with onboarding basics such as:
- How can users improve onboarding?
- How do I onboard a new user?
- What is the User Onboarding process?
- What are the strategies for the best User Onboarding experience?
- What is the onboarding flow?
- What is onboarding in UX?
We have covered most of the questions in our blog “The Definitive Guide for User Onboarding”
Once you’ve learned the basics of onboarding you’ll be interested in how to implement an effective onboarding to reap the benefits of having the best User Onboarding experience:
- Increased user engagement
- Educates users and reduces churn
- Improved conversion rates
- Faster product adoption
- Reduced support
- Increased revenue
Having understood the benefits let’s jump look at some companies that have the best User Onboarding experiences.
5 best User Onboarding Examples
- Slack
- Duolingo
- Evernote
- Dropbox
1. Slack – a well-designed team messaging platform:
Slack, founded in 2009 by American software company Slack Technologies, is an effective business communication platform that helps companies to communicate internally.
Slack is essentially a chat room organized by private groups for your entire organization, designed to replace the conventional method of sharing and communication.
Why do we think Slack as the Best User Onboarding examples?
- Hassle-free message search and in-built reminders features
- Walks you through the onboarding with Slack bots, provides an interactive product tour
- Slack is a one-size-fits-all solution pertaining to communication and file sharing
- Users are allowed to do practice messaging and explore different Slack features
- Slack channel bridges the communication gap and helps to keep your customers in the loop
- Instead of bombarding with features, they are straight to the point, thereby minimizing the users from getting overwhelmed and confused
Top 5 competitors for Slack:
- Chanty
- Flock
- Microsoft Teams
- Fleep
- Hangouts Chat
Slack stands out from its competitors by having the best User Onboarding experience which is simple to set up and administrate.
Also, its workspaces allow you to
- Organize communications
- Send private messages
- Automate routine communications and actions
- Protect your data using your encryption key
- Share information, files, and more all in one place
Slack provides solutions for remote work, distance learning, engineering, financial services, IT, project management, and many more.
2. Duolingo – Language learning platform:
Duolingo is an American platform, one of the best User Onboarding examples, which includes a language-learning website and mobile app, and it wastes no time in the onboarding process.
Duolingo is the most downloaded education app with more than 300 million users, globally.
Why do we think Duolingo as the Best User Onboarding examples?
- Users can select their language right from the landing page
- Duolingo asks for your goal at the start itself to keep you engaged for longer
- Two options are available
- Can start from the basics
- Take a placement test
- Soon after the selection (2nd step), you will get a personalized user experience
- Then, tooltips come into play. Introduce users to Duolingo features based on user knowledge and language selection
- Approximately, within 10 clicks, users start learning what they want
- Provides a very personal, interactive, and smooth User Onboarding experience.
- Offers Digital language-proficiency assessment exam
Top 5 competitors for Duolingo:
- Babbel
- Italki
- Rosetta Stone
- Voxy
- Mango Languages
Notable features:
- Offers 95 different language courses in 37+ languages
- Engages users in many ways like
- Duo costumes
- Flashcards
- Images and more
- Helps to complete lessons faster
3. Evernote – Best note-taking platform:
Evernote, developed by the Evernote Corporation in California, is an app designed for
- note-taking
- organizing
- task management
- archiving and many more
Why do we think Evernote as the Best User Onboarding examples?
- User onboarding of Evernote is easy and simple
- Once you click signup, you can select the plans that you want
- Post that you can start exploring the features accordingly
- You can easily share your notes and whole notebooks with the team
- Liberty to attach files (spreadsheets, pictures, docs) to any note
- Chrome extension option available for saving news articles
- Sync automatically between all devices and access when offline
Top 5 competitors for Evernote:
- ClickUp
- Google Keep
- Microsoft OneNote
- DropBox Paper
- ProofHub
Notable features:
- Sync & organize
- Web clipper
- Templates
- Integrations and Spaces
- Search Handwriting
4. Dropbox – modern file hosting platform:
Dropbox, operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., is a wonderful User Onboarding example. Dropbox is a file hosting service that offers
- cloud storage
- personal cloud
- file synchronization
- client software and many more
Dropbox is primarily designed to reduce your work and makes files transfer easy and portable without the use of any external devices. This permits you to keep all important documents in one location, which is highly secured & easy to access.
Why do we think Dropbox as the Best User Onboarding examples?
- Creating an account is simple and easy
- Users are walked through the process in 7 simple steps with admirable illustrations
- File sharing and collaboration within the team can be done instantaneously
- A progress bar monitors the user flows and reduces complexity
- Create, store, edit and share cloud content
- Minimal steps and clear content
Notable features:
- Centralize team content
- Transform your folders
- Flexible storage plans
- Smart Sync
- Third-party app integrations
Top 5 competitors of Dropbox:
- Google Drive
- Microsoft OneDrive for Business
- Box
- ShareFile
- Egnyte
5. LinkedIn – Networking Platform:
LinkedIn is a platform built for networking. LinkedIn is one of the Best User Onboarding examples, as it is very simple and easy to setup.
LinkedIn, #1 professional network, for those who are looking to improve their professional life. LinkedIn primarily focuses on career development and professional networking.
Use LinkedIn to
- Display your resume
- Build your bio
- Search for jobs
- Learn & acquire knowledge
- Share your thoughts and insights
- Interact with top-level executives
- Enhance your professional reputation
Why do we think LinkedIn as the Best User Onboarding examples?
- The onboarding process is made very simple and easy.
- You can just go ahead and create an account, and start exploring things.
- The progress bar will be very helpful in completing your profile.
- Start gaining exposure & knowledge right from the beginning. No complexity involved and the user gets adopted at the earliest.
- Allows the user to explore and also asks the user about the functionalities that he/she would like to use.
Notable features:
- Build your Connections
- LinkedIn courses & certifications
- Manage your Skills & Endorsements
- Save your searches
- Send messages without making a connection
Top 5 competitors of LinkedIn:
- Indeed
- ZipRecruiter
- CareerBuilder
- Glassdoor
These are some of the best User Onboarding examples. But, these applications don’t involve complex operations. So, the process of onboarding requires only a few steps which can be made appealing and effective.
But what if your application is robust and involves many operations? You still want to have the best User Onboarding experience. Is there any tool that can improve user onboarding?
Yes, there is.
Apty, the highest-rated Digital Adoption Platform, makes it easy to create the best User Onboarding experience for any SaaS product. The interactive software walkthroughs of Apty guide your users step-by-step and make the onboarding process smooth and fast.
Apty acts as a software layer on your application and provides in-app guidance where the users can follow the walkthroughs and complete any complex operations.
Why do we think Apty can make your software have the best User Onboarding experience?
- Personalized interactive software walkthroughs
- Improved User Engagement
- Increased retention rates and minimizes churn
- Maximize customer exposure to the full product value
- Apty Analytics increases Usage and improves User Experience (UX)
- DAP cycle
- Increased Productivity
- Real-time navigation and instruction
Apty is the only Digital Adoption Platform that follows the DAP cycle.
Here’s how Apty works:
- Step 1:
Apty analyzes your software usage and find out where your users are spending more time to complete and getting stuck. - Step 2:
Once the actual hang-ups are found, identify ways to minimize the pain points by creating workflows that are needed by the end-users. - Step 3:
Create workflows (Software Walkthroughs). These workflows are personalized content that addresses user pain points and makes them comfortable. - Step 4:
Apty helps your users in real-time and gives the best User Onboarding experience for the application users.
If you are looking for a tool that can make improve productivity, and provide the best User Onboarding experience, then try Apty.