Benefits Of a Strong Onboarding Program
Most managers think employee onboarding is about making sure new hires have completed their paperwork, but when done properly, onboarding benefits the businesses as a whole.
This infographic breaks down the four main benefits of a strong onboarding program:
- Increased Retention
- More Productive Employees
- Better Revenue
- Happier Customers
The Link Between Onboarding and Employee Retention
The most obvious benefit to a successful onboarding program is increased retention. Employees that are happy and well adjusted in their jobs are more likely to stay with their employer. Companies with an engaging onboarding program retained 91% of their first-year workers.
Improving your employee retention saves time and money but not having to search for a replacement. Companies spend weeks and thousands of dollars just trying to fill one position. HR experts estimate the organization costs of replacing an employee are one to three times the employee’s annual salary.
The solution is to make sure employees feel confident and comfortable in their jobs from Day 1 instead of just hoping things will work out.
Onboarding Improves Productivity
Not only does onboarding make employees more likely to stay, it also makes them better at their jobs. Employees who go through an onboarding program are nearly 2X as productive, according to research published by Glassdoor.
Onboarding eliminates confusion and confusion can kill your team’s productivity and your bottom line. Businesses in the United States and United Kingdom lose an estimated $37 billion each year from employees not understanding their jobs.
One of the main goals of an onboarding program is for employees to gain role clarity. Employees need to know both what is expected of them and how to use the company’s systems and technologies to meet those expectations.
Employees can’t be productive if they don’t know what to do or how to use your enterprise software. Onboarding makes sure employees have both the institutional knowledge and technical training to be successful.
Driving Revenue and Boosting Customer Satisfaction
The final two benefits of employee onboarding might be the biggest selling point – onboarding boosts both revenue and customer satisfaction. Research from the Aberdeen Group shows that great onboarding can lead to 60% year-over-year improvement in revenue and a 63% year-over-year in customer satisfaction.
An engaged and productive workforce will create better results. Onboarding equips employees to be better at their jobs. Happier and more confident employees lead to happier customers and better revenue. The process starts with your onboarding process. If onboarding at your company only consists of sitting with an HR manager for 30 minutes, you’ll need to consider in building out a full onboarding program.
Seeing the Benefits of Employee Onboarding
Realizing the benefits of an employee onboarding program will require investing time, staff and money to building an onboarding program. Onboarding is not just an HR activity. Department-level supervisors and managers should be involved in developing and executing your onboarding strategy. For more help in developing an onboarding strategy check out this resource – What Employees Want Out of Onboarding
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 introduce them to all the software that they will need to use to work remotely.
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
Product adoption is the key to a successful and growing SaaS product. Without it, your product will fail.
Simply put, product adoption is the process of customers discovering, purchasing, and implementing a new application into their work or lives. Many companies invest a lot of time and money into the first part of the process – the discovery.
From expensive marketing tactics to free trials, SaaS companies place a significant emphasis on the acquisition part of the customer lifecycle, but what happens after a new user converts to a paying customer is even more critical and often overlooked. If paying customers isn’t fully utilizing your software, they will cancel or not renew their subscription.
If you don’t have a solid adoption strategy in place, you’ll waste all the time and money you spent on marketing and converting a customer. According to Harvard Business Review, it costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one.
Product adoption is essential for any SaaS business that is serious about gaining returning customers that love what they have to offer.
When companies focus on customer adoption, they are not merely increasing conversions; they’re developing a base of customers who know and share the value of their product.
In this guide, we’re taking a closer look at what a product adoption framework looks like for SaaS companies and how you can measure your adoption rates and best practices to improve your overall customer adoption.
Why should SaaS companies care about customer adoption?
Numerous SaaS companies with long-term goals of growth and success tend to focus time and effort on product adoption. By concentrating on adoption, SaaS companies move their users along the pathway from basic conversion to becoming regular users.
This path is essential as it creates a base of regular, loyal customers that believe in the value of what the company produces. They have complete buy-in with the company’s software and use it as part of their daily processes.
A key reason why SaaS customer adoption matters is its impact on reducing churn in the SaaS industry. By focusing on driving engagement through outcome-driven onboarding, businesses can achieve higher retention rates and increased product adoption across their user base.
What are the six stages of the product adoption process?
The typical customer lifecycle for a SaaS product has six stages:
- Awareness
- Conversion
- Purchase
- Activation
- Renewal
- Referral
SaaS products need a robust customer adoption strategy that moves users from each stage to the next. The following table summarizes the roles marketing, sales, and customer success play in each step of the process:
You must communicate in such a way that it must excite your users. There is a high chance that the information you provide might overwhelm them and discourage them from using the application.
Make your In-app announcements crisp and clear. Don’t try to dump all the information at one go. Give some breathing time and show them only what they need to know.
| Stage | Who is driving? | Desired Outcome |
| Awareness | Marketing | The potential user learns of your product |
| Conversion | Marketing | The user signs up for a free resource or trial |
| Purchase | Sales | The user purchases a subscription |
| Activation | Customer Success | The user begins implementing the software and becomes a frequent active user |
| Renewal | Customer Success | The user purchases another term (typically monthly or yearly) |
| Referral | Customer Success and Sales | The user is so pleased with the application they refer a friend or colleague. |
When people think about product adoption, they often think of the activation phase – getting someone to use your product after buying it. But, it’s helpful to picture a product adoption framework as a cycle.
All the referrals you get from the last step will entire the cycle at awareness. The cycle continues to repeat itself as you add more users.
To accelerate this cycle, you need a product adoption framework supported by tools that enable in-app guidance and user analytics. Platforms like Apty’s Digital Adoption Platform offer tailored walkthroughs, enabling users to activate faster and navigate the SaaS product lifecycle more efficiently.
The customer adoption cycle is also helpful for when you’re introducing new features. Here’s how each step could apply:
- Awareness – Users learn about your feature release and how it can solve a problem.
- Conversion – user watches a video you released about the new feature.
- Purchase – if the feature requires an upgrade, the user could make a purchase.
- Activation – user begins incorporating the feature into their routines.
- Renewal – if the feature required an upgrade, users could renew their upgraded subscription.
- Referral – the user lets other people know about the new features.
What are the benefits of product adoption?
Product adoption provides several benefits for companies. As with every business, success is dependent upon customer conversion and retention.
That makes customer adoption essential, as the result of effective adoption is that users find the product so valuable that they continue to use it.
After implementing a product adoption framework, businesses experience higher user retention, as well as lower churn.
Decreasing churn leads to regular, high revenue for the business. Churn refers to the loss of profit or users and is the antithesis of success. By utilizing customer adoption, companies can ensure they have low churn, as they effectively gain loyal customers as a result of their process.
Incorporating feature adoption tracking into your product strategy helps you understand which functionalities are driving value and which need improvement. This insight also enables teams to build a stronger customer onboarding strategy focused on outcomes instead of one-size-fits-all tutorials.
But customer adoption isn’t just about reducing churn; the right adoption strategy can also be the key to growth. As illustrated in the adoption lifecycle, if you can develop a successful product adoption framework that moves users through all six stages, your super users should start referring their friends and colleagues.
Therefore, improved adoption rates can reduce your customer acquisition costs as you reap the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing.
How do you measure product adoption?
There are several key metrics by which you can measure the effectiveness of your product adoption framework. You’ll want to assess how core features are performing, what’s most appealing to new users, and the time and value of the actions that users take with your product.
Because adoption is often influenced by how users discover and engage with the product, marketing mix modeling can help teams connect marketing activities to adoption outcomes and understand which efforts contribute most to sustained usage.
All these assessments work together to form a complete portrait of how people adopt your product — and how you can improve the experience. Before we look at metrics and benchmarks, you’ll need to define and track these key data points:
- Key action – an action providing the most value to your users, examples include running a report or completing an entry.
- Daily active users – total number of users who performed at least one key action in a day
- Weekly active users – total number of users who performed at least one key action in a week
With tools like Apty PULSE, you can dive deep into user activation metrics, process adherence, and behavioral flows to optimize every touchpoint of the product experience. This real-time insight allows product teams to measure SaaS product adoption metrics with greater accuracy and take timely action.
You can also calculate monthly active users, but for weekly or monthly users, you may want to consider raising the threshold on the number of key actions. Depending on your application, you might not consider a person who only completes one key activity, an active user.
In that case, you could define your monthly activity users as people who complete at least eight or more key activities.
Once you’ve defined and track these metrics, you can begin to measure your customer adoption success by looking at:
- Adoption rate
- Time-to-first key action
- Activation
- Time to value
Adoption Rate
There’s a lot of variety in how different consultants and experts recommend you calculate your adoption rate. In general, you’re trying to measure how successful you’ve been at onboarding and getting people to use your application.
One way to look at that is to examine the percentage of people who actually used your application in a given time period.
Adoption Rate = Active Users ÷ Subscribed Users x 100
So if you were trying to measure your adoption rate for a month where you had 75 monthly active users out of 100 subscribed users, you’d have an adoption rate of 75%.
The inactive users are the ones who are most likely to leave, so increasing your adoption rate by lowering inactive users should also reduce your churn rate.
You can also calculate adoption rates for certain features.
Feature Adoption Rate = People Who Use New Feature ÷ Active Users x 100
Time-to-first- key action
This metric refers to the time it takes a new user to start using an existing feature. It can also describe the time it takes a current user to try a new feature. The key action is whatever the user does to make this shift, e.g., completing a transaction or visiting a new feature in an app.
You can use this metric to suggest the appeal of the new feature or how quickly new users begin using core features of the product. Choose several key actions that best describe your primary goals, rather than trying to measure everything.
Your “key” actions are likely those that would provide the most value to your users; you might also measure a product’s more advanced features to see if they are worth keeping around.
Activation: Percentage of users who performed the key action for the first time
It’s also helpful to measure the number of users who took the key action compared to your total users. This metric gives you another way to look at how users respond to new features or which features are most compelling to new users.
As with the adoption rate, link this metric to a time period for more actionable data.
Time to value
As mentioned above, some features of your product provide greater value than others. Time-to-value measures the time it takes for users to obtain their desired results from a given feature.
Naturally, you want this time to be as short as possible, because adopters who derive value from your product more quickly are more likely to become regular users.
You should prioritize TTV assessments surrounding your key feature and provide a path of least resistance for your users. The shorter you can get this value to be, the more likely you are to encourage an adopter to take the next step in the user journey.
Determine your product’s core features and value opportunities, then use the above metrics to understand if you provide the best user experience in your product.
Generally, you need to measure these within a time period to obtain more specific guidance. Focus on the key actions that support your product’s user journey, then evaluate whether users are taking those actions.
What is a good adoption rate?
In general, the higher your adoption rate, the better. More people using your software means they’re seeing the value of your product and will renew the subscription. For specific metrics, consider these SaaS benchmarks from a 2019 Mixpanel study:
| Metric | Median | 90th Percentile |
| User Growth
Measured as the month-over-month growth in weekly active users. |
4% | 72% |
| Activation
Measured as a percentage of users who completed a key activity in their first week. |
17% | 65% |
What’s a good adoption rate for your product will vary depending on the industry and type of application. For example, B2B applications will have different adoption benchmarks than B2C solutions.
In the Mixpanel study, media, finance, and eCommerce applications were growing much faster than SaaS solutions, so the industry or use case your application serves could impact your customer adoption rate.
Economic and market forces could also play a role in determining your adoption rate. For example, products that enable remote work like video conferencing solutions saw rapid growth due to COVID-19.
How can you improve product adoption rates?
SaaS companies, like businesses in other industries, strategize ways to increase revenue. Improving customer adoption increases new user efficiency rates, which results in higher product revenue.
No matter the type of software a SaaS business offers, companies face roadblocks in the product adoption process, experiencing customer churn. Smart SaaS companies focus on improving product adoption by following proven, successful practices.
7 Ways to Improve Product Adoption
- Improve customer onboarding by creating awareness of the product benefits. Besides offering basic education on what the product is, what it does, and who can benefit by using it, make sure you reveal an “Aha” moment as a part of your onboarding. The “aha” moment is when users realize the value your software provides, such as how it will save them time. For more tips, check out our blog post Tips for Using Product Tours to Reveal Your Aha Moment.
- Beef up your product support. Add a live chat feature, embedded videos, and interactive guides to your in-app support. Include tooltips, on-screen messages, and in-app tutorials. Additional education and information that’s easy to access influence adoption. A frustrated customer is more likely to reject the software, so don’t let that person become frustrated. Consider product adoption software to help you with this tip, saving you time.
- Create a memorable first experience for the user. The tools mentioned above are part of this first experience tip, making it easier for them to navigate and complete tasks. Create more than one onboarding experience, targeting different types of users. Consistent visual elements, including your business logo, can also help build trust and familiarity during a user’s first interaction with your product
- Make a big deal when introducing new features. Give new feature introduction treatment similar to a new product launch, but a bit smaller version. Implement an onboarding plan for the functionality and make users interested in the new addition.
- Implement in-app marketing techniques. Your tips and notifications can improve the user experience and can act as ways to promote the product and its features. In-app announcements can be useful. Decide on what you’re trying to achieve and use tools that support that goal.
- Support in-app marketing with emails. Emails keep you in front of the customer. Use them to give information, tips, and highlights new features. Pay attention to the timing of the emails based on where the customer is in the new product adoption stages. To ensure the quality of your email list and campaign effectiveness, Form Guard helps prevent spam and invalid submissions, keeping your outreach targeted and reliable.
- Continue to use data to improve. Collect and review data on an ongoing basis. Explore indicators of problems and find out why they exist. Develop and implement new strategies to enhance product adoption.
Implementing these seven product adoption strategies will boost your level of customer adoption. Companies that have high user adoption numbers experience higher marketing ROI and lower marketing costs. Overall, the gain for your company will be increased revenue in the long run.
How a Digital Adoption Platform Improves Product and Customer Adoption
One of the easiest ways to implement these best practices for product adoption is to use a digital adoption platform or DAP.
DAPs like Apty make it easy for you to provide on-screen guidance, product tours, and guided onboarding to your users. The benefits of using a digital adoption platform with your SaaS product include:
- Faster onboarding – Replace video sessions and custom onboarding sessions with on-screen guidance so users can get started immediately.
- Lower support costs and fewer tickets – On-screen guidance enables users to solve problems on their own without opening a support ticket.
- Decreased churn and increased customer satisfaction – Since DAPs make your application easier to use, customers are happier and more likely to renew.
- Deliver better product tours – DAPs make it easier to create and segment product tours to guide users through your adoption and onboarding process.
Product Adoption Key Takeaways
If you’re looking to improve your product adoption and grow your SaaS product, remember these key points:
- SaaS customers follow a life cycle. Make sure product adoption is a priority at each stage as you move users from novice to expert.
- Track and measure key product adoption metrics so you can identify weaknesses and areas for improvement.
Leverage best practices and a digital adoption platform to boost user engagement and drive higher adoption rates.
Ready to Maximize SaaS Product Adoption?
With Apty’s AI-powered Digital Adoption Platform, you don’t just train users—you empower them to thrive. Eliminate friction, reduce churn, and accelerate time-to-value with smart, outcome-driven adoption tools built for SaaS success.
Book a personalized demo now and see how you can revolutionize your SaaS customer adoption journey.
FAQs
One of the most common questions we get at trade shows is what is a product adoption platform or digital adoption tool?
This blog tackles that question by:
- Defining what a product adoption platform is,
- Explaining how it’s different from your LMS or other training solutions, and
- Exploring who could benefit from using an adoption tool.
What is a Product Adoption Platform?
Product adoption or digital adoption platforms, like Apty, are a part of a growing category of SaaS providers focused on helping users navigate and adopt web-based applications.
While individual features may vary, common elements include:
- On-screen guidance,
- Integrated support or help content, and
- Step-by-step guidance.
Apty uses data-centric approach to improve the Product Adoption. Learn more about how Apty increases Product Adoption in this video.
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What are the Product Adoption metrics?
The 4 Product Adoption metrics are:
- Adoption rate
- Time-to-first (key action)
- Percentage of users for the first time (who performed the core action)
- Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
1. Adoption rate:
It is the percentage of a number of new users to the total number of users. The adoption rate can be calculated on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
Adoption rate = (number of new users / total number of users) *100
For example:
Assume a total of 1,000 users, out of which 250 are new.
Adoption rate = (250/1,000) *100 = 25%
2. Time-to-first (key action)
It is the mean (average) time it takes a new user to use an existing feature, or an existing user to use a new feature for the first time.
For example:
- Time-to-first click the file option on the homepage is 5 seconds.
- Time-to-first submit an application form when an account is first created is 7 days.
3. Percentage of users for the first time (who performed the core action)
It is the percentage of users who have performed a core action (the action you care about) for the first time in a given time frame.
For example:
- 78% of users have completed the task successfully in the month of July
- 33% of users subscribed your product in the month of August
4. The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
It is the average amount of money (per month) you expect to earn from any individual user. It helps you to evaluate whether you have the resources to make your business a success.
The Average Revenue Per User = Monthly Recurring Revenue / total number of users
For example:
If your ARPU is $10, then you need 1000 users to make $10,000 per month. If you want to hit the same target with a smaller number of users, then ARPU must be high.
How is a Product Adoption Platform Different than my Other Training Tools?
While product adoption platforms train users on new applications, they differ greatly from a Learning Management System or other training tools. Product adoption tools offer real-time product training and support users by showing them how to complete their tasks as they’re doing it.
An LMS or other training solution typically explains how to use software in an abstract case. A training document or video may show a generic use case with screenshots of each step.
2 effective ways to improve your Product Adoption rates:
- Increase your Support
- Improve your User Onboarding process
Support
Users face difficulties in figuring out how your product works. Users would rather not spend any extra time in understanding how your product works as they can spend that time on something more important to them.
Offering in-app support, guided walkthroughs, embedded tooltips are a great solution to improve Product Adoption rates.
Improve your User Onboarding Process:
Effective Onboarding practice must help users understand your product without any external help. Users must be empowered to find their “Aha!” moment smoothly and easily.
As discussed above, interactive Software Walkthroughs help your users understand the product. So, leveraging a Product Adoption tool might be a go-to place for improving your User Onboarding process.
A Product Adoption tool shows users where to click and what to do next. Moreover, the Product Adoption tool gives analytical information that allows you to make key decisions.
Tools like Apty, the highest-rated modern Digital Adoption Platform, help users learn and perform their tasks while learning instead of just reading how they should do their work.
Benefits of a Digital Adoption Platform
Digital adoption platforms should decrease training and support costs and increase productivity. In many cases, the on screen guidance offered by a product adoption tool can replace the need for costly and ineffective classroom training sessions.
Digital Adoption Platform like Apty helps to
- Improve Product Adoption
- Create Interactive Software Walkthroughs
- Improve User Experience and User Engagement
- Increase retention rates and minimizes churn
- Maximize user exposure to the full product value
- Increase Employee Productivity
- Increase Return on Investment (ROI)
- Real-time navigation and instruction
One of Apty’s clients, a major U.S. airline, utilizes Apty to help with CA PPM adoption. As a result of Apty’s adoption tools, they experienced:
- 80% reduction in CA PPM support tickets,
- 70% decrease in time spent on CA PPM training, and
- 3x increase in productivity.
What are the Common Uses of Product Adoption Platforms?
The uses of product adoption platforms are not limited to new users. Common use cases for an adoption platform include:
- Change Management – Adopting a new software or updating to a new version? The onscreen guidance helps users master new software and processes.
- Employee Onboarding – Quickly introduce new employees to your enterprise software.
- Customer Success and Engagement – For front-line agents in a customer contact center, every second counts. Guided workflows help agents quickly respond to customers requests.
- Customer Experience – Product adoption platforms aren’t just for employees. On-screen guidance can also help your customers use your website and other web-based applications.
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
Leveraging the right User Onboarding techniques based on your specific business requirements can prove to be extremely beneficial for enterprises. However, the biggest challenge for most companies is the lack of awareness about the different User Onboarding techniques and their classifications.
In this article, we will be discussing the top 10 types of User Onboarding techniques, so you can make an informed decision on which one works best for you.
Before jumping into different types of User Onboarding tools, let us understand few basic questions like,
- What is User Onboarding?
- Why is User Onboarding important?
- Why User Onboarding tool is important?
- What are the primary things User Onboarding tools should do?
What is User Onboarding and Why it’s important?
It is a process of providing new users with necessary product knowledge and skills to help understand the principles of how your product works and why it should be a part of their workflow.
User onboarding is like a guided tour. You lead users through a series of simple tasks to reveal the benefits of your software.
Why User Onboarding tool is important?
User Onboarding tools make your users experience “Aha moment!” as soon as possible. It provides a better User Engagement, User Experience (UX), and makes your onboarding process smooth and effective.
According to Forbes, one disengaged user at the average salary level will cost you almost $16,000 per year. This shows the necessity of User Engagement and that in turn explains the importance of User onboarding tools.
The ideal User Onboarding tool should help you with:
- Accelerating the User Onboarding process
- Guiding and introducing your users to the product
- Demonstrating how to use your product
Also, people need to know,
- How can users improve onboarding
- How do I use onboard users
- What defines successful product onboarding
We have addressed these questions in our blog, The Definitive Guide For User Onboarding. Here we are going to concentrate more on User Onboarding tools.
With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 classifications of User Onboarding techniques in which we have listed around 22 User Onboarding to consider for improving your User Onboarding experience:
The Top 10 User Onboarding Tools Classifications
- Social Login
- Email tools
- In-app guidance (Product tours)
- Chat support
- Support & Help tools
- Survey tools
- Analytics and Data Collection
- A/B Testing Software
- Visual Media tools
- User Experience (UX) Journey tools
Many user onboarding tools fall under the mentioned categories. Let’s have a look at what are those User Onboarding software.
1. User Onboarding tools – through Social Login
While technically not a part of onboarding, how users login can impact their adoption. If you make it easier to log in, they’re more likely to use the product and start your onboarding sequence. Consider adding a single sign-on or social login with tools like this:
Auth0:
Auth0 is an enterprise-grade universal authentication and authorization platform both for web and mobile applications, it is known for its capability to reduce friction in the login experience.
With Auth0, an effective User Onboarding tool, you will not only reduce the time required by users to complete the registration process with Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions but also securely capture user’s data and prevent malicious logins.
According to cxl.com, 77% of users believe social login is a good registration solution to increase user engagement.
Auth0 – Less Friction with Single Sign-On
Auth0, a freemium model-based tool that helps in onboarding your users immediately and personalizes their experience across different platforms by leveraging social login through Google, Twitter, and Facebook.
Key benefits of Auth0:
- Implementation is very simple.
- Loaded with features that address most of the use cases.
Some challenges of Auth0:
- Complex role management.
- More customization of the login page and how it looks could be helpful to enhance the user experience.
LoginRadius
LoginRadius is a cloud-based Customer Identity and Access Management platform (CIAM) that is not only simplified, customizable, and secure but also integrates it with marketing tools.
LoginRadius offers a fully customizable user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) that streamlines the registration process, login time, and password recovery.
LoginRadius is available for both web and mobile applications. It provides multiple login options from social media channels and a lot more options depending on the registration type needed, making it easier for users to sign up or sign in while enabling businesses to seamlessly create social post campaigns that connect authentication with user engagement.
LoginRadius – Seamless secured signup
It saves significant time by making login quick also collects customer data through email-based registration and social profile data.
Key Benefits of LoginRadius:
- LoginRadius can handle a load of customer logins. It can manage hundreds and thousands of concurrent logins.
- The system is capable of load balancing and the auto-scalable server mechanism.
Some challenges of LoginRadius:
- Setting it up needs a high level of technical knowledge.
2. User Onboarding tools – Email tools
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email service providers (ESP) used to send personalized emails to make it easy to connect with the right people at the right time. Key features are their templates, automation, and analytics.
For organizations operating at a larger scale, platforms like Marketo email marketing build on similar foundations with advanced lifecycle automation, deeper segmentation logic, and revenue-focused analytics enabling teams to coordinate more complex, data-driven engagement strategies across longer customer journeys.
Mailchimp – Create, automate, and monitor emails
Key Benefits of Mailchimp:
- It has a great template editor and easy to navigate design.
- Segmentation of audience is possible which helps to grow the audience or subscriber list at a sustainable rate.
Some Challenges of Mailchimp:
- The process of updating the customer list is not automated at all, it can be hectic to maintain or manage each list manually.
- The learning curve is slightly longer when compared with other tools.
Customer.io unique and notable feature is to send push notifications and SMS messages to the prospects and also collect real-time data of them.
Customer.io
Customer.io – Trigger-based custom emails
With a tool like Customer.io, you can deliver the right email at the right time to the right customer also you can segment your customers depending on real-time events and send personalized custom emails after observing what they do or don’t do during User Onboarding experience.
Key Benefits of Customer.io:
- Creating the email workflow is easy to create and configure.
- A/B testing could be better.
- Creating the email workflow is easy to create and configure.
- A/B testing could be better.
Some Challenges of Customer.io:
- Reporting could be more customizable.
- Lacks the ability to schedule emails on a daily or weekly basis.
3. User Onboarding tools with in-app guidance (Product tours)
Tour My App
Tour My App creates code less in-application tutorials that help to onboard new users, highlight features in your application, and also reflect your value proposition faster and easier. It increases employee engagement through interactive in-app guided tours.
Tour My App – Customization made simple
Tour My App can be easily customized and the app is very user-friendly. Built-in Analytics and codeless creation of tutorials are the highlights features.
Key Benefits of Tour My App:
- Easy to create in-app guidance.
- Multi-Language support is available.
Some Challenges of Tour My App:
- Audience segmentation is unavailable.
- Creating contextual guidance is not possible.
Apty
Apty is the next-gen modern Digital Adoption Platform that makes the onboarding process simpler and easier. Apty, one of the best User Onboarding tools, helps in many ways such as creates walkthroughs and content, automates mundane tasks, analytical insights, on-screen guidance, tooltips, announcements and many more.
To create credibility, look out the G2 crowd review, the best software review platform in the market.
Apty is ranking as the Highest rated digital adoption platform software in the G2 crowd with a score of 93/100. Here is a snippet from G2 Crowd.
Apty – Digital Adoption is done the right way
If you need something robust that not only makes the onboarding process faster but also has added advantages then you must have Apty is in the priority list.
Key Benefits of Apty:
- Powered with AI which helps to identify where the user is getting stuck or dropping off.
- Could create contextual workflows for each job role and ensure process compliance using features like data validation and Goal settings.
Some Challenges of Apty:
- The announcement feature could be more customizable.
- Email notification is unavailable for users who have not completed the workflows.
Nickelled
Nickelled, a User Onboarding walkthrough making solution, helps to create easy step-by-step guides that can be added to any website without any code integration- creating code-free walkthroughs in no time to onboard your users quickly and effectively. The application lets website owners train users on new updates, online tools, and work processes.
Nickelled- Supportive onboarding solution
There aren’t many reviews available for Nickelled, but most reviews stated that Nickelled is very easy to use and they do provide good customer support and the tool is worth buying.
Key Benefits of Nickelled:
- Quick and easy to setup.
- Customizable guides.
Some Challenges of Nickelled:
- Audience segmentation is not available.
4. User Onboarding tools – with chat support
LiveChat
LiveChat is a chat platform that can be used to interact with visitors on your website. It is an online customer service software that allows you to communicate in real-time with visitors to your Web site via instant messaging. LiveChat is packed with features that are designed to boost your customer’s satisfaction.
LiveChat – Unlock the data behind the problems
LiveChat helps to monitor your onboarding process and identify roadblocks of customers with the support of LiveChat analytics.
Key Benefits of Livechat:
- It is simple and intuitive to use.
- It comes with a daily chat summary which helps to the daily performance of the customer support department.
Some Challenges of Livechat:
- Some add on features like video and voice call is not available.
Olark
Olark is easy-to-use live chat software that helps to track your website visitors and lets you talk to customers on your website. It also gives information in real-time on your user behavior during the onboarding process. Olark helps to share a personal experience which is a way to engage users and avoid unwanted friction during the process of User Onboarding.
Olark – Make your business human
Olark allows customization that gives you complete control of the integration. Olark can help you track prospects, create live chat automation, drive sales, increase conversions, and provide great customer support.
Key Benefits of Olark:
- It helps to view the customer journey when they visit the website.
- You can see in real-time what the search query was while chatting with a customer in the chat window.
Some Challenges of Olark:
- Detailed reporting is not available.
5. User Onboarding tools – Support & Help
Zendesk
Zendesk is a knowledge base tool that quickens the User Onboarding process by allowing you to create an online help center where customers can access FAQs, community-curated solutions and step-by-step articles.
Zendesk – Build with, on, and beyond
Highlighting features of Zendesk,
- Nurture customer relationships with personalized support
- Supporting consistently with self-serving helpdesk
- Lower company cost and enhance the team’s productivity
- Track, prioritize, and solve customer queries
- Easily accessible live chat with responsive support
Zendesk is a customer service software tool that helps your users to help themselves by enabling the users to access the information they need to solve their issues.
Key Benefits of Zendesk:
- The trigger option of Zendesk helps to automate repetitive tasks and save valuable man-hours.
- It has a great interface that can be customized.
Some Challenges of Zendesk:
- 2-way sync integration could be a challenge.
Help Scout
Help Scout is a cloud-based help desk solution that allows you to empower human driving and customizable live chat and email support with an array of tools that helps consistently in supporting your users.
Help Scout helps in humanizing chat support that will help your business to build good relationships with your customers and drive more interactions and engagement.
Help Scout – Let user serve themselves
Help Scout helps in the User Onboarding process by automatically creating a customer support ticket for any user who has an issue during onboarding and beyond which is a notable feature.
Key Benefits of Help Scout:
- Tickets can be segmented into buckets to accelerate the response rate.
Some Challenges of Help Scout:
- The folder can be created but those folders cannot be created based on tags.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software that allows businesses to effectively manage their customer care and support function. The primary purpose of the tool is to implement chat support in User Onboarding processes and track of all conversations.
Freshdesk – Have a responsive chat
Freshdesk, a ticketing software or a helpdesk tool is a perfect fit for small to medium-size enterprises that require an easily manageable helpdesk and can be effectively used for solving customer support tickets. It helps enterprises to track and resolve user queries, or any other form of enquiry from customers.
Key Benefits of Freshdesk:
- The modern interface includes smartphone applications.
- Simple and easy to navigate user interface.
- Integration with multiple products is available which increases the scope.
Some Challenges of Freshdesk:
- Reporting is adequate but needs tech-savvy personnel to deploy detailed reporting that suits the organization’s demand.
6. User Onboarding tools – Survey:
SurveyMonkey
A survey is the best way to understand whether your User Onboarding and training program is moving in the right or desired way. SurveyMonkey is the world’s leading survey platform that helps to create surveys that range from simple easy polls to in-depth market research.
SurveyMonkey – Power to drive curiosity
It’s a powerful cloud-based software as a service tool that allows you to create and run professional online surveys.
Key Benefits of Survey Monkey:
- Very robust with features like data analysis.
- Easy to set up surveys when compared with other tools.
Some Challenges of Survey Monkey:
- UI is too loaded.
Typeform
Typeform survey designs are minimal and memorable. Paying attention to your users should always be a high priority, but getting proper user feedback is time-consuming and expensive, there comes the need of Typeform.
Typeform – Make things a little more human
Typeform allows you to do things like business forms, product feedback, surveys, quizzes, landing page, contests, payment forms and many more.
Key Benefits of Typeform:
- Great level of customization and integration is available.
- Drag and drop elements for ordering and reordering.
Some Challenges of Typeform:
- The editor may not be as intuitive as you may expect but with time you get used to it.
Zoho Survey
Zoho Survey is an online survey platform that addresses User Onboarding survey needs and requirements. It is a satisfactory tool for organizations that needs to conduct surveys in customer satisfaction, marketing, finance, education, human resources, research and other business areas with a wide range of pre-built survey templates.
Zoho Survey – Survey made simple
Zoho Survey makes survey creation simple and administration easy and painless. Zoho Survey is optimized for mobile devices and allows you to track user engagement actively. Zoho Survey’s real-time reporting and analytics tool is powerful that helps you to organize your surveys effectively.
Key Benefits of Zoho Survey:
- The piping and logic features provide a better user experience for survey respondents.
- It allows the survey designer to see all questions on one page with the option of inserting any type of question anywhere within the survey.
Some Challenges of Zoho Survey:
- The interface could be more dynamic.
- Customization is not as flexible as other similar products.
7. User Onboarding tools – Analytics and Data Collection
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a behavioral and product user experience tracking tool. Mixpanel’s user interface is very simple and engaging for both mobile and web applications.
Mixpanel allows you to visualize and segment your data, reports, analytics, and monitor your User Onboarding KPIs. In the case of User Onboarding, Mixpanel helps you to understand your user behavior better before taking action and making any important decisions.
Similarly, social media tools can help track user interactions across social platforms, giving additional insights into user behavior and engagement beyond the product environment.
Mixpanel – Timely assistant optimizing every touchpoint
Mixpanel is a popular funnel analytics tool that provides visibility of how effectively you retain your users post-hiring. They allow you to track and monitor the progress of the User Onboarding process and helps to identify the touchpoints where the individual users need assistance and engagement.
Key Benefits of Mixpanel:
- It gives a lot of reporting options so you can visualize the data in different ways.
- Tying users with user attributes allows you to segment the users into cohorts which then can be tracked individually.
Some Challenges of Mixpanel:
- Since it is packed with features, it gets overwhelming. It usually demands proper training.
Amplitude
The Amplitude platform helps you to build better in-app experiences and improve your User Onboarding. Amplitude is a web and mobile analytics solution that improves retention by understanding the user journey and patterns. Amplitude analytics and dashboard allow you to monitor your product usage data and statistics in real-time, letting you know a to z about your app.
Amplitude’s notable features,
- Understand where users are navigating
- Deeper analytics and actionable insights
- Strategize product development
Amplitude – Behavioral targeting made simple
Amplitude released a tool called Amplitude Growth Engine, which helps you to learn and increase the winning hypothesis. Amplitude personalizes user experiences by understanding their actual behavior and building the segments tailored to your users. Amplitude helps enterprises target potential clients and increase revenue.
Key Benefits of Amplitude:
- Tracking of the particular user group is easy which helps to understand their needs and add necessary functionalities that they may like.
- A/B testing and graphical representation of data are available.
Some Challenges of Amplitude:
- Not an intuitive application and navigation could be challenging.
8. User Onboarding tools – A/B Testing Software
Optimizely
Optimizely is a customer experience optimization platform that leverages A/B testing, where two versions of a web page can be compared and perform multivariate testing.
Optimizely’s A/B testing methods help enterprises to identify better User Onboarding methods, most effective CTA’s and also helps in taking correct decisions during tough times.
Optimizely — Data-driven decision
Features of Optimizely,
- A/B testing
- Multi-page experimentation
- Analytics integrations
With Optimizely, an enterprise-grade A/B testing tool allows you to conduct multi-page experiments without coding. You can customize and control the experiment in your desired way, in the end, Optimizely provides you in-depth insights in the form of statistics, graphs, and analytics.
Key Benefits of Optimizely:
- Collecting all tests in a single interface allows multiple people to see what’s being tested.
- Developers can set the experiments easily.
Some Challenges of Optimizely:
- There is no easy way to check what tests are running and its effect without going to the management interface.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize is personalization and also an A/B testing platform. The unique and notable feature of Google Optimize is its in-depth integration with Google Analytics. This integration allows you to perform highly advanced targeting and conversion tracking.
Google Optimize – A Dynamic product by Google
Key Benefits of Google Optimize:
- Comprehensive audience targeting.
- More complex multivariate tests.
Some Challenges of Google Optimize:
- Reporting interface lack visual appeal when compared to other products.
9. User Onboarding tools – Visual Media tools:
Wistia
Wistia is a video software company that provides professional video-hosting services for businesses. Wistia is a trusted platform to create and host video tutorials to onboard your users quickly by making them understand and adopt your product in no time.
Wistia –Feel the power of personalization
Key Benefits of Wistia:
- Customize the videos as per your choice.
- Track and analyze the video performance.
Some Challenges of Wistia:
- It could add a few more integrations to empower its users.
10. User Onboarding tools – User Experience (UX) Journey
Hotjar
Hotjar is powerful behavior analytics and user feedback platform that allows you to understand the behavior and voice of your website users and get their feedback.
Hotjar – Visualize user behavior
Hotjar provides you the ‘big picture’ by combining heatmaps, conversion funnels and session recordings and offers you invaluable insights such as
- Users in-app experiences
- How to improve your site’s UX and performance
- How to increase conversion rates
- Track and monitor all the feedback in a visual dashboard
Key Benefits of Hotjar:
- The heat mapping tool of Hotjar gives deep insights. You can see how the user is traveling within the website and whether the rewrite section is performing on the expected lines or not.
- Feedback polls are useful for the development team to gather information about how the user felt with the latest changes on the website.
Some Challenges of Hotjar:
- The interface is a bit complicated for the first-time user as it involves too many touchpoints.
FullStory
FullStory is a web-based digital intelligence system that helps you to optimize your user experience within the application. It enables you to track and monitor each client’s activity.
FullStory – Tackles point of friction
FullStory captures all page views and analyze heatmaps, and also track every clicks users make on your site.
Key Benefits of Fullstory:
- Advanced search capabilities are available.
- Sessions can be filtered and segmented.
Some Challenges of Fullstory:
- It tends to assign multiple user IDs which makes it difficult to find one particular session.
Phew!!!
If you have reached here, I am sure you are a voracious reader. Kudos on that!
Fortunately or unfortunately, there are thousands of tools that fall under the spectrum of “tools helping in User Onboarding.” We have covered around 15+ tools here, selecting just one solution completely depends on what pain point you are trying to solve and the best tool that fits your requirement.
For example, if your objective is to not only faster User Onboarding process but also looking for feature adoption, and product analytics, the answer is a digital adoption platform like Apty.
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.