Month: February 2022

5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date February 16, 2022
No Comments on 5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

Customer Education is the Most Powerful Weapon to Survive in the Market.

Irrespective of the business you run or the product or service you want to deliver, the goal is to add value to the customer base. Any business that wants to survive in the market continually strives to develop a product or service that meets the needs of the customers. They want to solve the pain points that the customers may have before using the product.

In this hyper-competitive market, where products are becoming complex and advancing technology, it is vital to keep the customers knowledgeable. But how do you keep them educated about these factors? The best way is to launch the right customer training program. It ensures that your product is successful in the market when customers adopt the training.

What is a Customer Training Program?

When you launch a program, product, or service, a set of programs are developed to offer the consumers and stakeholders the required skills, information, and abilities to use the product to its maximum capacity. The aim is to arm customers with the resources and tools they need to become more informed consumers or buyers of the service or product.

With the help of customer education, a company can engage, onboard, and retain existing and new customers. By developing the customer education program, you are helping to exist and potential customers recognize the product’s value. The customer training program intends to offer a positive experience for the consumers.

As a part of the process, it is often conducted in two phases, pre-sales assistance, and after-sale education. In the pre-sale, the program helps consumers to know about the various features of the product. The process also helps the company know whether the service/product meets the consumer’s needs. The after-sale customer education program focuses on techniques and knowledge for optimum usage of the product/service.

The Customer Training Program Course Can Offer the Knowledge to the Consumers in Several Forms and Formats, Which Can Range From the Following.

Written material like purpose and focused blogs.
Multimedia, which can have video content focusing on skills.
Interactive knowledge bases with the help of AI chatbots.
Webinars for a live session group instruction process.
Interactive assessments to monitor and help consumers to track their progress with quizzes and tests.
Contacting the consumers with your customer service reps.

It is quite likely that you can find all these in the content marketing of your business. If that’s the case, it’s wonderful because you already have the base for creating a customer training program. However, customer education takes this training a step further, where resources are offered to consumers to better tackle product/service-oriented concerns. Moreover, while providing the training, the program also equips the consumer with enhanced insights with methods and tools that they can apply to resolve broader challenges on their own.

The topics covered in a customer training program are more than just help-desk topics. Its core focus is on developing self-service while having an always scalable approach even when there are n numbers of users of your product/service.

Given that proper customer education helps with scaling the business, there are few more benefits that the training offers. The next section discusses five of the key benefits of using the right customer education program.

5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

It has been witnessed that customer education programs can create a practical and positive experience not only for the consumers but also for employees dealing with the customers. Here are five top benefits of implementing the right customer training program portal.

1. Scale & Educate Every Customer

Many companies are now employing dedicated customer success managers to help with the onboarding of customers and train them with the products. The job, however, often becomes problematic when each customer manager has to assist many of the customers per day.

With the customer training program online, the customer success manager will only be required to help those who need the extra layer. Only when a customer finds certain factors confusing or not finding the answers in the training program will the customer-facing employee be required to engage.

The process automatically frees the customer service employees to tackle more pressing issues than troubleshooting mundane problems. This enables better scaling of the program or service while facilitating the education.

2. The Same Level of Learning for Every Customer

All customers want to feel special. Without a customer training program, the chances are one consumer can get through training while the other just the basics. This can result in having dissatisfied customers. There is no chance of a lack of consistency across the customer training with a customer training program.

This hence ensures each customer has a similar onboarding experience. The opportunity to access the same material and similarly navigate the product. It allows the consumer to feel confident that everyone gets the same information from the company.

3. Increase Cost-Efficiency

Often the job of customer service employees is tedious with answering the same old questions of the customers. This often results in employee churning; thus you have to hire and train the new ones. The training cost is quite expensive for the companies.

Additionally, if you are one of those who offers 24/7 customer service, you have to hire people round the clock, which is once again expensive. With a customer training program, you can cut through all these by reducing the churning, hiring people for shorter periods while ensuring your customers get a valuable and satisfying experience. Overall you reduce your overall expense to keep the customers satisfied.

4. Increasing Customer Trust

Customers want to be taken seriously, and they want to solve the problem by themselves instead of running to the company all the time. When you educate them, this builds the customer’s confidence; in return, they start trusting your company more.

So, if you are afraid that by educating your customer, they will choose your competitor, you are wrong. Your customer-centric attitude will help in creating the loyalty that you seek from your customers.

5. Product Development Made Easy

With a customer training program, you get constant feedback from the users. You can use these as actionable data to develop your product or service better. So, when you develop a product that connects with your customer, you will find a natural marketing ally of your product. They will advocate your brand, and customer recommendations work wonders for any business.

Final Thoughts.

Customer education programs offer a host of benefits while helping you to develop a community of loyal customers who will help you increase your ROI. So, if you haven’t started your customer education program yet, consider developing one now. Visit the best customer training platform to learn more.

Blog Customer Onboarding

Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date February 8, 2022
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Do You Want to Know the Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers?

Selling your client’s software isn’t enough to ensure their success, especially if they opt for a free trial first. To successfully onboard people in the future, you must ensure that they understand and use your product appropriately. This customer training strategy can help. The success of your client is your success.

The global value of the SaaS business is expected to reach $110 billion in 2020, with a 14.5 percent annual growth rate. By 2022, it is predicted to have grown to $143 billion.

To get you started, we’ll go through 10 strategies for improving customer onboarding program and providing maximum value and delight to your customers. SaaS onboarding best practices, on the other hand, are never too late to implement, and we encourage you to do so as soon as possible.

Top 10 Best Practices Every SaaS Company Must Follow to Onboard Customers.

1. Keep In Touch.

When learning to utilize new software or services, everyone will run into some snags or challenges. Follow up with your clients regularly to see how things are doing and if they require any assistance.

This will assist you in creating a trust while also demonstrating that you are a trustworthy service provider. You can schedule regular phone/Skype talks, online meetings, or outdoor gatherings to discuss any difficulties they may have.

2. Instruct Them.

As a service/software provider in your sector, you should be up to date on all current trends, news, and subjects. To improve your clients’ user experience, educate them on industry news, tips, and methods.

This can be accomplished through online schools, articles, and webinars. Share any fresh, relevant articles you write with them and invite them to webinars where you may inform/educate them and address their concerns.

3. Provide Access to a Wide Range of People.

Providing multiple access levels to different team members is a terrific method to get your client’s team acquainted with all of your software/capabilities. Service allows certain persons to receive invitations to explore different portions of the product.

4. Let Others Know About Your Success.

Providing evidence of previous satisfied and successful clients is a very effective technique. It quickly builds trust in your firm and demonstrates to your client that you know what you’re doing. Create excellent instructional case studies based on previous projects, describing the challenge and how you assisted in finding a solution.

5. Produce User Guides.

You can develop a detailed guide or merely an article, depending on the complexity of your software’s usage, to help new users understand the fundamentals of using your product. Your material could be a Q&A paragraph in which you ask the primary questions and then respond.

Screenshots are nearly always helpful in these instances, so don’t forget to provide them. You can send the user manual to their email address or post it on your website for them to read or download.

6. A Quick Tour of the Product.

Be a fantastic tour guide for your newly registered customer. While emphasizing the features and concrete benefits of your product, emphasize the problem it strives to answer as well as the larger vision of what you’re trying to achieve. It’s one thing to pique interest; it’s another to keep it alive.

Unfortunately, most products lose a large percentage of their first-time consumers after the sign-up procedure. While the reasons for churn may differ, a comprehensive onboarding architecture should generate interesting content to entice users to return to the platform. Make sure they realize the value your product can add to their business or service.

7. Improve Feedback & Communication.

It’s possible that some of your software’s features will irritate your clients or that they will want them to work differently. For this reason, encourage client feedback and idea generation.

Your clients are the ones that use your software/app/service daily, and if they have any suggestions for improving it, you should take advantage of them. Discuss their ideas and proposals in-depth to understand better what they want and how to accomplish it.

Never toss out ideas that aren’t feasible. Even if your client requests something unattainable, take the time to explain why and offer alternatives.

This will increase your client’s trust in you, extend their lifetime value, and demonstrate that you are a caring and responsible vendor. When your client’s happiness grows, your chances of a successful onboarding increase.

8. Instead of Selling Features, Sell Results.

It’s critical to consider your app/service from your clients’ perspective once you’ve outlined all of the features to them. After all, knowing all of the features and how they work is excellent, but your clients’ want is for you to succeed.

Knowing and comprehending features does not guarantee that they will achieve their objectives. To optimize the value you provide as a vendor, you must demonstrate and guide your client to success using your service’s capabilities. Your consumers must believe that they would be able to achieve success by using your program, which is why they should continue with you.

9. Indicate Conversions in the Early Stages.

If your clients have begun to utilize your service and are still in the free trial period, they are technically ready to convert. Why not focus on a faster conversion now that your service has piqued their interest enough to sign up for a free trial? You don’t have to wait until the end of the 30-day trial period to convert your consumers.

You have a few days to make a good impression. Clients are generally open to new ideas, discussions, and learning over the first few days. They want to know what your service has to offer, what features it has, and what techniques and tips they can use to attain their objectives faster.

10. Keep Your Tactics Up-to-Date.

Even if you’ve devised the ideal onboarding plan, it’s critical to keep the process going. With each new consumer, you have the opportunity to learn something new, something you didn’t know or hadn’t considered previously.

Concentrate on the facts and come up with fresh approaches to improve the process regularly. This will aid in ongoing innovation and increase client happiness and allow you to stand out from the competition. Develop a reputation as a SaaS company that cares about and listens to its customers. Also developing customer service training programs can help.

We hope that this list of top 10 best practices every SaaS company must follow to onboard customers help you.

Conclusion.

Design out-of-the-box customer onboarding tactics to impress your new user at every touchpoint, in addition to the broad criteria outlined above. Your onboarding techniques should not only teach users how to use your SaaS product, but they should also emphasize the numerous ways in which they can make their lives easier by continuing to use it.

Tags customer onboarding

Blog Customer Onboarding

The Best Definitive Guide for SaaS Customer Onboarding

Post author By CXcherry Marketing
Post date February 2, 2022
No Comments on The Best Definitive Guide for SaaS Customer Onboarding

Closeup of two content adult business men sitting at table, using tablet computer, working with documents and discussing them in cafe

Are you confused while deciding SaaS Customer Onboarding strategies? Do you want a definitive guide for SaaS customer onboarding? Then this is the right place.

When is customer onboarding necessary in SaaS? Do you have a product that is so self-explanatory & simple that your customer would adopt it at ease? When we say onboarding, in-context, we mean how frictionless your product is for new customers.

SaaS Customer Onboarding is the process of helping new customers get started and stay engaged. What is a good or bad or even worse onboarding experience for SaaS customers?

The straightforward answer to this is: Your onboarding practices must stay aligned with that – First Valuable Moment.

You skipped your assessed step – and you might lose the flow, customers might get clueless about what to do. Then bad or worse becomes a clueless consequence in onboarding experiences.

What are the perfect practices for a successful customer onboarding program? There are no perfect templates or steps that you can imply that will work – It is like a continuous improvement process. You follow a plan – stay in touch with your customers – take note of friction points – and improve!

Especially this guide is for SaaS companies to improve their customer experience, identify customer churn, and increase retention rate through the proven customer onboarding methods with tools to personalized SaaS Customer Onboarding.

If you get inspiration or this blog raised any questions regarding your onboarding, here is your free guide for your late whiteboard sessions.

Use the table of content to navigate the guide.

What Is Customer Onboarding?
Why Is Customer Onboarding Important for SaaS?
How To Implement Right Customer Onboarding? (Tools + Methods)
How To Create A Customer Onboarding Process For SaaS?
Conclusion

What is Customer Onboarding?

Customer Onboarding is like a seed, you nurture it with the right amount of water, air, and sunlight & it will flourish. Similarly, you nurture your customers by introducing them to your products & services, making them comfortable in their initial journey.

When any new customer sign-up to use your product, it means -Customers stimulated an idea in their head about how it would be with your product! It could be your technical setup, your product benefits, your features, or even your UX that might have attracted them to join.

But, if customers are clueless to find what they are looking for as a solution, no matter how easy-to-access or attractive dashboard you have, customers will churn off.

So, your entire efforts must stay aligned with manifesting ideas of the customer to become a living experience for them.

E.g.:- Twitter (content consumption app) makes it so smooth sailing for new users by mapping an image of what kind of journey they desire.

Twitter Onboarding Metrics:-

Twitter allows users to choose their path of interest even before the sign-up – this process creates a space for users choice as in how do they want their journey to start using the application:

Follow your interests.
Hear what people are talking about!
Join the Conversation.

Why is Customer Onboarding Important for SaaS Companies?

It is a Sunday morning & you excitedly planned to head out for a coffee. While sitting near the window of the coffee shop, your attention drew towards two men humping with a large acrylic-on-canvas pop art painting across the street for an art exhibition.

As your interest pursued you to visit the fine art- you stepped in & found yourself surrounded by everything related to art. You are clueless about whether to roam around or keep staring around – unless you are an art connoisseur!

Now, the question of the story asks:

How Do You Think Your Software Relates To Customer Perspectives?

Essentially, which stage of your software positions your customer best value? Remember, It is not about mapping each step in detail – It is about staying in close touch with your customers on the macro level.

To initiate any new customers about your products and services – you must use the power of storytelling.

The Power of Storytelling! (SaaS Onboarding Method)

Everyone loves stories! It is like, you visualized all those characters and storylines within yourself for that duration – And after a while, it becomes a personal journey for you at the end. Does it happen to everyone?

But what is so special about a story? The real magic lies in the hook & the promise!

What is a Hook?

It is that heroic character, that struggling situation, that winning story end that explores ideas & imaginations of the witnessing mind – it sets a clear picture of the journey since the start.

What is a Promise?

It is like connecting dots or a puzzle with each character & situation according to the delivered hook.

Similarly, when you think about how your software can relate to customers, you realize you need a story for your product.

How To Create Your Product Story Framework? (Using Hook & Promise Method)

Like stories involve characters and situations, you need a hook and a promise to start with new customers.

What is the Hook for SaaS Companies?

It is the what of your company – What does your software do?

Now, if you happen to notice the topmost publicly traded SaaS companies in Montclair250 & SaaS1000.com list, you will observe the most successful SaaS companies follow a pattern – It is the hook (what do you do?)

The World Most Successful SaaS Companies – Montclair SaaS 250

And the promise (how you do that?) method in each of their onboarding metrics.

For an e.g.

On the homepage of Salesforce, they use the hook & promise method to communicate with new customers & even engage with old ones to explore their features.

And they say it right underneath the hook step – a promise of how to do it. (Features & Benefits)

Once you get into their footing with this approach – it becomes a communicative expectation for your customers – That is why being thoughtful and intentional with the language is a must-thing because customers will be looking for evidence of what you said on the homepage.

“Onboarding was and is the one truly universal problem every piece of software has.”

When customers find a hook in your story, it is time for you to onboard them smoothly so that they do not feel lost after signing up.

How To Create A Smooth Customer Onboarding Process For SaaS?

Customer Onboarding does not have to be the next big marketing project for your company – that you start considering after realizing the importance of customer participation. Onboarding is like a function of your company – the more you feel the friction that customers are getting, the more you improve & grow.

So, to create a personalized customer onboarding framework, you need to establish a customer-centric approach:

Identify Success (Customers).
Map Milestones.
Find the Friction.
Clear the Path.
Measure & Iterate.

1. Identify Success (Customers).

When your customer starts using your product, they expect a visual – their first win. So, delivering specific goals according to unique customer solutions creates an achievable environment.

Let us take an example,

You are a startup owner looking to explore your services through social media – Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest in its trial stage allows a handful of customized features that can take you forward

Access to their SEO tool
Daily rank tracking
Seo training & support
Personalized Seo suggestion

It does two things from the customer’s perspective: solves the daily ongoing SEO problems & shows them the bigger picture to achieve organic growth for their website.

2. Map Milestones.

You don’t need to map the tiny steps of the customer at the very beginning. Keep your focus on the macro-level output & stay in the loop with the customer’s journey while tackling their ongoing friction points.

3. Find the Friction.

Customers using your software for the first time and customers finding their first success, your efforts is to find that point where you are losing them on a macro level – it will give you enough space & time to improve their ongoing journey.

What was the issue?

The hypothesis tested and excluded:

Is the Customer Unhappy? No, they love it! (High NPS)
Is there a cost that causes churn? (No, there’s a free trial!)
Is it too hard to set up? (Actually, it’s pretty easy.)

Real Explaination!

You might have missed out on a big chunk of customers’ churn while testing & evaluating by yourself. Try out some quantitative analysis. Use these available tools to find out the links between customers’ churn.

Effective analytics tools you can use:

4. Clear the Path.

Once you found the friction, now it’s time to find ways to solve it. There are mainly two ways to solve any friction point in SaaS onboarding:

Technology: Enhance the UX, add a new platform, assist 24/7 chatbots. (Basically, ease off the friction points)
Talk to your customers: Whether it’s a one-to-many or one-to-one conversation about what to do, it is a very unscalable process, so pick up the phone – Ask them! Then try to resolve them in a more scalable manner.

5. Measure & Iterate.

Maintain to keep yourself on the customer’s foot, remember – improving customer onboarding isn’t a project. So, when suddenly improving onboarding pops up again, then it’s probably not why you should do it.

It is a function of the company. It is a continuous process of improvement. So, never stop, find the next friction – improve – find the next friction – improve!

How to Implement Right Customer Onboarding?

1. Welcome email.

Your new customers need to feel reassured and confident about their decision to invest in your product – To make them experience instant gratification or a rewarding experience.

A welcome email can provide access to their instant gratifications (bonus, lucky prize, added features, or even free services)

Miro has enhanced its presence in the SaaS industry like a storm with its easy-to-use and interactive whiteboard sessions.

And Miro has a very creative yet simplistic sense of onboarding new customers with emails. It brings out a “Tips & Tricks” mode for customers during their focus whiteboards and also manages the workflow with a not-so-stressful user interface.

The key ingredients to every compelling Email Onboardings:

It is super easy to read.
It went straight into the customer’s inbox.
It includes a helpful video (What to do next? Or even starting bonus)
It came from the real person. (whom a customer can reach out to query!)
It provides a helpful CTA.

2. Product Walk-through.

A welcoming message at the initial stage is a great way to initiate new customers about – how to get along with the product overview. You can attach a small snippet video about ‘how-to’ start off using your product, or you can use different ways to present product tutorials:

Using Video Tutorials
- Demo/Explainer Video
- Mini-Movie Walkthrough
- Lively Instructions for Complex Products
- Friendly Tips for First Use

An in-app learning section or a small product tour.
Tutorial buttons or pop-ups alongside different features.

Canva makes it fun! Your product tutorial can be simple, fun, and guiding. Take an example of Canva – their growth process is simple & proven in work.

You are free to choose your specific design templates:

And then Canva uses animation to guide you through the first design & will remain a guide throughout the process.

While you use or create design templates – Canva assists along the way with welcome pop-ups and infographics to assist you with features and specific areas of application.

The simple, fun, and personalized product tour resulted in a 10% boost inactivation for the company.

3. Messaging (In-App)

In-app messaging is there to introduce your product or services to customers, especially those who had been using your product for the first time. By delivering welcome pop-ups and brief product tours – you engage with your users right from the start.

Like, take this as an example built with Helppier on Salient Demo. In addition to just onboarding email & messages, they included a specific video & resource for first-time customers to go through before getting started.

Now there are chances that your customer is in a hurry and tries to skip every onboarding step – That’s why try to keep your onboarding In-app messaging as simple & beautiful as these top SaaS companies:

Trello – Keeps it Simple & On-point!

Hubspot – Simple, relatable, and actionable!

Slack – Informative, Direct, and Solution-based.

Conclusion:

Customer Onboarding is a function of SaaS companies. Once your customers sign-up, they need you as a guiding buddy on each step of their journey. Because once the customers are lost or feel churn to move ahead with your product without any assistance – they won’t come back!

So, if you want to increase customer retention and LTV, improve your customer onboarding process and reduce customer churn. We hope that this definitive guide for SaaS customer onboarding helps you.