Do you remember the number of times you uninstalled an app just because you didn't understand how to use it? Don't worry; you are not alone; 8 out of 10 people do the same.
As a SaaS owner, that's a hell of a lot of users. After spending so much time and resources building a product, acquiring customers and convincing them to give your tool a chance from the pool of choices is not easy.
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But, you can lose that chance in a minute with a bad customer experience.
Today, customer experience plays a major role in deciding whether they want to continue using a product or not. That's only possible when they derive value from your SaaS tool faster.
And this is where user onboarding comes to the rescue. The onboarding process helps users understand your product and reach that pivotal "Aha moment" as soon as possible.
SaaS owners can use software onboarding tools that offer video tutorials, product walkthroughs, emails, a knowledge centre, and many more to create an excellent user onboarding experience.
After testing 50+ SaaS onboarding tools, we have filtered the best of the best software for SaaS owners to smash their user onboarding experience and drive insane revenue growth.
#1 What does a SaaS onboarding tool do?
User onboarding software helps new users transition from being unaware of the product's features to using it efficiently according to their pain points. It understands each user's needs, sets up orientation guides, and gives SaaS owners insight into how new users perform.
When you have hundreds or thousands of users, it becomes impossible for your sales or customer success team to personally be part of the user onboarding process. Software onboarding tools automate the process and use various methods like emails, live chat, or tutorials to help customers receive value from the product faster.
#2 What features to consider when choosing your SaaS onboarding tool?
Choosing the right user onboarding software for your SaaS tool is crucial. They are a representative of your support team that helps solve user problems. SaaS onboarding tools boost user retention and product adoption rates, leading to more conversions.
Here are some features to consider when choosing your best customer onboarding tools:
- Ease of use: Your SaaS onboarding tool should be easy to use for users to navigate through and understand how your SaaS tool can help resolve their problems without requiring a lot of time and effort.
- Dedicated features: An onboarding platform should contain interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, a knowledge base, and tutorials to provide relevant direction to the users at the right times.
- Analytics and reporting: For SaaS owners, a customer onboarding tool should contain insights on user satisfaction scores, views, and completion of the onboarding process. Relevant analytics can help market your product in the right way, ensuring a decrease in drop-offs, identifying upskilling opportunities, and amplifying user experience.
- Continuous updates and improvements: The user onboarding process will continue to evolve with time. So, you cannot depend on an onboarding tool that doesn't have plans to update its features. Technology evolves, and customer behavior and preferences change; that's why it's important for your customer onboarding to keep adding new features.
- Customer support: Choose a software onboarding tool that offers top-notch customer support so you can get a fast answer to all your queries.
- Integrations: The software should allow integration with other third-party tools so you can seamlessly use your existing tech stack of CRM, email marketing tools, etc.
- Pricing: Analyze what features you want in your customer onboarding tool and then filter the best ones from the market. Now you can easily evaluate the pricing of one another and choose what best fits your needs. You must also look for free trials before committing to any software.
#3 These 9 best SaaS onboarding tools to boost product adoption
Now that you know how a SaaS onboarding tool helps and the factors to consider when choosing the best one for your business. It's time we give you some options on various SaaS onboarding tools that you can use to provide an excellent customer experience.
Since there is no universal tool for everything and onboarding users is a complex process requiring multiple touchpoints with several tools. Therefore, we have split the list into various categories according to their functions to make things simpler.
1. SaaS onboarding tool for first user experience - MarbleFlows
Onboarding flows are customers' first user experiences with your product. It helps to introduce your features and suggest ways to use the interface. Interactive flows help lower customer churn and let users realize the product’s full potential.
MarbleFlows is a no-code first-time user experience app that lets you create interactive flows within seconds. It offers an array of templates that you can use while onboarding customers. You can customize these templates according to your needs and add questions that help you better understand your user's journey.
Using the collected data, you can personalize the user onboarding process according to how they can best draw the benefits of your product. You can A/B test various user journeys to select the best onboarding flow for your SaaS tool.
Marble pricing:
MarbleFlows offers a basic free plan and two paid plans, starting at €12.99/month.
2. SaaS onboarding tool for video onboarding - Wistia
Video tutorials are an excellent way to encourage users to complete tasks and engage with your SaaS tool for longer. In fact, 97% of people feel that videos effectively welcome and educate new customers.
And one of the best SaaS onboarding tool that lets you include video effectively is Wistia.
Wistia is quite a popular video marketing platform that helps to create, host, market, and analyze your videos. You can record videos from your browser with or without your face. Furthermore, use Wistia's editing tool to make your videos look polished and professional.
Wistia's interactive video onboarding feature lets you customize your videos with brand identity, call to action, video resolution, and other features that help users engage better.
Wistia pricing:
Wistia has three paid plans starting at $24/month. It also has a free plan to try before committing to the paid ones.
3. Email SaaS onboarding tool - Intercom
Onboarding emails play a major role in educating and reminding users that they have started using your product and how they can benefit from it. This is an excellent chance to engage with your users and provide a premium customer experience.
Intercom is an excellent communication tool that is used for email user onboarding. You can segment users, send personalized messages, and set triggered events for automation. Marketers can benefit from its rich behavioral attributes to control what messages users receive and when.
You can test the performance of your email A/B testing against other variants to find the winner. It lets you analyze how each email performs through open, click, and reply rates. Intercom UI also offers an array of successful message styles that can be customized as per your needs.
Intercom pricing:
Intercom engagement platform offers unique pricing depending on the number of users and unique people reached. You can take their free demo to learn more.
4. SaaS onboarding tool for feedback collection - Interact
Most customers won't voice their opinions or complaints. Only 1 out of 26 users will come up to you with their problems; others will switch to your competitor without a word. So, you must let your customers know you are willing to listen to their problems.
Customer feedback surveys are the simplest way to ask for feedback from your customers. They just have to fill out a form, and you get to understand the problems that your customers are facing.
Interact is a well-established customer feedback tool where you can create simple quizzes for your users. It has an array of Interact quiz templates that you can customize from scratch to match your brand style.
Interact's robust analytics gives you a bird's eye view of your quiz's performance to help understand your customer's challenges.
Interact pricing:
Interact app offers three paid plans starting at $39/month. You can take their free trial to learn more.
5. SaaS onboarding tool for user communication - Zendesk
Customer support is key in making your users happy with your SaaS tool. It becomes more important when you are onboarding new users for a holistic customer-centric experience.
Zendesk is a customer service software that strikes a balance between providing quick answers by integrating knowledge bases and live chat, as well as offering human conversational support through a ticketing system.
Zendesk offers an all-in-one dashboard where agents can track between conversations and respond from a unified place.
Zendesk pricing:
Zendesk customer support software offers three paid plans starting at $49/month, billed annually. You can take their free trial to learn more.
6. SaaS onboarding tool for product analytics - Mixpanel
Want to know how your product is used? What challenges do your customers face? Or what type of user does your SaaS tool retain the most?
Then, Mixpanel is your ultimate solution.
Mixpanel is a product analytics software that lets you analyze conversions, measure active usage and find retention spots. It offers a powerful product analytics portal that analyzes every bit of your customer's movement and tracks KPIs that let product managers make better decisions.
Mixpanel gives insights on users' interactions with your product on mobile or web and creates cohorts based on their actions, target segments, and more.
Mixpanel pricing:
Mixapanel offers two paid plans starting at $25/month. You can also use their free plan to get started.
7. SaaS onboarding tool for knowledge centre - Sprinklr
Many SaaS owners think that if their customers are facing a problem, the first thing they want to do is get on a call with your representative. But that's actually the opposite.
Research by Harvard Business Review says that 81% of all customers will work to find a solution rather than reach a representative. This shows the importance of self-service amongst customers.
And the best way to improve self-service applications is through the knowledge base.
Sprinklr knowledge centre lets you collect, organize, and share answers to questions through how-to guides and faqs on your website and mobile app across channels. You can integrate a conversational bot into your knowledge base and automate answers to repetitive questions.
Sprinklr also maximizes agents' productivity with an internal smart knowledge base that surfaces relevant guides according to customer queries. You can also track the performance of your knowledge base and make changes to your content accordingly.
Sprinklr pricing:
Sprinklr offers unique pricing; you can request a demo or start your free trial to learn more.
8. SaaS onboarding tool for screen recording - Loom
Sometimes help docs are not just enough for customers to solve their problems. To make things easier, agents can send them screen-recorded videos explaining how to get started.
Loom is an excellent screen recording software that most people use to provide visual support to customers. It comes as a web app, a desktop app, and a chrome extension, all available for Mac and Windows users.
You can record the screen, yourself, or both using Loom. It is extremely easy to create and share explainer videos with your customers.
Loom pricing:
Loom screen recording software offers a free plan (best for small businesses), and two paid plans starting at $10/month/user.
9. SaaS onboarding tool for documentation automation - Scribe
There are always a number of repetitive questions that your support representative keeps drowning in. Instead of wasting your resources on doing repetitive tasks, automate the process by creating a step-by-step guide using Scribehow.
Using the Scribe tool, you can record your process into easy-to-follow step-by-step guides in the formats of text and screenshots. You can also share these guides with your customers, saving you 90% of the time spent explaining processes.
Scribe Pricing:
Scribe document automation software offers a free plan, and two paid plans starting at $29/user/month.
Wrapping up
That's it. These were our favourite SaaS onboarding tools that you can use for first-time users to simplify complicated processes and help you easily navigate your platform. Using at least some of these tools is crucial for customer retention and, most importantly, for making them happy. You can definitely filter through SaaS tools depending on your product and the level of your customer awareness for desired results.
Written by Rashi Jaitly.
