What is Onboarding? A thorough explanation of its importance and key points in Saas customer success

What is Onboarding? A thorough explanation of its importance and key points in Saas customer success.

Table of Contents

1. What is onboarding in customer success?
1-1. What is Customer Success?
1-2. What is Onboarding?
1-3. Differences between Adoption and Expansion
1-4. The Importance of Onboarding in Customer Success Operations
1-5. How to Successfully Implement Customer Success Activities for Onboarding and Key Points
1-6. Set KGI and KPI
1-7. KGI and KPI Setting Points
2. Summary
2-1. Introduction of Services
2-2. Achievements

1. What is onboarding in customer success?

1-1. Customer Success

"Customer Success" refers to the concept of "guiding customers to success" and is generally defined as "efforts to lead customers to success". In recent years, this concept has gained attention, particularly among companies that offer subscription-based services, due to the nature of their revenue structure. In a situation where subscription-based products and services are proliferating and customers are becoming more likely to switch to other services, it is important to consider "how to keep customers using our service". The role of Customer Success is to accompany customers and help them maximize the value of the product or service they have purchased.

"It can also be said as support to lead customers to success."

What is Customer Success?

1-2. Onboarding

"Onboarding" in customer success is the process of supporting customers who have started using a product or service to understand how to use it and its features. The goal is to quickly and smoothly guide users to a state where they can use the service without confusion, and to promote product and service adoption within the customer base.

1-3. Differences between Adoption and Expansion

Onboarding is a support for utilizing systems and tools immediately after their introduction. It supports customers in understanding and grasping how to use and the functions, and increases their expectations and maintains their interest in the system and tools.
Adoption is a support for establishing the "full-fledged" use of systems and tools. It introduces specific usage methods and examples, and ensures that customers use them with satisfaction. The purpose is to improve satisfaction and understanding of the system.
Expansion is the stage where services are renewed, upsold, and cross-sold. We provide support to achieve actual results and move on to the next stage.

Reference: What is a Customer Journey? Steps for Creation and Key Points for Operation

What are the main phases of customer success and the key points of success?

The above article explains the main phases of customer success.
●Onboarding: Support for customers when they start using products or services
●Adoption: Support for customers to fully utilize products or services
●Expansion: Upselling and cross-selling to existing customers to expand the use of products or services
In addition, the article also explains the time-to-value (TTV) for successful customer success and points for successful adoption.

1-4. The Importance of Onboarding in Customer Success Operations

Onboarding in customer success is an important step when customers first start using a product or service. The main goal is to increase customer satisfaction and avoid early churn (cancellation). Below, we will explain in detail the importance of onboarding.

●Infrastructure development for customer lifecycle: The customer lifecycle refers to the flow from when a customer becomes aware of a product or service, makes a purchase, and continues to make repeat purchases. Onboarding in customer success is the entry point to this lifecycle. By providing appropriate support when a customer first starts using a product or service, we can maximize their success experience and build a continuous relationship.●Continued use of services: When a customer first starts using a product or service, insufficient understanding of how to use it or its functions can lead to early cancellation. By supporting customers in smoothly using the product through onboarding, we can improve customer satisfaction and promote continued use of the service.●Maximizing LTV (Lifetime Value) of customers: LTV is an indicator of the profits brought by a customer from the start of their use of our company until the end. By promoting continued use of the service through onboarding, we can increase LTV.●Promoting upselling and cross-selling: When customers become proficient in using a product they purchased for the first time through onboarding, new needs and dissatisfaction may arise. This can lead to upselling and cross-selling, contributing to an increase in LTV.

In customer success, proper onboarding serves as the foundation for maximizing customer success and building long-term relationships.

What is a churn rate? Improvement methods
What is LTV? How to maximize it

1-5. How to Successfully Implement Customer Success Activities for Onboarding

Defining and sharing the success of "onboarding" that fits our own products and services is extremely important. Below are the key points for that.

●Clear goal setting: By setting KGI (Key Goal Indicator), the entire team can work towards a common goal. Customers also understand their expectations and clarify their expectations for service implementation.●Improving customer satisfaction: If onboarding is successful, customers can use the service smoothly and their satisfaction will improve. Improving satisfaction leads to repeat use and word-of-mouth spread.●Promoting customer engagement: By increasing contact with customers during the onboarding process, trust is built. Customers actively participate in the service and engagement increases.●Strengthening customer success: By sharing the success criteria for onboarding, the customer success team can provide support tailored to the customer's needs. Customer success directly contributes to the success of the company.●Guidelines for improvement: Based on the defined success criteria, you can find guidelines for improving the onboarding process. Collect customer feedback and optimize the process.

By defining unique success criteria for our products and services and sharing them with our customers, we can maximize the effectiveness of onboarding.

1-6. Set KGI and KPI

KGI (Key Goal Indicator) and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) are important indicators in goal setting.
●KGI (Key Goal Indicator): KGI represents the "goal". In other words, it is the final target value that the project should achieve. For example, monthly contract numbers, conversion rates, and sales amounts are set as KGI. After setting KGI, KPI is set towards it, and there is a dependency where KGI is also achieved by achieving KPI.●KPI (Key Performance Indicator): KPI is an "intermediate goal" and is an indicator that evaluates the processes necessary to achieve the final goal. KPI is set by quantifying the actions necessary to achieve KGI. For example, if KGI is set to 10 monthly contract numbers, "making 50 appointments" to achieve it would be a KPI.

1-7. KGI and KPI Setting Points

●Always quantify. Set specific targets with concrete numbers.●Be aware of the relationship between KGI and KPI. KPIs that do not contribute to KGI are meaningless, so confirm their relevance.●Utilize KPI trees. This is a method of visualizing KPIs by breaking them down and placing KGI at the top of the tree.

Setting KGI and KPI is an important indicator even in onboarding.

What is a customer journey? Steps for creating and operating it
"2. Steps for creating a customer journey"

2. Summary

Many BtoB companies (especially SaaS companies) have a high priority for customer success. The tasks of the customer success department are very diverse, so efficient task execution, including onboarding, is required. Human Science's services can implement measures that lead to improved efficiency of the customer success department and CX (customer experience).

2-1. Introduction of Services

To efficiently share information on know-how for customer success or to increase customer satisfaction, it is important to maintain documents. This requires securing resources. However, creating manuals and improving/training content to increase customer satisfaction requires a lot of personnel and time, and is becoming a high priority and heavy workload task.
At Human Science, there are many services available for customers in the Customer Success department. In particular, we believe that the quality of the content provided by the Customer Success department is the key to success. Therefore, it is necessary to improve and create manuals, enhance FAQs, and create training content. All of these tasks require costs if done in-house. Additionally, the quality must be easy to understand. At Human Science, we have a lot of experience in creating easy-to-understand manuals and e-learning content. We offer the following services:

・Improvement of manual and training text quality
We propose the most suitable instruction manuals, technical documents, help, and FAQs for your environment. We provide consulting services from evaluating current manuals to creating a multilingual support system and building and operating a CMS. We can also handle the production of video manuals.・Creation of educational content and support for introducing LMS (Learning Management System)
Similar to manuals, we propose the most suitable educational content for your environment. We can also optimize and provide multilingual support for LMS based on the evaluation of current content.・Support for introducing and building chatbots
To improve customer support efficiency, many companies are introducing chatbots. We propose the most suitable chatbot for your environment. We can provide one-stop support from introducing chatbot systems to creating content.

2-2. Achievements

The following are achievements for the Customer Success Department.

WingArc1st Inc.: Consulting and content creation services for the Customer Success department

We also offer services that can handle the creation of easy-to-understand "manuals" and "video manuals", as well as e-learning content, which are necessary for customer success, all in one stop. Please take advantage of them.