Do you ever feel like you are not able to fully help customers that contacted your support? Like they were not completely satisfied even though you provided them with an effective solution? Like they were not completely onboard? Your support team might be missing some key components. One of these components could be efficient user onboarding. In this article, we will explain how user onboarding completes customer support.

What is User Onboarding?#

We said that user onboarding completes customer support, but what is user onboarding? You might know it as teaching customers how to use your product when they first acquire it. I’m afraid this perception of a highly crucial part of user experience is completely wrong.

User Onboarding is the whole process of turning a potential customer into a fan. This happens when your customer is fully acquainted with your product and its value, and has all its features adopted through interactive walkthroughs, feature highlights, and various tasks that help them explore the product.

At the end of the onboarding process that you have designed, your user must experience an "Aha!" moment where they understand what your product does, how it does it and in what ways it can help them. If the solution your product offers is what they need, and they have experienced their "Aha!" moment, your users become your fans.

Click here to read all about "Aha!" moments and how to search for them.

How does it help your company?#

User onboarding is the key to the overall success of your product. It is! It’s the main factor that improves all the ratings that determine the success of a business.

First, it increases conversion. It provides your users with a clear value proposition. When they understand what your product offers quickly, users will understand how it can help them, so they will be more likely to adopt your product.

Second, it will increase retention and decrease churn. Having users learn all the functions of your product and offering them what they need will make customers keep using your product. They will be coming back for your solution month after month.

And last, it educates users. A successful onboarding teaches your users how to successfully use your product and how to implement it in their daily lives. A well-learned solution becomes indispensable for a user. It also improves the overall quality of their experience with your product.

It is not a first-day thing#

So, user onboarding is highly important, and it doesn’t mean just teaching your users how to use your product. It goes way beyond that and never stops until your user becomes a fan and a master of your product. The onboarding processes of the majority of the products last a day or at max, a week. It is impossible to transform every customer into a fan in a week. The average transformation takes a lot longer than that.

To shorten this process and onboard users more efficiently, you can’t ever stop working on it. You have to constantly improve your user onboarding process and optimize it to your ever-evolving product so that your users don’t get left behind.

User Onboarding Completes Customer Support#

"Helping your users easily understand how your product works". It sounds like something the support team would do, right? Unfortunately, it is generally not! Although it may be unbelievable, the onboarding of most products is created, maintained, and improved by developers and product teams while customer support departments suffer from not being able to utilize onboarding processes. This absence makes the majority of customer support teams incomplete.

How are modern customer support teams built#

Modern customer support teams consist of customer service representatives that devote their days to solving the problems of the users with the product, otherwise directing them to people more knowledgeable on the subject.

They also try to gather feedback and transfer these feedback over to the product team for improvement. In short, they attend to users’ requests.

Every ticket is solved by onboarding your user again#

Let’s assume that you have built a product that is flawless. No user ever experiences an error while using it. Do you think you would no longer need customer support? I’m afraid you would still need it.

Most of the time a customer contacts with the support team because they don’t know how to get over a problem that they can solve themselves. But they are not aware of this, and they feel stuck so they ask for help. The only aim of the following conversation between the customer and the support team is to teach them the solution to the problem.

This is not necessary, though. You don’t have to have your employees spend hours teaching users the same things over and over again. You can automate this process by designing personalized and efficient onboarding flows that help users explore every feature and aspect of your product. When you successfully do that, you will see a significant decrease in the tickets you receive.

Make onboarding an everyday task of your support team#

To create the perfect onboarding process you have to focus on improving it every day.

But you can’t have developers doing that because they don’t have an active connection with the users. They won’t know where to improve.

The best team that can push through this responsibility and achieve success is customer support as they are always listening to the customers and are aware of their pain points and requests.

You don’t need to establish another department to do this#

Building onboarding processes require a lot of time and effort, lots of coding and design. You will have to actively involve a developer and a designer, as well as someone from the customer support. This team will collaborate for a few weeks before having the final product. But it doesn’t have to necessarily be this hard to create an efficient onboarding flow.

A lot of companies noticed these problems that businesses are experiencing. They have developed software that help you create onboarding flows. Most of these tools do not require an additional developer or a designer, just someone that knows the pain points of the users and how to solve them.

UserGuiding is one of these tools, With UserGuiding you can create onboarding processes, highlight features, conduct NPS surveys, message your customers in-app, and personalize their experience with segmentation, completely code-free. Compared to its competitors, UserGuiding is more actionable, affordable and its customer support is more accessible. Click here to start your free trial and see what it offers for yourself!

Summary#

Every time your user experiences a problem with using your product, they contact customer support. These problems are caused by inefficient onboarding processes, so they need to be onboard again.

Creating onboarding flows should not be the one-time duty of the product teams. They should be a regular responsibility of the customer support teams since it will be what completes and improves the service they offer to their customers.

Check out our article How User Onboarding Boosts Customer Success for further reading on the subject!