Customer onboarding is important for long-term business success because it goes beyond simply introducing customers to your product or service. After all, it’s all about ensuring satisfaction and setting the stage for a lasting partnership.
Another core benefit you should remember is how it can help you build trust. A smooth (and ideally personalized) experience shows you're committed to helping customers achieve their goals.
In return? You'll get loyal customers and strengthen your relationship with them right from the start.
Still, there's a clear distinction to make between customer and user onboarding. The former focuses on decision-makers and long-term relationships while the latter remains more tactical and aimed at individual users.
This guide provides actionable templates, tips, and insights to optimize both. Together, these processes ensure a seamless experience that aligns with your customers’ goals and maximizes their potential with your product.
A customer onboarding checklist is a list of steps you'll use to guide new customers from their initial purchase to using your product or service correctly.
It ensures things will go as planned, getting customers up-to-speed with your product, by relying on a couple of key milestones, actions, and resources. You need this structured approach to avoid common problems like customers taking too long to understand how your product works or, worse, abandoning the process.
While a customer onboarding checklist focuses on the broader relationship—addressing both decision-makers and end users—a user onboarding checklist targets the adoption process at the individual user level.
These tools help ensure that users understand how to navigate the product effectively and quickly achieve their outcomes.
Here's a comparison of customer vs. user onboarding:
The better your customer onboarding process, the higher your chances to make a good first impression and keep your new customers for years.
One of the key benefits of effective onboarding is its ability to align the customer’s goals with your solution. By understanding their unique objectives and tailoring the onboarding process to address these, you can demonstrate immediate value while building trust.
Customers who feel understood and supported are more likely to stay engaged, explore advanced features, and expand their use of your offering, driving both their success and your business growth.
in other words, customer onboarding focuses on the big picture. So let's see where user onboarding comes in.
The latter is all about ensuring users can quickly adopt a product. The goal? Minimal friction and a clear path to value.
Tools like in-app checklists, product walkthroughs, and gamification play a crucial role in this process. They guide users step-by-step, highlighting features and actions that lead to success.
By making the experience intuitive and engaging, you help users gain confidence and mastery, which in turn reduces frustration and increases overall satisfaction.
Start by welcoming both decision-makers and end-users with a SaaS-first approach:
Highlight SaaS-specific resources, such as access to customer success contacts or chat support for questions during setup.
Use your SaaS platform’s email automation tool to trigger personalized welcome messages at the right time.
Conduct a kickoff call or an automated onboarding survey directly within the SaaS platform to gather insights. Use some of the following questions to help:
Share data-driven recommendations based on their responses (e.g. “Based on your needs, we suggest setting up [Feature X] first.”). This helps you customize the onboarding process by taking into account exactly what new users want.
Not sure how to track these goals and measure alignment?
Customer success software gives you a place to keep all your customer goals, pain points, and preferences in one place for easy reference. You can also use it to monitor progress toward these goals throughout the onboarding process and report the status of your onboarding activities.
Create a SaaS-specific onboarding roadmap, highlighting key milestones for success like:
Include any other metrics specific to SaaS adoption, such as feature utilization rates or time-to-value (TTV).
Use in-app messaging to communicate progress to users, ensuring alignment across the journey:
Another important aspect of the onboarding experience is making sure the right people have access to the app and your files. For each of the role examples below, you should be able to customize the exact permission levels and responsibilities as early as the client onboarding process.
Admins, for instance, are almost always in charge of the platform configuration, adding team members, and monitoring usage. Power users shouldn't be left out either as they're the early adopters who can champion the software internally. Then, there are the end-users who interact with the SaaS platform for specific tasks or workflows.
Give customers help as they're setting up SaaS-specific configurations, such as:
Use in-app wizards or guided setup flows to make this process easier. Remember though: Some companies might require dedicated support for complex setups, such as API integrations or custom implementations.
Deliver interactive in-app tours tailored to user roles:
Use tools like Appcues, WalkMe, or Pendo to create these walkthroughs and embed them directly within the SaaS platform.
Appcues allows you to create various user engagement elements like walkthroughs, which guide users step-by-step through your product, and tooltips, which provide contextual information by highlighting specific UI elements.
Add extra slideouts, hot tips, and modal windows to deliver targeted messages, highlight features, and improve user understanding without requiring custom code.
While in-app messaging plays a crucial role in guiding users through their initial interactions, effective onboarding doesn’t stop there. To keep users engaged beyond the product, you need a multi-channel approach that includes well-timed emails, push notifications, and even SMS reminders. These out-of-product touchpoints help re-engage users who may have dropped off, reinforce key onboarding steps, and ensure they continue progressing toward activation. By combining in-app guidance with external messaging, you create a seamless, cohesive onboarding experience that keeps users on track and maximizes adoption.
To give customers resources they can turn to for self-support, offer SaaS-focused training resources, such as on-demand video tutorials for feature deep dives or a dynamic knowledge base that updates with every product release. Got large customers? How about live training sessions or webinars to ensure team-wide adoption?
You can also consider setting up the very first articles for a resource hub within your SaaS platform. This would give users access to relevant materials without them having to leave the app.
Collaborate with your customers to decide what your most important SaaS-specific success metrics are:
Use dashboards within your SaaS product to visualize these metrics for both admins and users.
Automate check-ins with behavioral triggers. Let's take the following scenario:
What would you do if a user hasn’t logged in for seven days?
Plenty of options here:
The user and customer onboarding process is more than just sticking to a list of steps.
A consistent onboarding process also matters. How you work around the user journey is yet another point to take into account. Plus, you simply can never forget about your long-term client relationship.
Next are a couple of best practices for the onboarding flow. These will help you with client retention and encourage users to use your tool to its full potential.
To minimize confusion, Avoid overwhelming users with too many tasks upfront. Instead, focus on progressive disclosure.
Imagine you're teaching a cat how to use a new scratching post.
If you dump a neverending step-by-step manual on them, they'll just stare at you, knock over your coffee, and nap on your keyboard instead. Instead, start with one step: dangle a toy mouse near the post. They'll figure out the rest like pros. Your users? They're the same—just without the toy mouse.
Add interactive elements like progress bars, achievements, and reward systems to motivate users and keep them engaged.
An example can look like this: "Complete your profile to unlock 5% more features—and earn the 'Profile Pro' badge!"
Pro tip: Think of it like a game. When users see progress or rewards, they’re more likely to stay motivated and complete tasks. Just like leveling up in their favorite video game (but instead of dragons, it’s dashboards).
Share tips for collecting input from both admins and end-users via surveys or NPS tools. Use their insights to refine your checklist and make it more user-friendly.
After launching your comprehensive checklist, consider adding a quick feedback option like, "Was this checklist helpful? Yes/No". Or, add an NPS prompt at the end. Pair it with a friendly nudge like, "Help us make this even better—your input goes straight to the team (and the coffee fund)".
Balancing customer success and user adoption drives better results. Here's how David Kirkdorffer, Fractional B2B CMO, takes a proactive approach to this:
After the sale is closed but before onboarding starts, host a short workshop (virtual or in-person) with both decision-makers (customer champions) and power users (hands-on operators). Frame the session around a “pre-mortem” exercise. Ask the group, “Imagine we’re six months in, and the onboarding failed. What went wrong?”
This approach helps align expectations from the start, identifies potential blind spots, and ensures both groups feel heard before onboarding begins. Neglecting this balance can leave new customers feeling buyer’s remorse, making them more likely to churn when contracts come due.
As David Kirkdorffer notes, "focusing on this balance upfront is key to ensuring a smoother, more successful onboarding experience for all."
How you plan out your onboarding tasks is also prone to lots of mistakes. But don't be discouraged! Here's a couple of the most common pitfalls in both customer and user onboarding and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Not involving decision-makers in goal-setting
Without input from decision-makers, you're at risk of misaligning the onboarding process with their expectations.
Solution #1: Host a meeting with both decision-makers and key stakeholders
Ask them what success looks like for them and what specific outcomes they expect.
Mistake #2: Failing to communicate ROI during onboarding
If the onboarding process doesn’t clearly communicate how your product will help them achieve ROI, they may lose interest.
Solution #2: Ensure the onboarding process showcases quick wins
Use data and real-world examples to demonstrate how your product addresses key pain points.
Mistake #3: Neglecting individual users’ needs
A generic onboarding experience will never address the unique needs of each individual.
Solution #3: Personalize the onboarding flow
Use segmentation to cater to different user roles, experience levels, and goals.
Mistake #4: Overloading users with information at once
Providing a ton of information upfront can overwhelm new users and lead to frustration.
Solution #4: Adopt a progressive disclosure approach
Focus on the most important tasks initially and allow users to explore further at their own pace.
Create smooth onboarding experiences with ease using our no-code builder.
Using our no-code builder, you can design in-app messages, NPS surveys, and automated multi-channel flows tailored to guide users through their journey. Track performance metrics to refine strategies and ensure onboarding drives deeper product adoption and engagement.
With Appcues you can:
Get a free Appcues demo to see how we can help you activate and retain your users from day one.
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