Imagine you just bought a brand new smart fridge. You open the box only to find out there’s no manual to guide you or an app that could take you through the set-up.
Just the customer support phone number you got is only adding to the frustration. After all, you want to set up your new fridge right now. Now imagine if the fridge could actually walk you through every step with clear instructions as soon as you plug it in.
This is the power of self-service onboarding. And just like home appliances, SaaS businesses can benefit greatly from self onboarding.
Product-led growth, in particular, has prompted companies to make products their leading salespeople, marketers, and onboarding specialists. Nobody wants to wait for a support call anymore. This is why scalable, cross-channel onboarding is more than just a nice to have.
From in-app prompts to email sequences and interactive walkthroughs, your onboarding has to keep users coming back. Let’s see just how you can do that!
A self-service onboarding process allows new users to learn and use the products on their own, without having to first ask for direct help.
Unlike traditional onboarding, which, more often than not, involves demos or calls for support, self-service onboarding adapts easily through in-app tutorials, walkthroughs, and knowledge bases.
Users will be less dependent on customer support since their questions have already been addressed. For example, a tooltip or walkthrough can dispel confusion when first using an interface by giving users contextual nudges on where to find a feature.
In fact, users find self-service with proactive guidance (like in-app nudges and notifications) support them. A project management app might send quick hints through a notification such as, "Want to add a due date? Click here!" But why are these so effective?
Self-service onboarding is proven to work. Here’s why you should consider it when creating an onboarding journey:
Users are more inclined to engage with and adopt features when they onboard at their own pace. Using interactive walkthroughs and contextual nudges gives users the confidence to explore your product, improving time-to-value and deeper engagement.
Litmus used Appcues for self service options in onboarding for a 2100% increase in feature adoption. By adding tooltips and interactive walkthroughs, they improved engagement, with 62% of users who saw the onboarding tooltip becoming active users.
On-demand support and proactive guidance can keep users engaged and avoid confusion. With tools such as in-app tutorials and knowledge bases, your users can independently fix issues, giving them a sense of accomplishment that keeps them loyal.
AdRoll boosts retention through proactive in-product assistance, addressing user struggles before they escalate.
When users pause a campaign, AdRoll generates in-app messages with help and solutions. With this real-time support, frustration is prevented, keeping users engaged. AdRoll reduces churn and increases customer loyalty by delivering timely contextual help.
.png)
Talking to a person for human support costs between $6 and $12 per interaction, whereas an automated interaction can be as low as $0.25.
Hence, an effective self-service onboarding model can reduce the number of support tickets for customer success teams. Step-by-step guides, for instance, keep engagement levels up while allowing your team to dedicate more time to high-priority tickets.
So what goes into self onboarding if you want to improve the customer experience?
Static tutorials are boring because they tend to take trial users a lot of time to go through them and don’t provide a learning-by-doing experience. Instead, users should try out interactive walkthroughs that cover the entire app’s common workflows one small step at a time.
This way, by the end of the customer onboarding process within your app, they’ll know exactly how to use it and you’ll have increased product adoption. In-app tours, layered tooltips, and follow-up emails during the entire customer journey are all perfect elements to start with.
Asana's customer success teams, for instance, use tooltips to explain how to create a project with all of its details:
.png)
One-size-fits-all just doesn’t cut it anymore. Segmentation for your onboarding lets you take into account a user’s role, behavior within the platform, and goals.
A marketing manager, for instance, could use custom onboarding flows and tips for campaign tracking while developers will need to focus on something like API integrations.
Coursera uses adaptive, behavior-triggered flows to keep users engaged. They do so by asking users directly what their goals, role, and experience level is—as early as the onboarding stage.
This lets them deliver customized courses so users will easily find something relevant to them, instead of dropping off early due to poor self serve onboarding content.
All SaaS websites should come with a knowledge base users can search through for quick answers on all possible in-app actions and workflows. This should act just like a 24/7 help desk in the users’ pocket.
Intercom structures its help docs with clear headings and useful visuals like GIFs or videos. For instance, a user stuck on a feature can click on a "Learn" button within the app and get instant access to a step-by-step guide for solving their issue.
Contextual, behavior-driven help is the special ingredient used to offer a superior user experience. Help points will appear only when the user might need it. Just like having a coworker giving you tiny cues like: "Psst, you may want to try this!"
YotPo, an eCommerce marketing CRM, uses tooltips created with Appcues to help users navigate their product. For example, this tooltip below takes users through one of the steps for adjusting mail delivery time to ensure users can correctly fill in the fields.
With gamification, onboarding offers a game-like experience through progress indicators, milestones, and rewards triggered by in-app actions like completing a task or even onboarding altogether.
SaaS companies also use cross-channel motivators like email reminders whenever users aren’t done with a step. They might have forgotten about it or simply couldn’t figure out how to use a feature.
Apollo.io opts for a reward-based system by giving users who complete all onboarding steps extra credits they can use within the app
Now let’s see how you can avoid a poor user onboarding experience by focusing just on the right things that will help you build customer loyalty from day one”
Understanding user intent lets you create a self service onboarding process that’s relevant, personalized, and effective. Users should be presented with different touchpoints—emails, in-app messages, and notifications—through a smooth experience that reunites these across all channels and increases activation rates.
The main steps to use to map multi-touch user journeys for self service options include:
Tracking behavioral data lets you understand how to improve onboarding strategies. The three parameters that need to be checked include:
Automate data-driven messaging to refine your onboarding flows based on user behavior. Timely nudges worth considering include:
A self serve onboarding process should be customized based on the device to improve accessibility. For mobile onboarding, consider going heavier on push notifications that can encourage users to finish the onboarding steps.
SMS reminders also let you send time-sensitive reminders. And beyond it all, responsive UI is even more important on mobile as your flows should work properly on both Android and iOS devices.
The best practice though remains creating a fluid onboarding flow that works well across all devices. Users should be able to move to other devices without hindering any progress. Consider syncing the onboarding status across web and mobile and opt for mobile-friendly content formats such as microlearning modules.
But let’s be clear for a second here: Live support has its own place in onboarding. Special account setups or complex workflows will require human intervention. Still, onboarding shouldn’t be overreliant on humans. In other words, you simply need to prioritize the self-service journey
Context-based assistance with the help of chatbots and knowledge bases can help identify the issues that require escalation to live agents. Consider implementing gradual escalation tactics that reunite automation and personal interaction.
Start with automating replies with general recommendations using AI that can identify user problems and pull solutions from existing databases and past support tickets.
Redirect users to a live chat only if they keep facing difficulties with automation. In extreme cases, live calls for complicated onboarding questions should be used to fix issues as soon as possible.
Diversify your customer touchpoints by creating a plan for all channels you own.
Email? Set up personalized emails you can automatically send out when a user abandons an onboarding checklist.
In-app? Try push notifications to call out steps missed.
Mobile? SMS messages can nudge users who are inactive for too long.
Just remember to maintain consistency between in-app messaging and out-of-product channels for a seamless user journey. After all, emails, push notifications, and in-app messages should support rather than contradict one another.
You can use customer data from these touchpoints for iterative improvements in onboarding flows. Try multiple messaging strategies and tune them based on how you gather user feedback. A good starting point is looking at behavioral insights to address onboarding roadblocks before they even happen.
Focusing more on the best practices for a self service portal and onboarding flow, you’ll get the most value out of these:
Use in-app triggers and event-based messaging to create an onboarding that will keep up with user progress, instead of running ahead.
Duolingo returns contextual popups and suggestions based on user progress to ensure they’re sharing the right next steps. Upon using the app for the first time, users are prompted to complete a quick lesson.
By taking into account progress on this, Duolingo will ask the learner to build a habit of practicing every day and decide once again how often they want to take similar courses.
Onboarding shouldn’t be built and forgotten about. Outdated onboarding is dangerous as it influences how a user behaves and what feedback they share. changes user behavior and feedback.
Make use of data from your support tickets, surveys, and in-app analytics to develop better guides, tutorials, and walkthroughs but make sure you’re always updating them.
Notion periodically refreshes its onboarding guides based on user input and makes sure its tutorials and walkthroughs stay up-to-date when new features come out.
Deciding when to automate vs. when to offer human intervention is also a find game to play. Hybrid onboarding approaches combine automated self-service with proactive customer success engagement.
HubSpot combines AI chatbots for frequent questions with human agents handling complex onboarding problems well before users even join the app:
Consider embedding knowledge bases, tooltips, even chatbots in all customer touchpoints (e.g. app, email, website, help center). Let’s walk through an example of a multi-channel strategy Slack uses to enable a self-service learning process during onboarding.
They have a mix of best-in-class help pages, in-app tooltips, and proactive emails with self-service resources.
For instance, when you try a new feature, you’ll get a tooltip describing exactly what it does:
The initial help page pop out also prioritizes common tasks new users might want to complete like configuring Slack notifications or setting reminders:
Plus, they leave some room for promoting some of their pro features align the way:
A connected, multi-channel onboarding approach boosts user engagement, accelerates adoption, and minimizes churn. By incorporating personalized touchpoints on various channels, businesses enhance consumer experiences that promote long-term customer satisfaction.
Retaining customers, driving product adoption, and reinforcing relationships with customers are among the numerous benefits. Building a well-orchestrated onboarding process propels the users to get the essential support level they need at all times.
Start perfecting your self-service onboarding today with a holistic engagement strategy that reunites channels, personalizes interactions, and boosts long-term profits. Try Appcues for free to see how you can build all that in seconds!
.svg){kind=icon}
