The best customer onboarding tool for your product

According to Wyzowl, nearly two-thirds (63%) of customers say that onboarding–the level of support they’re likely to receive post-sale–is an essential consideration when they decide whether or not to buy your product.

Onboarding usually makes or breaks the relationship you have with your customers. It is, therefore, extremely crucial that they have a pleasant experience while getting to know the ins and outs of your product. 

Using the right tool(s) can go a long way in ensuring that your customers see value in what you have to offer and aren’t overwhelmed by the various aspects of onboarding.

In this post, we’ll explore:

A. The need for having solid tools to guarantee a seamless customer onboarding experience

B. The kind of tools currently used by companies to onboard, educate, and handoff customers to the Success team

C. The merits of using a single tool over multiple tools for customer onboarding

A. Why you need tools for customer onboarding

Given the amount of training, documentation, and correspondence involved in the onboarding and implementation journey, it makes sense for businesses to employ various tools to aid them in different stages of the process.

Customer onboarding isn’t straightforward. Tasks have to be assigned to team members, and for that, you need a project management tool. Post that, a lot of the work takes place on various documents - some meant for internal viewing and others intended for your customers. Then comes the tracking aspect - who’s doing what and how much time they spend on it. All this information has to be collated, updated, and documented on a separate sheet. There’s always a lot happening simultaneously. To make things more complex, every customer is different. They don’t all have the exact requirements. Hence without proper tools in place, it’s just not possible to deliver a world-class product experience. One that’s as smooth as butter. Without the churn. 

B. Some tools currently being used by businesses for customer onboarding

Now that we’ve established the importance of having the right tools let’s look at what businesses are currently using for their customer onboarding process:

1. Document collaboration tools (Google docs, Notion, Excel, Smartsheets)
2. Communication tools (Slack, Gmail)
3. Project tracking tools (Asana, Monday, Trello)  
4. Time tracking tools (Harvest)
   

This isn’t an exhaustive list. More tools could be used depending on the complexity of the project. Sometimes companies even use a separate Gantt chart tool, an internal project tool apart from what they want their customers to have access to. 

As you can see from the number of tools currently being used, it is certainly a lot. 

And so, we move on to the final section.

C. Using one solid tool vs. multiple tools

If you use multiple tools for customer onboarding, you are more likely to run into the following issues:

1. Chaotic and stressful workflows due to inefficient and inconsistent processes
2. Lack of visibility across projects
3. Communication snags with your customers and internal team members
4. Time lost in keeping track of all the information buried in silos
5. Time lost in sending manual follow-ups and reminders
6. Time lost in keeping your customers accountable for their part in the onboarding process
   

We could go on and on. 

But thankfully, there’s a solution for all this. As soon as you get started with the right tool, you can immediately see a remarkable improvement to your customer onboarding process - better retention, satisfaction, and lifetime value. You’ll also notice a drastic decrease in the workload of your employees. 

And if you’re using just one tool to handle the majority of your processes, you won’t be held back by visibility, productivity, and collaboration issues anymore. 

That one tool is Rocketlane!

Rocketlane, with its purpose-built customer onboarding platform, enables businesses to accelerate the time-to-value of their products, achieve faster go-lives, increase renewals and boost customer satisfaction. It brings the focus back to the customer in customer onboarding through a fully collaborative experience. Rocketlane replaces general project management, communication, and document collaboration tools with a unique, unified workspace that improves communication, collaboration, and project visibility for teams and their customers. With insights from trends and benchmarks across projects, teams can develop and optimize playbooks and best practices with continuous improvement.

You could give it a spin or book a demo to see how Rocketlane can work for you.

More resources

1. Implementation Stories
2. Preflight Conversations
3. The Launch Station - a podcast for all things customer onboarding
4. Customer onboarding resources from Rocketlane