Cohorts

What is a cohort?

A popular term in customer onboarding, a cohort is a group of customers with a common experience. This predefined group could be clubbed into the same onboarding batch by design, or who signed up around the same time.

Why cohorts are important in customer onboarding

Segmenting customers helps you analyze trends in behavior over time. Cohort analysis is a big part of understanding user behavior to improve retention. 

On the customer onboarding front, a more important case for cohort-based onboarding is that it enables you to reduce Time-to-first-value (TTFV) for different types of users within your customers’ org by identifying different aha moments or value realization points for different sets of users in the same product/service.

Best practices

1. Looking at cohorts based on when they signed up is the most common approach in SaaS. However, proactively defining cohorts based on the different values/outcomes that different customers can get from the same product is an important part of a value-based onboarding strategy. 
2. Make sure that cohort analysis is a part of your process so you can get a better understanding of your customers’ needs, the effectiveness of onboarding, and product-customer fit.