How to Automate Your Customer Onboarding Process: Customer Onboarding Automation 101
Jake Lizarraga
Nailing the customer onboarding process is the most important objective for any customer success team. That said, it's also undoubtedly the most time-consuming part of their job with repetitive tasks like answering FAQs, hosting webinars, and emailing new users.
This guide will show you how to build an automated onboarding process that will help your customer success team reclaim their time without sacrificing the onboarding experience for users!
Onboarding webinars can be highly effective at getting new users to their activation point but hosting them live can be incredibly time-consuming. Want to reap the benefits of onboarding webinars without trapping your CSMs in an endless loop of live webinars?
Use eWebinar to automate your onboarding webinars without sacrificing interactivity or live chat capabilities. Watch our on-demand demo (created with eWebinar) to see an automated webinar for yourself!
What is customer onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the first stage of the customer journey when they begin using your product or service. Even after a user has already adopted your product, secondary onboarding flows can help them discover more advanced features and make the product stickier as a result.
What is customer onboarding automation?
Customer onboarding automation streamlines the transition from prospect to user while reducing the workload of your customer success team. It can eliminate repetitive tasks while making the onboarding process smoother for users and boosting CSAT scores as a result.
How to automate customer onboarding
The five steps of customer onboarding automation are:
1. Define your customer onboarding automation goals
The first step of the process is to determine what your actual goals are. Will you attempt to automate your onboarding process from start to finish or only automate an isolated onboarding flow? In addition to the scope of automation, you must define target outcomes and metrics by which to measure them.
Are you looking to drive product adoption, reduce the time to value, improve customer satisfaction scores, or automate repetitive tasks that are eating up all of your customer success managers' time? Knowing the scope, outcomes, and metrics in advance will help you automate accordingly.
2. Map your customer journey and key touchpoints
Next, it's time to identify the specific stages in your existing user onboarding process. This should cover everything from the moment they first sign up to their activation point when they finally experience the core value that your product provides.
Break these stages down into key tasks that new users must accomplish and specific touchpoints that you could potentially automate. It often helps to visualize the customer journey by creating a flowchart that will help you better identify opportunities for automation.
Source: Touchpoint
Because different customer segments may take different paths to get to the same destination, it could also be helpful to create a different flow chart for each segment. This will help you tailor the automated workflows to the specific needs of each user persona (with their own unique use case for your product).
3. Identify areas for customer onboarding automation
Once you have a clear overview of your current onboarding processes, it's finally time to hone in on repetitive tasks and time-consuming workflows that would benefit from being automated. We can borrow Sean Ellis' ICE framework to help prioritize which automation opportunities to pursue:
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Impact. How much time and energy would your customer success team save if you were able to automate this task or workflow?
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Confidence. How confident are you in your ability to effectively automate this task or workflow without negatively impacting the user experience?
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Ease. How easy will it be to automate this task or workflow?
Score each automation opportunity on a scale of 1-10 for each of the three criteria then tally everything up to get a final score of 3-30. With this data in hand, you'll be able to weigh the amount of time each automation would save against the effort it'll take to implement it and confidence in being able to do so.
Examples of customer onboarding automation opportunities
Here are a few examples of common automation opportunities and how you might score them:
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Chatbots. Chatbots are commonly used to reduce ticket volume for both support and customer success teams as they're easy to implement and almost always work as intended. That said, they only provide moderate time savings as more complex tickets will still require human intervention.
ICE score: 23 (5 + 9 + 9) -
Email sequences. Writing an automated email sequence for onboarding new customers is standard practice as manually emailing signups is usually reserved for early-stage founders looking for feedback. However, creating and optimizing the sequence can be time-consuming.
ICE score: 22 (7 + 10 + 5) -
Onboarding webinars. Webinars are often the most effective way to onboard new users but also the most time-consuming as CSMs typically host multiple live sessions each week or month. As such, automating onboarding webinars provides significant time savings for comparatively low effort.
ICE score: 27 (10 + 9 + 8)
These are just a handful of examples that you'd commonly find within SaaS companies but there are many other opportunities that may arise depending on the specific details of your products and customer base.
However, if automating webinars is an opportunity that aligns with your customer success goals then consider using our webinar automation platform, eWebinar, to pre-record your onboarding webinars without losing the interactivity and live chat capabilities of sessions you'd normally host live.
Go watch our on-demand demo that was created using eWebinar:
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4. Choose the right automation software for the job
Now that you've set your goals, mapped your customer journey, and identified the automation opportunities that you'd like to pursue, it's time to find the tools that you'll use to get the job done. Which automation tools you select will ultimately depend on what you're trying to automate.
As we mentioned in the previous section, customer success teams who are trying to escape the endless cycle of hosting live onboarding webinars would look for an automated webinar platform like eWebinar.
In contrast, CSMs trying to automate an onboarding email sequence would likely find themselves signing up for email automation platforms like Mailchimp, MailerLite, or ActiveCampaign. Of course, there are other factors that help you determine which tool is the right pick.
Criteria for selecting customer onboarding automation tools
The three main factors to consider when choosing between automation tools are:
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Budget. In addition to determining whether the entry-level plan for a particular tool is within your budget, ensure that the provider offers a cost-effective pricing model. This will ensure you’re able to upgrade to higher tiers as needed without breaking the bank.
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Scalability. Can the tool scale alongside your business and onboard users at scale as your customer base grows? For instance, our webinar platform lets you automate onboarding webinars for more than 12,000 customers per month!
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Integrations. Lastly, how easily will you be able to integrate this new automation tool into your existing tech stack? eWebinar has native integrations with 20+ tools that let you forward webinar registrant data to your CRM of choice or reply to attendee questions within your Slack workspace.
Failing to choose the right tool could leave you stuck with software that doesn’t have the infrastructure to continue scaling as your audience grows or otherwise make it difficult to integrate with the rest of your tech stack.
5. Create automated workflows for customer onboarding
Once you've chosen the best tool(s) for the job, it's time to break ground and start creating automated workflows to streamline your customer onboarding processes. What this looks like will depend heavily on what you're trying to automate and which tool you’re using.
For example, if you were automating your onboarding webinars then here’s what the process would look like with eWebinar:
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Upload video. Select a local file, paste a YouTube link, or use our integrations with our integrations with Zoom and Vimeo to import a video from the cloud.
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Set schedule. Make your webinar available on demand and automate it on a recurring schedule to make your onboarding resources more readily available.
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Configure chat. Use our chat system to answer questions from users in real time or reply after the webinar ends to have your responses sent to their email.
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Add interactions. Drag the playhead to any point of the webinar and choose from our 20+ interactions you’d like to insert to make your presentation interactive.
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Publish webinar. Publish your webinar, promote the registration page, embed it on your website, and track its performance using our robust analytics dashboards.
As another example, those automating their onboarding email sequences will need to write the email copy, configure the triggers to ensure they’re automatically sent to new users, and use segmentation features to personalize each flow to a specific customer use case.
Lastly, customer success teams that are integrating chatbots into their onboarding infrastructure will need to set custom routing rules. This ensures that users who are struggling with onboarding are routed to a CSM while other customers or prospects are sent to support/sales.
Customer onboarding automation best practices
Regardless of which customer onboarding workflow you’re trying to automate, there are a few universal best practices that you should adhere to. These are communication, personalization, and optimization.
Communication
First and foremost, you need to be honest with your users about which workflows are automated. For example, tricking users into thinking that an automated onboarding webinar is live will destroy user trust once they realize the presentation is actually pre-recorded.
Conversely, telling them that they’re watching a pre-recorded presentation at the start of the webinar but noting that they can still talk to a customer success manager in real time through live chat will put them at ease.
The same applies when adding a chatbot to your onboarding flow. You’ll want to indicate that the chatbot is only there to answer FAQs and help them find relevant resources but that they still have the option to have their conversation routed to a human agent if necessary.
Personalization
Just because an onboarding process is automated, that doesn’t mean it should feel boilerplate. Take the time to record multiple onboarding webinars and write multiple email sequences so that you can send the most relevant resources to users depending on what their use case is.
Personalized onboarding is easily achievable nowadays in no small part due to the user segmentation capabilities of modern software. Email automation tools let you target individual segments with your sequences and insert dynamic content that reflects user attributes.
This goes beyond just inserting a first name field at the start of the email as you can actually change which images show up or display different content based on what type of device the user is reading your onboarding emails on.
Optimization
Successfully automating customer onboarding workflows will take some trial and error as it’s difficult to get everything perfect the first time around. Looking at qualitative metrics like NPS, CES, and CSAT scores can help but they don’t tell the whole story.
As such, we highly recommend that you gather and review qualitative onboarding feedback from your users to get deeper insights into how your automations impact UX. You could start by inserting onboarding surveys in your webinars, email sequences, and chatbots.
Responses to open-ended questions will also provide context on why a certain user provided a particular score. This combination of quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback will help you continuously improve your automated onboarding process to ensure it doesn’t harm UX.
Conclusion
As you can see, creating an automated customer onboarding process can save your customer success managers countless hours while eliminating friction points for users. If you define clear goals, map the customer journey, identify opportunities, and choose the right tools then you're already halfway there.
eWebinar has already helped customer success teams from Gem, Later, BombBomb, SkySlope, ActivePipe, HighNote.io, and countless other SaaS companies automate their onboarding webinars so that their CSMs can redirect the time spent hosting live webinars towards engaging users instead.
If you want to make your onboarding webinars available on demand or on a recurring schedule to save time while increasing attendance rates then go watch our on-demand demo that we created using eWebinar!
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