SaaS Customer Onboarding and the Power of Human Connection

A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group found that 70% of digital transformation projects fall short of their goals. A poor onboarding experience and a lack of purpose-built systems are common reasons for project failure.

Here Louise Chaston, Customer Success Manager at Intoware, explains why a human approach to SaaS customer onboarding is helping businesses get value as early as possible from their investment. This is the first in a three-part Customer Success blog series.

So what is SaaS Customer Onboarding?

Customer onboarding is an umbrella term that’s often used to describe the process that businesses go through when they start to use a new software product. The onboarding experience defines the relationship that our customers will have with us. So, it’s critical to our joint future success.

It isn’t just about teaching businesses how to use our workflow automation software WorkfloPlus. WorkfloPlus generates digital work instructions for the frontline workforce to follow via smartphones, tablets or wearables. It creates an auditable log of the job and then generates and instantly distributes job reports to where they need to be as soon as a task is completed. WorkfloPlus also provides a wealth of previously unavailable data which can be analysed to prove real-time Business Intelligence. Our job is to get them to the moment where they realise that WorkfloPlus is tailored to their individual business needs. That ‘aha moment’ when they gain new insights for better, data-informed decisions.

This can be ensuring greater speed and accuracy in asset reporting, fewer visits to site or greater operational visibility on the factors that impact your bottom line. Our SaaS customer onboarding service is all about creating a human connection. It’s about developing long-term relationships based on trust. It is the process of helping new customers get started and, most importantly, to remain engaged by creating new work habits.

Digitalisation is a series of steps that enable paper-based processes to be replaced with smart digital workflows. These workflows are integrated into business operations simply and easily, whether they are followed by frontline engineers out in the field or providing data insights for managers back at HQ. It isn’t just about teaching customers which buttons to click on our app. It’s about supporting their strategic business goals and understanding what “success” means to them.

It’s not a ‘one size fits all’ strategy

We know that for most businesses we work with they are at the very beginning of their digital journey. So, with that in mind we have created an in-depth, proven and simple onboarding process. We work closely with our sales team to fully understand their requirements. This includes what the reasons are for beginning their digital journey, what their ‘pain-points’ are, what they want to achieve, and what resources are available to them.

Each customer is unique, so we adapt our onboarding process according to their individual needs. We find this flexible approach successful rather than staying with a rigid gated process. So, we begin with a discovery session to fully understand their needs and identify where we can help the most.

All our customers get access to our onboarding service, during which we train their workforce. We teach them how to build workflows, manage them, run jobs and access data. On some occasions customer requirements may be more complex. In that case, we will work with them to achieve the integrations they require. Our onboarding process is in-depth, but most importantly it’s human. It’s this one-to-one approach that helps get results.

How long does Saas customer onboarding last?

Typically, we aim to have WorkfloPlus users up and running in four to six weeks. We want our customers to achieve success and see value as early as possible. Once onboarded, we carefully track usage of WorkfloPlus to ensure that our customers are getting the most from the platform in line with their individual needs. We will then carry on working with them, so they can get an even greater return on their investment.

Laying the groundwork for future success

When a customer gains early value it helps build trust in WorkfloPlus. We are an open and transparent organisation. We like to think of ourselves not only as a provider of digital workflow technology but as a true partner of your business. So, if our customers aren’t successful then neither are we. This is the foundation of our onboarding approach. We believe this helps to achieve entire company ‘buy-in’ around digital transformation. This can mean the difference between failure and success.

Our aim is to ensure customer success by creating a deeper, one-to-one bond with them. Our proven metrics not only look at how long it takes our customers to be onboarded, but also effectively track their engagement. This ensures that when they come up against challenges, they can be quickly addressed along the way.

Now that we’ve explained how we operate our Saas customer onboarding process, learn in our next blog how we help them to build digital workflows and embrace change.