Onboarding Therapy #3: Balancing Human-Led vs. In-App Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding plays a crucial role in driving adoption, retention, and long-term success for B2B SaaS companies.

However, many organizations struggle to find the right balance between human-led onboarding and automated, in-app experiences.

In this week's Onboarding Therapy, we're exploring the benefits and limitations of both approaches, offering insights and strategies to help customer onboarding teams optimize their processes.

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Understanding the In-App Onboarding Trend

Many product and engineering teams in B2B SaaS aspire to create an intuitive product that essentially eliminates the need for human-led onboarding.

While this goal can certainly drive positive product improvements, it often overlooks several key factors:

1. Diverse Learning Styles

Adult learners have varied preferences and needs when it comes to absorbing new information.

Shareil Nariman, Arrows' Head of Customer Experience noted:

"We are talking about adult learning and adults learn differently. So everyone might not actually be inclined to click through a bunch of pop-ups in your app."

This diversity in learning styles means that relying solely on in-app tutorials likely will not effectively engage all users.

2. Product Complexity

While simple applications might be self-explanatory, many B2B SaaS products involve complex workflows, integrations, and use cases. These nuances are often difficult to convey solely through in-app experiences.

3. Aligning with Business Goals

In-app onboarding often focuses primarily on feature activation, which is important but not sufficient.

As Shareil pointed out, the things that onboarding teams need to be thinking about are far more complex than that:

"Are you actually hitting customers' goals, achieving their goals, and helping them solve for their pains that they came to you for in the first place?"

Human-led onboarding can more easily bridge the gap between product features and customer outcomes.

The Long-Term Value of Human-Led Client Onboarding

Despite the push for automated solutions, human-led onboarding continues to provide unique benefits:

1. Personalization at Scale

Onboarding specialists can tailor the onboarding experience to each customer's specific needs, industry, and use cases. This level of personalization is challenging to achieve through purely automated means.

2. Strategic Guidance

Human-led onboarding goes beyond feature explanation to provide strategic advice.

As Kim Hacker from Arrows described it:

"Ideally, your product is intuitive enough that your customers can easily understand it. And then the onboarding specialist is able to be more strategic, telling them how to do certain things in the app in a more strategic way."

3. Real-time Feedback Loop

Human interactions during onboarding provide invaluable insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies, and overall customer experience improvements.

Strategies for Effective Onboarding Integration

To create a comprehensive onboarding experience, consider the following strategies:

1. Start with Human Insights

Begin your onboarding program with human-led sessions to gain deep insights into your customer 's needs, pain points, and goals. Once that's solid, you can use these learnings to inform the development of your in-app onboarding elements.

2. Develop a Multi-Channel Approach

Create a mix of onboarding options to cater to different learning styles and customer preferences. Some examples include:

• One-on-one sessions for high-touch clients or complex use cases
• Webinars and group training for scalable knowledge sharing
• In-app guidance for just-in-time learning and feature discovery
• Self-serve resources like knowledge bases and video tutorials

3. Implement Continuous Improvement

We say it all the time: onboarding never ends.

That means you should be regularly reviewing and updating both your human-led and in-app onboarding processes.

Establish feedback loops with your customers and internal teams to gather and discuss key insights, and make adjustments to your processes based on that data.

4. Align with Customer Goals

Ensure that all onboarding touchpoints, whether human-led or in-app, drive towards customer goals rather than just feature activation.

This alignment is crucial for long-term customer success and retention.

5. Leverage Data for Optimization

Use data from both human-led and in-app onboarding to identify areas for improvement:

• Track completion rates for in-app tutorials
• Analyze common questions in human-led sessions
• Monitor feature adoption rates post-onboarding
• Measure time-to-value for different onboarding approaches

Addressing Resource Constraints in Onboarding

While human-led onboarding offers a ton of benefits, many teams face pressure to reduce these efforts due to resource constraints.

However, there are several strategies to maintain effective human-led onboarding while optimizing your existing resources:

Demonstrate ROI:‍

Use data to show the value of human-led onboarding, such as improved retention rates or faster time-to-value.

Implement a Tiered Onboarding Approach:‍

Implement a segmented onboarding strategy based on customer type or contract value, focusing more intensive human-led efforts on high-value accounts.

Leverage Technology

‍Utilize tools like Arrows to streamline your human-led onboarding process, making it more efficient and strategic.

By addressing resource constraints strategically, teams can continue to provide valuable human-led onboarding experiences while managing costs effectively.

The Future of Customer Onboarding

While the aspiration for fully automated in-app onboarding will always be around, the reality is that human touchpoints will likely remain necessary for the foreseeable future.

As Shareil noted:

"I've been in customer onboarding for 13 years. I'm still waiting for that day to come where I don't have to answer questions and people just onboard themselves and I can just sit here and tally up all the revenue that we're saving."

The key is to embrace a hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both human-led and in-app onboarding. This balanced strategy allows for personalization, scalability, and continuous improvement, ultimately driving better outcomes for both your customers and your business.

Remember that onboarding is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Continuously gather feedback, iterate on your approach, and strive to meet your customers where they are. By doing so, you'll create an onboarding experience that drives adoption, reduces churn, and maximizes customer lifetime value.