Low-Touch Onboarding for SaaS: How to Get Started Right Away

Are you struggling to figure out an efficient and effective onboarding process for your SaaS business? If so, don’t worry – you’re not alone! Onboarding can be a complex topic, especially for SaaS startups, but it’s important to get right. 

According to recent surveys, 63% of customers believe that onboarding is a crucial factor in making their decision to subscribe to a SaaS product. 

Fortunately, with the right low-touch techniques in place, you can get up and running quickly and start delivering value to your customers from day one.

In this blog post, we’ll explore what low-touch onboarding is, discuss why it matters to SaaS companies of all sizes, and provide actionable tips that will help you easily implement a successful low-touch onboarding strategy. 

Read on to learn more about transforming your SaaS into an agile powerhouse by leveraging the power of low-touch onboarding.

What is Low-Touch Onboarding?

Low-touch onboarding is an automated process that guides users through the signup process with minimal human interaction. 

It offers a simple, streamlined way for users to register their account information and quickly access your SaaS’ features and solutions, with automated tutorials and detailed documentation of how your software works. 

This approach eliminates the need for long emails back and forth between customers and customer service agents. Instead, customers can complete their identity verification or take other steps with fewer clicks.

How Does Low-Touch Onboarding Work?

The goal of low-touch onboarding is to speed up user registration while still verifying identities. 

This requires utilizing automated technology such as AI bots that can do quick identity assessments without the need for manual review processes. Additionally, self-service portals offer an easy way for customers to get their accounts set up without waiting on hold with phone support agents.

Here are the main characteristics of the low-touch onboarding model for SaaS:

• Heavy emphasis on automation tools to deliver value
• Little to no human intervention during onboarding
• Streamlined customer sign-up process

Benefits of Low-Touch Onboarding

Low-touch onboarding provides several advantages for businesses that adopt it:

• Increased Efficiency – With automation taking care of most if not all of the user registration process, your team can focus on other tasks such as product development or customer support.
• Faster Delivery – Since there’s no lengthy manual review process involved, users can complete their registration almost immediately upon signing up with your company.
• Reduced Costs – By automating many of the processes associated with user onboarding, you’ll be able to save time and money by reducing reliance on customer service staff members who may be needed elsewhere within the organization.

Ultimately, low-touch onboarding provides businesses with an effective way to reduce friction during user registrations while also saving money in the long run.

Disadvantages of Low-Touch Onboarding Model For SaaS

While low-touch onboarding can provide several advantages for businesses and their customers, there are a few potential drawbacks that should be considered.

• Security Concerns – Low-touch onboarding relies on automated identity assessments which means that the process is open to potential security risks. Companies must ensure proper authentication procedures are in place to protect user data.
• Requires Skilled Staff – There is a dependency on technology which requires skilled staff members who know how to troubleshoot any issues that might arise from using these solutions. This could be difficult for businesses who don’t have access to these resources or don’t want to invest in them.
• Lack of Personalization – Since the process is so automated, it can be difficult to create personalized experiences and build relationships with customers.
• Limited Control – With low-touch onboarding processes, companies may not have as much control over the registration flow which could potentially lead to mistakes or errors during sign-up.
• Lower Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate – low-touch onboarding relies on freemium versions or free trials to capture users’ attention and convince them to become paid customers. With this method of having less of a commitment involved, the quality of leads tends to be lower than those acquired through product demos. Additionally, many leads will not end up converting either, which is common when transitioning away from traditional sales tactics.

Is Low-Touch Onboarding the Right Model For Your SaaS Business?

Low-touch onboarding models as shown above are an effective way to get new customers up and running quickly. It is a process that enables users to learn about the product, sign up, and start using it without needing much help or assistance from customer service representatives. However, before you jump on the low-touch onboarding bandwagon, there are a few questions you should ask yourself. 

What Is My Primary Goal? 

The goal of any onboarding experience should be to get new customers using your product as quickly and easily as possible. This means figuring out what customers need in order to understand your product and how they can best use it. Knowing this will allow you to customize the onboarding process so that it meets their needs and helps them become successful users of your product. 

How Will I Measure Success? 

Before implementing any sort of onboarding model, it’s important to have a way of measuring success—otherwise, you won’t know if the model is working or not. To do this, set up metrics such as time spent on the page, clickthrough rates, conversion rates, etc., so that you can track how successful each step in the process is. This will also help you identify areas where improvements can be made in order to make the process even more efficient for future customers. 

How Will I Train Current Employees? 

If you decide to go with a low-touch onboarding model for SaaS products, then it’s important to ensure that your current employees are adequately trained on how to use the system. Have them take part in user testing sessions and provide feedback on any potential issues or areas for improvement. This will help ensure that everyone is comfortable with using the system when new customers come on board. 

Does My SaaS tool Lend Itself to Self-Service? 

If your product requires a lot of customization or has complex features that require customer education, then low touch onboarding might not be the best option. 

Instead, you may want to consider offering more personalized support until the customer has become comfortable with the product.

Furthermore, if you offer subscription tiers with different levels of customization and services, then you’ll need to consider how those options are presented in order for customers to make informed decisions. 

Do I Have Good Documentation? 

Whether you’re implementing low touch onboarding or any other type of online purchasing process, good documentation is essential.

Your website should contain detailed information about your product so that potential customers can quickly get answers to their questions without having to contact customer service directly.

This includes descriptions of features and benefits as well as pricing information and FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).

You may also want to consider including video tutorials or other visual resources that can help explain complicated concepts quickly and easily. 

How to Make Low-Touch Onboarding Work for Your SaaS Business 

In order to ensure that your low-touch onboarding process works effectively, there are several tools and tactics that you should consider implementing.

Invest in User Experience Design

You should consider investing in user experience (UX) design services or software that will help ensure that your product’s interface is user friendly so customers don’t have any trouble navigating it during the setup process.

To accomplish this, you should prioritize user research to understand the needs of your target audience. You must also focus on creating designs that make it easy for users to complete onboarding tasks without assistance.

Additionally, you should leverage data analytics tools to measure user engagement with various aspects of their onboarding flow. 

Create Tutorials and Documentation

It is important to create detailed yet concise tutorials and documentation for customers so they have everything they need at their fingertips when getting started with your product. These resources help new users learn how the product works, quickly ramp up on features, and self-solve any issues they may encounter.

It’s important to keep in mind that tutorial and documentation needs are specific to each product and target audience, so it’s imperative to do research around customer personas and their onboarding needs. By focusing on user flow and mapping out autopilot scenarios of common tasks, it’s possible to ensure that users understand how a product works without needing hand-holding from customer service representatives.

Moreover, tutorials and documentation should be regularly updated with accurate information as the product evolves, enabling low-touch onboarding processes that scale with the business and create an efficient environment for new users.

Offer Email or Chat Bot Support

Offering support via email or chatbot so customers can get answers quickly if they do have any issues during setup is key.  

Email support provides an asynchronous channel for customers to submit any queries or issues that can be handled by your customer service team. Chatbots on the other hand act as automated agents that offer self-service options through conversations while employing sophisticated AI technologies to respond accurately.

Together, email and chatbot support makes sure your customers feel heard even during times of high demand when human involvement might otherwise be limited.

Start by making sure your onboarding process is flexible and adjustable to the needs of each individual user. With that base in place, you can then focus efforts on writing effective automated emails or chatbots.

These should provide helpful information to guide users through their onboarding processes such as details about pricing plans, ideas for getting the most out of a particular service, and tips for troubleshooting commonly encountered issues.

Create Communities for Your Customers

Creating active communities for customers to interact with one another is a great way to provide support through peer-to-peer engagement. This can be done through forums, social media platforms, or dedicated customer service channels.

These communities not only help customers troubleshoot issues faster but also build trust between the business and its users since they can share their experiences and help other customers.

Furthermore, customer communities provide invaluable feedback that allows businesses to make improvements to their products and services. This in turn helps create better onboarding experiences for new users while encouraging a sense of loyalty among current ones.

How to Measure the Success of Your SaaS Low-Touch Onboarding Process

Determining what metrics to track and analyzing them can help you determine if your process is successful and where improvements can be made.

Some metrics to consider include:

• time-to-productivity: how long it takes for a customer to onboard and start using the product
• retention rate: whether customers stay onboarded after they’ve started using the product
• activation velocity: how quickly users move through each step of the onboarding process
• customer satisfaction: how likely customers are to recommend the product
• customer churn: how many customers have canceled their subscription
• average time spent in onboarding: how much time customers are spending in the onboarding process
• product usage frequency: how often customers are using the product

It might be useful to track these metrics over a period of time to get an accurate understanding of their impact on your product’s performance over time. Regularly measuring the success of your low-touch onboarding process will ensure it continues to meet customer expectations and stays up to date with changing market needs.

Final Thoughts

Low-touch onboarding matters – and it could be the key to growing a successful SaaS business. From utilizing customer feedback to make improvements to equipping your support team with the right resources, there are many ways that companies can streamline their onboarding process.

Furthermore, having an automated onboarding strategy will help you save time, money and resources while providing a seamless customer experience.

While onboarding will always require some manual efforts, leveraging modern technology can help you rapidly scale in an ever-changing landscape.

Note however that the low-touch onboarding process also comes with its own set of disadvantages. If you’re not careful, you could end up sacrificing customer satisfaction for cost savings. Some of the notable disadvantages include not having enough ways to track customer engagement or create personalized experiences.

Before diving into a low-touch strategy, make sure you have an understanding of the customer’s needs, as well as a clear plan to ensure they are met. 

And if you’re looking for more information about growing your SaaS business and improving customer experiences, visit our blog for more tips on how to succeed!