Onboarding
What is onboarding?
Onboarding is the process that takes a customer from signing up to getting their first result with the product. It covers the initial setup, the data import, training the team and everything else needed for usage to become routine.
Also: activation · implementation · go-live
Why it matters
What it means for a SaaS
It is where next year’s retention is decided. A customer who never reaches the first result does not renew, however good the product is, and no later commercial effort recovers them. It is also the moment that consumes the most support: a large share of a SaaS company’s volume comes from customers in their first weeks.
Onboarding in detail
The first result, not the first session
Onboarding does not end when somebody logs in and configures their account; it ends when they get something they care about: the first useful report, the first automation running, the first visible saving. Defining what that moment is in your product is the first thing to do.
Why it concentrates support
Because it is when the customer knows nothing yet and when every decision arrives at once. The same five questions repeat with every new customer, and it is the part of support that automates best because the answer is nearly always the same.
Onboarding and documentation
Onboarding articles are the most read in any help center and the least reviewed. When the product changes they are the first to go stale, and the ones that do the most damage stale.
How Intake handles it
Frequently asked questions
How long should SaaS onboarding take?
As long as it takes the customer to reach the first result, which depends on the product. Setting a deadline before defining what that result is leads to calling an onboarding finished when it is not.
Can onboarding be automated?
The informational part can, and should: they are the same questions with every customer. What does not automate is the conversation where you understand what this particular customer is trying to achieve, which is what determines whether they get there.
Related terms
These usually come up in the same conversation.
Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers, or of revenue, lost in a period. It is the metric that tells you whether a subscription business is growing or just standing still: with high churn, every new customer only fills the hole left by another.
CSM — Customer Success Manager
A Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the person responsible for making sure a customer gets the outcome they signed up for. They work proactively across a book of accounts, own adoption, retention and expansion, and their success is measured in renewals, not in closed tickets.
Knowledge base
A knowledge base is the organized set of articles documenting how a product works and how to resolve what gets asked often. It serves two audiences at once: customers looking up the answer themselves, and the team using it as the source for their replies.
Contact rate
Contact rate is how many support questions a business generates relative to its size: normally tickets per customer per month, or per hundred active customers. It is the metric that says whether support will grow at the pace of the business or choke it.
Burn rate — Burn rate
Burn rate is the net money a company consumes each month: everything it spends minus everything it brings in. It is the denominator of runway and, at a company that bills, it is considerably lower than total spend.
PMF — Product-market fit
Product-market fit is the point at which a product solves a problem well enough, for enough people, that growth stops depending on pushing. You recognize it because demand pulls the team along rather than the other way round.
