Enhancing the customer experience, boosting retention, and curbing the dreaded churn…that’s exactly what the right customer onboarding software can do for your business.
In the SaaS business world, customer success is often equal to the company’s long-term well-being.
If the client struggles to derive value from the product or service, the SaaS company provider will eventually feel it in their bottom line.
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the key features and benefits of onboarding software, as well as the top ten best customer onboarding platforms out there.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of March 5, 2024.
What is customer onboarding software?
Customer onboarding software (also known as client onboarding software) is a digital tool designed to help companies train and educate customers in using their products effectively.
It’s a way of making a good first impression by ensuring that clients get a positive customer experience.
Customer onboarding solutions use various features and functionalities in the form of product tours, tutorials, FAQ sections, use cases, onboarding checklists, in-app messages, and training content.
They can also include self-service knowledge bases, gamification functionalities, tooltips, interactive walkthroughs, third-party integrations, mobile apps, and more to achieve their intended purpose.
By helping clients reach their “aha moments” faster, product adoption also increases, boosting customer engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
That said, let’s take a closer look at what key features customer onboarding software must have to effectively achieve both the client’s and the company’s goals.
What are the key features of onboarding software?
When looking to implement some of the top customer onboarding best practices, companies need to ensure that the customer onboarding tools they use are up to the task.
Since no two companies or products are the same, their customer onboarding processes will also be different.
As a result, they may need different tools with distinct functionalities to address their specific requirements.
Nevertheless, there are several key features that all professional user onboarding tools should have.
Easy deployment
Usability is one of the most important features of any customer onboarding solution. A user-friendly platform makes it easy for customer success teams, admins, and other stakeholders to map out the customer journey.
While some learning curve is expected with every digital tool, onboarding platforms should be straightforward and intuitive to use.
The software should preferably offer no-code editing capabilities.
This means that admins and managers don’t need to write code to create engaging customer training content.
The tool should have various built-in widgets, templates, and other functionalities to streamline e-learning material creation.
It should also be able to automate part of the onboarding process, allowing the team to dedicate more time to customer support and the overall user experience.
Lastly, it’s a good idea to opt for cloud-based customer onboarding software.
This means that organizations store, manage, and process their data on remote servers. They don’t need to invest in in-house hardware, making it much easier to deploy and scale.
Tracking and analytics
Big data, tracking, and analytics functionalities are necessary for today’s highly digitized working environment.
These features help companies measure the overall effectiveness of their customer onboarding processes. They can show what’s working, what isn’t, and if any bottlenecks exist in the onboarding flow.
Without them, customer success managers operate blindly, relying more on gut feelings than anything else.
More importantly, these features can provide actionable insights for better decision-making. That means teams can make data-driven decisions on how to enhance onboarding workflows.
These tracking and analytics functionalities help lower churn rates and improve customer retention rates. At the same time, they aid in boosting user activation rates, time-to-value, and other key customer onboarding metrics.
Segmentation
Big data and analytics can also help with customer segmentation. However, you’ll need a user onboarding software that has this functionality.
Customer segmentation is generally based on buyer personas.
This is the process of dividing clients based on specific user behaviors, wants and needs, goals, pain points, job roles, industry, or other criteria relevant to your customer onboarding process.
Effectively, you’ll create different identities (personas) for each type of customer based on said criteria.
As the first step of their customer journey, the onboarding stage can often set the tone for the entire relationship going forward.
With customer segmentation, companies can personalize the learning experience for each persona.
It helps boost engagement, trust, product usage, and even new feature adoption. In turn, this provides upselling opportunities for companies to capitalize on.
Without this high level of customizability and personalization, businesses usually end up creating a generic onboarding program, running the risk of higher churn rates.
Robust reporting
The customer onboarding platform should also be able to generate reports.
Ideally, this functionality should support custom report generation for a wide variety of user activities and other aspects of the customer onboarding program.
The right tool allows you to analyze specific data regarding the training material, frequency of user activities, or other user behaviors that are relevant to the customer success team.
Companies can use these custom reports in their decision-making on product development, marketing, sales, onboarding, and management, even at a senior executive or investor level.
5 important benefits of client onboarding software
Client onboarding software is an indispensable tool in the world of SaaS onboarding.
It streamlines processes and product experiences.
It also helps with user adoption, retention, and engagement, helping to build customer trust and loyalty.
Here are five of the most important benefits of professional customer onboarding tools.
Saves both time and money
A proficient customer onboarding tool provides a worthwhile return on investment in terms of both time and resources.
The platform should automate many time-consuming and repetitive onboarding tasks, freeing up the customer success team to focus on other key areas of the process, such as the client’s experience.
Onboarding automation also minimizes human error, ensuring that every single customer receives the same high-quality experience.
Automation helps companies achieve success with a smaller team and reduced labor costs. This is particularly beneficial for start-ups or those looking to scale up more quickly.
If used effectively, the tool’s price should pale in comparison to the time and resources it saves in other areas of the onboarding process.
Boosts customer loyalty
A study by the MIT Sloan School of Management showed that customer education boosts trust among clients. That trust often becomes loyalty.
Client onboarding software that’s able to facilitate the creation and management of high-quality, engaging educational material will also be able to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Makes customer relationship management easier
As the customer success team no longer has to spend as much time on repetitive tasks, they can focus on more mission-critical onboarding tasks, like customer relationship management.
This is especially true if the platform doesn’t involve any coding. That way, team members simply create the user onboarding process using streamlined and easy-to-use UI elements.
Helps with customer retention
Customer retention is often tied to how easily and effectively clients can derive value from a product or service.
If their onboarding experience is seamless and straightforward, they will reach their “aha moment” faster. As a result, they’re more likely to keep using the product long-term.
A professional customer onboarding solution can help to onboard new users better and reduce customer churn in the process.
Reduces support requests volume
It’s normal for new customers to have plenty of questions or experience various issues as they’re starting out using the product.
Happily, there’s a way to keep the number of support requests to a minimum (without sacrificing user experience). You guessed it — effective customer training.
As customers become more knowledgeable, they need less assistance with basic information.
This frees up the customer support team, allowing them to tackle more serious issues or look after major clients better.
A solid customer onboarding solution facilitates this by giving users the knowledge they need in an accessible way.
Knowing all that, let’s take a look at ten of the best customer onboarding platforms currently available on the market.
10 best customer onboarding software solutions
We’ve done a fair amount of research, looking at the top ten best-ranked customer onboarding software solutions.
We’ll be comparing them based on their top features, their pros and cons, as well as what they generally excel at.
Hopefully, this list will help you make an informed decision when choosing a platform that best matches your customer onboarding needs.
Software #1: Docebo
Docebo is a cloud-based, SCORM-compliant learning management system (LMS) used not only for customer onboarding but also for employee, partner, and executive onboarding, compliance training, sales enablement, and more.
In terms of customer onboarding, Docebo is an all-in-one e-learning platform for the design, creation, curation, and distribution of customer onboarding training material.
Its many e-learning and tracking features and capabilities are geared toward enhancing customer engagement and expectations while shortening the time-to-value of every customer.
It also integrates with over 75 third-party tools and provides training courses in over 45 languages.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Automated content creation capabilities.
- Multiple customer learning and training functions, such as blended learning, social learning, mobile learning, etc.
- Gamification features for increased customer onboarding engagement.
- Branding and white labeling for a seamless experience across all platforms.
Pros
- Offers many functions: certification, automatic user groups, enrollment rules, a wide variety of notifications, and more.
- User-friendly for both the end user and the administrators managing the system.
- Highly personalized, accessible, and educational: both new and existing users can advance their education from anywhere around the world.
- Offers a really good feedback system and ideas-management platform.
Cons
- Reporting functionality is not as advanced as other platforms.
- Mobile application is less attractive, with limited features and capabilities compared to the desktop version.
- Limited capabilities of power users, such as the inability to create automated groups.
Best for
Personalized e-learning content creation, customer education, and training across all customer life cycle stages.
Software #2: Pendo
Pendo is a digital adoption platform (DAP) focusing on data tracking and analytics. Put simply, a DAP is a digital tool that’s meant to help users learn to use another software solution.
That said, Pendo aims to increase customer satisfaction, product adoption, and retention, thereby reducing customer churn rates. It looks to do so predominantly via big data tracking.
Due to its analytics capabilities, Pendo also focuses on user sentiment, uncovering potential bottlenecks or reasons customers are not engaging with the product.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Robust data collection, tracking, and analytics.
- In-app guides for a personalized user experience.
- Customer feedback capture and analysis at scale.
Pros
- Simple technical implementation allows for page and feature tagging without the need for in-house developers.
- Intuitive and user-friendly interface.
- Integrates seamlessly with Zendesk, which allows the creation of a single location for users to get any help they need.
Cons
- More costly than other tools on this list.
- Learning curve is somewhat high, given its main focus is on data tracking and analytics.
- Roadmap is not up to par with other road mapping tools.
Best for
Driving user engagement and feature discovery through its tracking, analytics, and customer feedback analysis capabilities.
Software #3: UserGuiding
UserGuiding is a no-code customer onboarding tool designed to increase the user experience through in-app interactive product tours, tutorials, articles, and walkthroughs.
It uses data tracking and analytics for customer segmentation. UserGuiding helps create buyer personas for better onboarding customizability and personalization.
It aims to enhance the user experience throughout the entire customer journey, reduce churn, and increase feature adoption and user activation rates.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- In-app product tours and walkthroughs.
- Customer segmentation for better personalization.
- Hotspots and tooltips for more user engagement.
Pros
- Guides can be set by user group and page address, giving you control over who can see the guides.
- User segmentation, triggers, and targeting are very straightforward.
- Easy to use and set up.
Cons
- Customization options may be limited.
- Editing process can be time-consuming and confusing.
- Analytics may be a little elementary.
Best for
Guiding clients toward feature discovery and product adoption through interactive walkthroughs, hotspots, and in-app articles.
Software #4: Document360
Document360 is a knowledge-base creation and management platform. It’s used by customer success teams to design and manage customer-orientated content.
Through its collaborative workspace, multiple team members can work on the same content pieces.
These are often in the form of self-serving knowledge bases, FAQ sections, how-to guides, and other types of content used during the customer onboarding process.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Knowledge-base site for content creation and management.
- Knowledge-base portal with analytics, art editor, and category manager.
- Platform API for direct knowledge-base access directly from the product.
- Third-party integrations with CRMs, chatbots, analytics, translation tools, etc.
Pros
- Interface is easy to use and customize.
- A great standalone help center integrates with most other tools.
- Great support team.
Cons
- Integration with some Google products is not available.
- Analytics dashboard is somewhat limited.
- Many essential features (format saving when importing Word docs, a format painter for easy format copying, or easily removing the default formatting tool) are still missing or need improvement.
Best for
Creating and managing self-serving knowledge bases.
Software #5: Appcues
Appcues is a cloud-based, no-code onboarding platform that focuses predominantly on mobile apps. It’s used to provide personalized onboarding through in-app messages, tooltips, and interactive guides for product adoption.
It offers native support for iOS and Android, allowing for the creation of in-app customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) surveys for customer feedback.
The tool also targets and segments the customer base, tracks onboarding flows, and measures relevant key performance indicators.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Customer segmentation and user targeting.
- In-app branding.
- Onboarding KPI tracking.
Pros
- Great reporting features and customization through their API and their new integration with Salesforce.
- Quick and easy way to deliver application updates.
- Full customization tools.
Cons
- Configures flows for known users only, not for unknown visitor segments.
- No easy way to analyze data and see where users drop off (only available through third-party integration).
- Segmentation settings can be confusing.
Best for
Tracking onboarding metrics and mobile onboarding.
Software #6: Inline Manual
Inline Manual is a no-code onboarding tool able to create walkthroughs, product videos, tooltips, interactive tutorials, in-app help articles, etc.
It has a single collaborative dashboard where team members can create and manage the onboarding documentation.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Content branching based on the path that each individual user takes.
- Customer feedback gathering.
- Customer segmentation and targeting.
- Multilingual support.
Pros
- Easy to set up and test tours.
- High level of customizability.
- Detailed support portal for fast support.
Cons
- Content creator UI may be too cluttered.
- No user data analytics customization.
Best for
Small start-ups that want to boost feature adoption, onboarding, and in-app support.
Software #7: Userflow
Userflow is a user onboarding platform tailored toward creating onboarding checklists, product tours, knowledge centers, surveys, etc.
It’s specifically geared toward streamlining the customer onboarding flow. It allows for real-time in-app user interactions. Userflow can also highlight any existing roadblocks or bottlenecks.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Tracking workflow tasks with checklists.
- Automatic triggers based on “if this then that” rules.
- Built-in app feedback surveys with contextual questions based on targeted conditions.
Pros
- Intuitive even to nontechnical roles.
- New enhancements added regularly.
- Flexible UI builder creates interactions and a powerful API emits and sets events.
Cons
- Editor is only supported in Google Chrome.
- Low code-tracking visualization means the product tour/flow might not work if your UI changes.
- In-app analytics data lacks additional filtering/sorting options to simplify performance analysis.
Best for
Optimizing client onboarding workflows.
Software #8: Helpjuice
Helpjuice is a knowledge base software solution with a built-in collaborative editor. It’s generally used to create and manage support documents for customers.
The platform also offers analytics capabilities that highlight user in-app searches and overall content material effectiveness.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- In-depth authoring functionalities.
- Extensive analytics capabilities.
- Branding and customization capabilities.
Pros
- Fast, accurate search function for all stakeholders.
- Centralized internal knowledge keeps everyone updated and on the same page.
- Integrates with other platforms like Slack, Salesforce, or Microsoft Teams.
Cons
- Support documentation can be out-of-date or unclear.
- More complex editing requires basic HTML/CSS knowledge.
- Editing complexity grows with more advanced components like tables.
Best for
Building and maintaining customer knowledge bases.
Software #9: Acadle
Acadle is a learning management system that aims to drive user integration and engagement through gamification, group discussions, and live-streaming features.
It can also be used to create drip email campaigns, gather customer feedback, segment clients, and provide training in multiple languages.
Acadle provides tracking and monitoring functionalities through reports and statistical analytics.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Building custom keywords and preview titles for SEO.
- Advanced pixel tracking for analyzing user behavior.
- Drip email campaigns.
Pros
- Clean and easy-to-navigate user interface.
- Numerous online course customization features.
- Facebook support group, webinars, and email announcements.
Cons
- No mobile apps for iOS and Android.
- Limited integration with other tools.
- Limited data storage.
Best for
Driving customer engagement during the onboarding process.
Software #10: Stonly
Stonly is a client onboarding platform for creating interactive walkthroughs and step-by-step guides. It’s also able to create self-serve knowledge bases, onboarding checklists, and product tours.
It has an intuitive interface and drag-and-drop editor, making it straightforward for non-technical team members to use.
Stonly also has an analytics dashboard for maximizing user engagement and walkthrough optimizations.
G2 Rating
Top Features
- Troubleshooting and setup guides.
- Self-serve client support for a streamlined experience.
- Automation and AI for faster customer e-learning content creation.
Pros
- Options for custom CSS when building content.
- Report Issues tool for identifying and reporting problems.
- Easy to move from a written doc to a live guide that’s accessible from your website.
Cons
- Limited number of images/media per page in a guide.
- Interface is highly oriented to the mobile experience (single column with a lot of negative space).
- Multiple widget management can be time-consuming.
Best for
Delivering interactive customer help content.
Onboard your customers with the right LMS
This list of customer onboarding software highlights some of the best-in-class tools currently available on the market.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with features and functionalities, remember that the best solution for your organization is the one that can cater to your specific needs and requirements.
Sometimes, the most cutting-edge product on the market isn’t the right option for your customer onboarding strategy.
Are you looking for a professional customer onboarding LMS to train your customers quickly and effectively? Look no further than Docebo.
Schedule a demo today and see exactly what it can do for your business!