Why should product owners care about User Onboarding?
Whether you are selling Software As a Service or any other product, customers buy your service to receive specific benefits. And the amount of time a new customer takes to realize value from your product is Time To Value (TTV). Low TTV means the customer gets a return on investment of time faster, thereby prevent churn, which is one critical KPI for products.
Recently, I have been working on user onboarding experience features for various ERP solutions. During this period, I learned that with better user onboarding, we could reduce the TTV. In the olden days, when customers buy licensed software, they had the patience to spend substantial time understanding the product and see their ROI; however, with SaaS products, that’s not the case. With SaaS, the tolerance for delays is much smaller, and customer churn is faster. Once you have convinced your customer to signup and use the trial version, you have very little time in hand to get this customer reach the aha moment when he sees actual value in your product. So if your onboarding process helps your new user understand the product features easily and guide him to use the product from day one, you have achieved your first goal — user engagement, that will help shorten TTV.
TTV depends on the kind of product you are offering, and it’s majorly categorized as Short Time To Value and Long Time To Value.
One example of a product with Short TTV is Web Tracking Software that helps you track web metrics. The only start action users need to take here is to configure their URL’s in the software, and they will begin to getting required insights from multiple reports.
Long TTV is typically for some SaaS products that don’t add value immediately, as it may take time to create data, inventory, accounting, etc. before using product core features.
There are various strategies used to achieve low TTV. In this article, I will cover how Deskera Books is helping its customers to reach their aha moment by providing some good options to its users at the time of onboarding. While we are continuously improving our customer experience, below are the top 3 features that I find very interesting.
Try Demo Company: With this option available in onboarding flow, before creating your data, you can go with the Demo Company option where the team at Deskera has created sample data ready for you to start playing around with the application as soon as you sign up. You can try performing accounting actions in a demo company, learn how the software works, prioritize features you want to use first, define your flows, and get started with your organization setup. With this approach, you are not exploring features with your company data, and the journey to understand the value you want is faster. I think this is a useful strategy for complex applications where data is critical, like in accounting systems or inventory management.
Add a Teammate: You alone having access to a system like accounting may not suffice, you may want to provide further access to your colleagues to collaborate with and get desired benefits from the product. With Add a Teammate feature, you can send invites to your colleagues and onboard them in specific roles like Admin, Accounting, Business, Auditor. With this, you get online as a team, while as an administrator, you manage all operations, and your accounting person will be handling your Chart Of Accounts; the Sales team can start preparing for buy and selling of products.
Import Data: Before you start with any accounting actions, it is necessary to have your Chart of Accounts, Customer, and Inventory data in the system, which can be time-intensive. To ease this task, Deskera’s Import Data feature helps you import data for all these modules from various sources like XLSX and CSV. You will save time spent on data entry exercise and start managing your accounts online quickly.
You will find the above features in most of the SaaS products, and even I have come across them many times in my 15+years IT journey. Still, now when I look at them from the user experience perspective, I learned that though features provide solutions, it is essential they are easily accessible to users at the right time.
It is s not about what value you want to deliver through your product; instead, it is about the value your customer sees in the product. And, I believe a good user onboarding process can help your customer understand the product from his perspective and thereby reach the aha moment quickly.
There is always more you can do for your customers, with situations customers perspective may change, so this is an ongoing process, keep measuring your TTV and work on enhancing your user onboarding process.
Before I conclude, I would like to add one last point on which I am still doing some research and would love to hear more thoughts on this. With the current pandemic of Covid-19 that we all are in, the business environment across sectors has wholly changed. Considering this, what is it that we can do in user onboarding flow and help our customers?
I hope the article was helpful. Thank you for reading!
