How To Choose The Right Customer Onboarding Tool For Business?

B2B SaaS companies focus on building a business model that meets the needs of their customers with a customer-centric approach to simplify their customer onboarding and implementation.

Customer centricity is crucial to an organization's overall business goals. Changing every customer interaction with a customer-centric approach helps to achieve higher customer success.

Many legacy and traditional IT companies store their data and resources with an on-premises business model. However, hosting on-site is too expensive for the firms, which has brought a shift in the IT industry to migrate IT assets to the cloud in recent years or create hybrid environments that use a mix of cloud and on-premises solutions. It allows companies to pay based on their need or a subscription model.  

Research says that 38% of SaaS businesses charge their customers based on usage, and 40% of companies use value-based pricing.

The SaaS business model allows customers a subscription on a monthly or annual basis rather than one-time fees, unlike the on-premises model with the help of cloud infrastructure. It helps companies generate recurring revenue while focusing on new features, new products, better service, and other benefits that offer lifetime value to both; new customers and existing users.  

Enterprise SaaS businesses have been experiencing exponential growth in recent years since 2005. Most organizations are still on legacy project management tools for their customer onboarding. However, they have also had to deal with bumpy roads with these legacy tools.

The Move From Legacy Project Management Tools To Dedicated Customer Onboarding Tool

Companies must invest in the right customer onboarding and implementation tool for their business to avoid stumbling on these bumpy roads. As customer onboarding is the most critical phase in the customer journey, having a single source of truth makes the lives of their customers and teams easier.

An organization must keep everyone on the same page in the whole process of customer onboarding and implementation. However, they often face problems with sharing information and effective communication during cross-functional team collaboration because they use silos of tools.

Every department has different roles and tasks but is connected with a common goal to achieve, so they often use various tools according to their needs to keep everyone in the loop.  

However, keeping everyone in the loop is not enough for quality service, or is it?

Using multiple tools doesn't provide a lot of benefits either. An organization also needs quality insights and productive communication between the organization and their customer.

Customers often complain of delays and miscommunication, which leads them to churn because they lack a unified customer data platform.

A single source of truth is your go-to solution for customer onboarding to reduce customer churn.

Let us dive into what features the best customer-centric onboarding and implementation platform provides for an effortless customer onboarding experience.

Best Customer-Centric Onboarding And Implementation Platform

B2B SaaS companies need to follow customer-centric approach examples to provide a good customer experience to make your customer stay for the long term. It costs up to 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one. B2B SaaS companies need customer-centric objectives for customer retention, which will help to increase their profits by 25-95%.

SaaS companies need to move from a product-centric to a customer-centric onboarding tool for better customer onboarding and implementation to build a smooth onboarding experience for their customers.

Let's dive into the essential features for the best customer onboarding and implementation platform experience.

Effortless Visibility

A dedicated onboarding and implementation platform should provide effortless visibility and ease of report generation, with holistic visibility across use cases, tasks, projects, and unified customer data, with a single-click view of all the customers who requested a new feature in one place.

B2B SaaS customers need time tracking, a Gantt chart, and a resource utilization map to help them manage projects at the scale.

This feature should also help prioritize tasks with a BRAG status, revenue milestones, and implementation fee tracking at every use case level.  So, there is no delay in delivering faster time to value and up to date with the progress of the highest priority clients.

Intelligent Focus

For B2B SaaS companies, delivering faster customer onboarding and time to value is a must to retain their customers, using configurable templates for projects and use cases. B2B SaaS enterprise customers expect a tool that helps them save their time and achieve a faster time to deliver with a one-click calculation of the RAG statuses of the customers, projects, and use cases.

An intelligent automation tracking system is crucial for adjustments of forecasted data in case of delays in tasks to help you save time.

Also, bi-directional integration with JIRA will help drive strategic collaborations with customers to track dependencies with the product and tech teams in a single place.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

A customer-centric onboarding is essential for organizations and their new customers to seamlessly collaborate with the implementation team on new feature requests, tech tasks, bugs, and API integrations with the help of a unified customer data platform.

B2B SaaS companies need a tool that helps them generate and share a customizable project status report with customers and assign tasks to internal cross-functional teams, customers, and stakeholders to manage and track dependencies and collaborate on a common platform.

Contextual Insights

The best customer onboarding and implementation platform help B2B SaaS companies build customer centricity at the organizational level with the help of custom fields to tailor functionality to their business needs.

Contextual Insights helps B2B SaaS Companies to manage all critical information in a single click view of all the projects, use cases, tasks, and product dependencies associated with a customer. It also prevents information loss and provides a seamless handover of information from sales to the onboarding and implementation team and then to the customer success team.

The features of the best customer-centric onboarding should provide a holistic view of customer data in one place, eliminate information silos, and save valuable time and bandwidth. However, If there is no accountability in use case/task dependencies, it gets difficult to track the growth of the milestones an organization and its customers are trying to achieve.

Revenue Risk Mitigation

B2B SaaS companies need to identify revenue leakage and opportunities across all modules, tasks, and clients; precisely in advance to help organizations minimize revenue risks with a focus on customer use cases/tasks with the highest impact on the bottom line time to value.  

There is a need for a customer-centric tool that provides a proprietary algorithm with actionable insights and recommendations to accelerate prioritization and revenue recognition with a one-click view of all customer activities.

Document Repository

Information loss or miscommunication is the major obstacle for B2B SaaS companies that rely on legacy project management tools for customer onboarding and implementation of customer requirements. This information loss causes delays in go-lives. These delays cause customers to lose trust in a product and move on to competitors.

Document repositories in these customer-centric tools help templatize all information in a structured format with details of use cases, revenue & timeline and to build a library for all documents to secure any crucial information.

Conclusion

B2B SaaS enterprise companies must understand the need for customer centricity. Medium SaaS companies lose about 5% to 7% of revenue to churn annually.

B2B SaaS Companies need to opt for the best customer-centric onboarding and implementation platform to reduce customer churn, provide a seamless onboarding journey to guide their customer toward their ideal outcomes and derive faster time to value from a product/service.

A dedicated onboarding and implementation platform with the features above is necessary to achieve customer centricity for organizations that provide solutions for all organizational-level problems.