Product Onboarding: Turning a User Manual into a Growth Tool 📊

🧩 What is it?
Product onboarding is the support and guidance clients receive to help them reach the outcomes they were after when they signed up for a digital product. They can be onboarded by humans (Customer Success & Support), by automated digital tools or in a hybrid way. At House of Product we build for scale and efficiency and prioritise automated product onboardings. One such onboarding we built from scratch grew RD Station CRM’s Activation Rate by 200% and helped it grow 9x in 2 years.

🧩 What is its job?
Clients hire digital products when they have a problem that they believe the product will solve in an appropriate way. They rarely have previous experience with it and most first need help learning to use it.

From their perspective onboarding’s job is to assist with:
➡️ Implementing the product into the company tech-stack & configuring it;
➡️ Teaching efficient ways of performing the JTBD for which the product was acquired;
➡️ Ensuring they are successful with the product;
➡️ Helping them avoid problems and solve them if they appear;
➡️ Developing appropriate usage habits for their context;
➡️ Helping them grow with the product, uncovering advanced use cases;

🧩 How can your company benefit from it?
It can greatly improve product performance and your company’s bottom line. It gets clients using the product immediately and they get value from it quickly by solving real problems the product was hired to solve. This reduces churn and improves the entire client retention funnel - improving activation, adoption and retention. Your product becomes much less of a leaky bucket, average customer LTV grows and with it your company’s bottom line.

As clients become good at using the product, onboarding can help them expand their use beyond core functionality to advanced features. Once they reach the limits of one product, good onboarding should direct them to the next one. These clients already know your company and your products, which is why they make high-quality leads for your other offerings. Automated onboardings can go as far as closing these up & cross-sell opportunities autonomously, saving great amounts of money in sales-rep salaries and commissions.

🧩 Should you revisit and improve yours?
Yes! If you cannot empirically prove that your onboarding is driving early retention, deflecting support tickets, generating product qualified leads, increasing customer LTV and assisting in cross and up-sells. It is disappointing your clients and underserving your company.

We can help you build or improve yours, so…

🚨 BOOK A FREE ONBOARDING DIAGNOSTIC CALL 🚀 🚨

🧠 Find hidden gaps.

📉 Fix churn.

⏱️ Get practical advice in 30 mins for free.

To help you diagnose Onboarding problems yourself in the future and help you turn it into a powerful growth tool, we will dive into the ideal technical setup and onboarding best practices in our upcoming posts 📚.

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