Think back to the first time you used a new product or service—whether it was a software platform or a complex tool. You were probably excited about the possibilities but also needed guidance to understand how to use it and get the most out of it. That first experience likely shaped your long-term relationship with the product.
This is what effective customer onboarding is all about. It’s the process of helping new customers become familiar with your product, ensuring they feel supported, confident, and ready to succeed.
In this blog post, we’ll explore best practices, checklists, and templates to help you craft a seamless customer onboarding process that drives engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
Skip ahead:
- What is onboarding?
- Why onboarding matters
- Types of onboarding
- The 4 C’s of Onboarding
- The stages of onboarding
- Onboarding is education
- Best practices for education-focused onboarding
- Onboarding in action
- Invest in your business relationships
What is customer onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the process of guiding new customers through the early stages of using your product. It involves delivering the training, resources, and support needed to help them understand your product’s full potential and how to achieve success with it.
Think of onboarding as the crucial phase between a customer signing up and becoming a fully engaged user. During this time, your goal is to equip them with the knowledge and tools they need to quickly realize value from your product.
When done well, customer onboarding sets the stage for long-term success by improving customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and increasing product adoption.
Why onboarding matters
Customer onboarding is more than just an introduction to your product—it’s the foundation for a successful customer journey. The first few interactions your customers have with your platform can define how engaged they remain over time.
Without proper onboarding, customers may struggle to understand how your product fits into their needs or how to unlock its full value. In fact, 74% of potential customers will abandon a potential solution if the onboarding is too complicated, and another 63% cite onboarding as a major factor in their purchasing decision.
Effective customer onboarding not only helps you retain customers but also encourages them to adopt more features, upgrade to higher plans, and increase their overall lifetime value (CLTV).
Types of onboarding
Customer onboarding should be a fundamental part of your customer success strategy, tailored to fit the different needs of your audience. Here are the most common types:
- Product onboarding: Provides customers with the knowledge and resources they need to get started with your product. This type of onboarding is especially critical for SaaS businesses, where early product adoption directly impacts retention.
- New customer onboarding: Introduces first-time customers to your brand and shows them how to derive value from your product or service. This phase focuses on building confidence and ensuring a smooth transition into regular use.
- Advanced feature onboarding: For customers who have been using your product for a while, advanced onboarding helps them discover and master more complex features or integrations.
Each type of customer onboarding should be focused on delivering a positive experience that helps users maximize the value of your product.
The 4 C’s of Onboarding
According to leading researchers from the SHRM foundation, onboarding has 4 crucial components, summed up as the ‘4 C’s’.
While originally developed for employee onboarding, these principles apply equally well to customer onboarding:
- Clarification: Helps customers get a clear understanding of how your product works and how it can solve their unique challenges.
- Culture: Introduces customers to your brand’s values, mission, and the unique culture behind your product, making them feel more connected to your business.
- Connection: Builds strong relationships between customers and your team, whether through dedicated support managers, customer success representatives, or community spaces.
These 4 C’s are not sequential but overlapping categories that should be addressed throughout the onboarding process, ensuring customers gradually become comfortable with all aspects of your product and brand.
Compliance
At a basic level, onboarding ensures that customers understand any necessary guidelines, regulations, or product usage policies.
Clarification
It helps customers get a clear understanding of how your product works and how it can solve their unique challenges.
Culture
Introduces customers to your brand’s values, mission, and the unique culture behind your product, making them feel more connected to your business.
Connection
Builds strong relationships between customers and your team, whether through dedicated support managers, customer success representatives, or community spaces.
These 4 C’s are not sequential but overlapping categories that should be addressed throughout the onboarding process, ensuring customers gradually become comfortable with all aspects of your product and brand.
The stages of onboarding
While customer onboarding may look different depending on the complexity of your product, it typically involves four key stages:
Preboarding
Onboarding starts before the customer’s official “first day.” Provide educational resources or product documentation ahead of time, so customers can explore the basics on their own and come prepared.
Activation
The first time a customer actively uses your product is a critical moment. This stage may involve a product tour, an introduction to their customer success manager, or a key milestone they have reached after getting started using your product.
Training
This is the core of the onboarding process. Customers will need to go through training sessions, tutorials, or courses that help them fully understand how to use your product to its full potential. Training may last a few weeks to several months and become ongoing, depending on the complexity of your product and how often you release new features or aspects to it.
Ongoing learning and relationship-building
Onboarding should flow seamlessly into a culture of continuous learning. This ensures that customers keep growing with your product and are always equipped with the knowledge they need to succeed as your product evolves.
As participants move through onboarding, set expectations that you’ll regularly be circling back to check in on progress.
Onboarding is education
At its core, customer onboarding is about education. Your customers need to be equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively use your product and achieve the goals that led them to choose your solution in the first place.
During onboarding, you’re not just welcoming a new customer—you’re their guide to mastering your product. By providing them with a clear path to success, you set the stage for a productive, long-term relationship.
Most of this education will happen in the early stages of onboarding, particularly during preboarding and training. But a successful onboarding strategy doesn’t stop there. High-performing businesses foster a culture of continuous learning, ensuring customers have access to educational resources throughout their entire journey with your product. This ongoing support helps your customers continually unlock new value as your product evolves.
The power of online courses for onboarding
In today’s digital-first world, online courses are a powerful and scalable way to deliver the knowledge your customers need to succeed with your product. While some hands-on, personal touchpoints will always be valuable, online courses should form the backbone of your customer education strategy.
Here are some key advantages of using online courses for customer onboarding:
- Cost-efficiency: Online courses are far more cost-effective than traditional in-person training or one-on-one sessions. They allow you to deliver consistent, high-quality education to all your customers, regardless of location.
- Scalability: Whether you’re onboarding 10 or 10,000 customers, online courses can scale effortlessly. Once created, a course can be delivered to an unlimited number of users, making it an ideal solution for growing businesses.
- Accessibility: Online courses can accommodate a variety of learning styles by incorporating different formats like videos, quizzes, and interactive elements. This flexibility ensures that every customer has the opportunity to learn in a way that suits them best.
- Self-directed learning: Online courses empower customers to learn at their own pace, providing them with the flexibility to engage with the content when it’s most convenient for them. This fosters independence and helps customers take ownership of their learning journey.
By incorporating online courses into your onboarding strategy, you can deliver the in-depth education customers need while providing them the flexibility to learn on their own terms.
Best practices for education-focused onboarding
Creating an exceptional customer onboarding experience requires more than just delivering information—it’s about making your customers feel supported, welcomed, and empowered to succeed.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when designing an onboarding process that’s focused on education:
Make it personal
Even though online courses are central to onboarding, adding a human touch is important. Consider pairing customers with dedicated customer success managers or hosting live Q&A sessions to provide personalized support.
Examples: Begin your online course with a real-time Zoom call, match new hires with buddies or mentors, or assign customers a dedicated support manager.
Lead with your values
Customers want to align with companies that reflect their own values. Use onboarding as an opportunity to reinforce your company’s mission and culture, and show customers how your values influence everything from product development to customer support.
Examples: If your company values transparency, provide consistent opportunities for participants to provide feedback and share their needs. If you value innovation, collaborate with clients to brainstorm fresh, new approaches to helping them achieve their goals.
Decide how to measure success early
Take an outcomes-focused approach by defining key success metrics from the beginning. Whether it’s product adoption or usage milestones, make sure your customers know what to aim for—and how you’ll support them in reaching those goals.
Make space for different learning styles
People learn in different ways, so offer a variety of content formats, from videos and articles to quizzes and interactive exercises. This ensures that every customer can engage with the material in a way that suits them best.
Embrace practical, hands-on learning
Encourage customers to apply what they’ve learned through practical tasks or exercises within the product. For example, after a course module, let customers complete a real task that reinforces the knowledge they just gained.
Example: Structure your onboarding around an actual project or task. After each unit or lesson, let participants apply what they’ve learned as they work towards completing it.
Schedule regular check-ins
Don’t rely solely on course completion rates to measure onboarding success. Schedule regular check-ins with customers to assess their progress, answer questions, and offer additional support where needed.
Example: Schedule a weekly, biweekly, or monthly one-to-one with customers. Instead of chat or email, use video or audio to get a real sense of their experience so far.
Ask for feedback on onboarding
Just like any other business project, onboarding should be focused on the end-user, whether that’s a customer, employee, affiliate, or partner.
The best way to improve your onboarding, and make sure it’s centering their needs? Just ask!
Make sure that you’re not just asking about their results and the onboarding content, but how it was delivered. Did the onboarding process itself align with their expectations?
Onboarding in action
Onboarding can truly power-up your business, but it needs to be done right.
To show the impact that effective onboarding can have, let’s look at how two companies transformed their customer relationships by embracing a structured, education-focused onboarding strategy.
Customer onboarding at Chargebee
Chargebee, a leading subscription management platform, needed a scalable onboarding solution to help customers navigate the complexities of subscription billing. As their customer base grew, they turned to online courses to deliver a more flexible and accessible onboarding experience. By leveraging the Thinkific Plus platform, Chargebee created a structured online academy that guided customers through product setup, billing integrations, and advanced features.
This shift to online learning not only helped customers feel more confident in using the product but also led to an increase in customer engagement with key product features. The ability to offer self-paced learning allowed Chargebee to scale their onboarding without compromising the quality of their customer support.
Onboarding at PayShepherd
PayShepherd, a software company specializing in contractor management for industrial facilities, needed to scale their customer training while maintaining a personal touch. Initially, PayShepherd relied on one-on-one training sessions to walk customers through their software, which managed everything from costs to contractor relationships. While this approach worked early on, it became unsustainable as the company expanded.
PayShepherd partnered with Thinkific Plus to build a scalable, self-guided online education program that could grow alongside their business. The results were significant. Within just three months, PayShepherd saved 350 hours of training time by shifting from manual sessions to an automated, online course model.
Their new training platform provided:
- Self-paced learning: Customers could access training materials on-demand, at their own convenience, leading to higher completion rates.
- Engaging multimedia content: By incorporating videos, interactive quizzes, and downloadable resources, PayShepherd created a rich learning experience that catered to various learning styles.
- Consistency and scalability: The online platform ensured that all clients received consistent, high-quality training without the resource constraints of one-on-one sessions.
- Data-driven insights: Analytics allowed PayShepherd to track customer progress, improve content, and offer proactive support.
By transforming their training approach, PayShepherd improved customer satisfaction and freed up internal resources to focus on complex support issues. The switch to scalable, online learning has been a game-changer for their business, providing the efficiency they needed without sacrificing the personal touch their customers appreciate.
Invest in your business relationships
At its core, business is built on relationships—collaboration, cooperation, and trust. Onboarding is your first major opportunity to invest in these relationships and set your customers up for long-term success.
By providing structured, thoughtful onboarding with the right support and education, you show your customers that you’re committed to their success. You’re not just selling a product—you’re partnering with them to help them realize the full value of what you offer.
Thoughtful onboarding is more than a one-time task; it’s a strategic investment in the future of your business relationships. By focusing on your customers’ needs and designing an onboarding process that caters to them, you’ll create lasting, mutually rewarding partnerships.
Ready to elevate your customer onboarding?
Download our Customer Onboarding Guide.
Designed to address the common challenges businesses face when it comes to onboarding customers, this resource provides you with actionable strategies and a step-by-step checklist to ensure a seamless, efficient, and engaging onboarding process.
Discover how your business can leverage customer education to enhance customer success today.
When your customers win, so does your business.
Platforms like Thinkific Plus are making it easier than ever for growing businesses to build and launch their first customer education academy. With specialized tools for content creation, engagement, and analytics for continuous improvement, enabling your customers and fostering business expansion is more achievable than ever.
