Accelerating Adoption: The Role of Community in Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding plays a critical role in ensuring that customers are successful with a product or service, especially in the case of a Software as a Service (SaaS) business.
Not only does high-quality onboarding improve customer experience, but it’s also directly linked to customer retention. That’s where a customer community can help.
A customer community is a critical element of onboarding. Full stop. It connects to every part of the customer journey, from sales to renewal and upsell. However, it’s not a catch-all solution. It applies in specific ways to different parts of the onboarding process.
If you’re thinking of leveraging community for your customer onboarding process—the key to success will be understanding how community aids in customer onboarding and designing your community to take full advantage of the benefits.
Here’s how this guide is broken down:
- What a community looks like for businesses
- 5 ways a community helps with customer onboarding
- Pitfalls to avoid when leveraging community for customer onboarding
What a community looks like for businesses
Customer communities need to deliver certain key values to members. However, there is a lot of variation in how the community delivers those values to meet customer needs.
According to psychologists D.W. McMillan and D.M. Chavis, communities must provide four things to be successful: membership, influence, fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. Arguably, the last piece is the most important, but your community should aim to provide all four.
With those four foundational elements in mind, customer communities will look different from organization to organization. In general, though, communities take one of three forms:
1. A learning community focused on education of some sort (product-specific or general business being the most common) to help customers be successful.
2. Support community focused on helping customers solve their problems through peer-to-peer discussions and an internal support team.
3. A community focused on social elements enables customers to meet and connect with one another (particularly covering networking and peer-to-peer help).
4. A feedback and ideation community where members are actively encouraged to share their thoughts about the business and have a voice in its future growth.
The way a community is structured will depend on your organization’s goals and how you plan to build a sense of community within your customer base. There’s no objectively right or wrong way to structure a community. Instead, it’s more about the context of what your business offers and what customers have an appetite for.
5 ways a community helps with user onboarding
Community is a powerful value-add for customers because it gives them more than what they paid for and extends the value of their purchase. Here are the five ways this value-add happens:
1. Domain education builds loyalty
Here is an example of the customer onboarding webinar hosted by Bettermode's Onboarding Manager, Amanda Merrifield. The recording of the webinar is posted in the community so customers can watch and learn based on their preferences.
For example, one of the webinars for July 2022 is about helping community admins create better member onboarding experience.
Professional development is a multi-billion dollar industry and is considered essential in nearly every career. By offering education, your community helps customers get ahead of the curve.
A community formed around education might have a focus on tutorials, FAQs, or other customer educational needs.
How education helps customer onboarding: When new customers have a wealth of knowledge they can pull from, they are more likely to try to learn new things. This makes the benefits of learning coupled with your brand, which builds loyalty at the start of the customer journey.
Watch Webinar: Growth and Sustainability of Communities through Customer Education
This is especially helpful for SaaS companies where your revenue growth is tied to becoming further entrenched in a customer’s business. The more you educate them, the more they will see you as a solution provider worth engaging with.
2. Product education scales adoption
Every product has its complicated points. This is where product-use education can help. Whether providing walkthroughs, pre-made templates, or a general knowledge base for new users, a community built around using the product can provide a significant value-add for customers.
How product-use education helps with onboarding: This is perhaps the purest form of community aiding in customer onboarding. When an entire community exists to support new users and help them get comfortable with the product, they are more likely to use the product, find value in it, and stay loyal customers. From there, any time you help a customer optimize product use is another valuable moment that increases the likelihood of adoption and renewal.
Yet another great example of this is the way Bettermode's Onboarding Manager promotes onboarding events through the community. These sessions are also recorded and posted in the community so customers can watch based at their convenience.
Product-use education is also a powerful tool for your customer success team if you have one. They can pull from these resources to help with custom onboarding plus share the resources if customers want a DIY solution.
Bettermode Platform's knowledge base and tips & tricks articles are hosted in the community as well. These resources are promoted through various channels for onboarding. For instance, customer onboarding email sequences reference the resources published in the community.
3. Credibility based on community quality quells worry
During the customer onboarding process, people are nervous and excited. They want their investment to pay off. But starting a new product journey alone can feel, well, isolating. Imagine instead that you get to welcome your new customer(s) into a vibrant community of existing members. Suddenly, they aren’t alone. Many people before them have walked the same path and there’s an implication that many more will come in the future.
How the credibility of a community’s quality helps with onboarding: Your community itself—the sheer size and quality of members—is another tool in your onboarding toolbox.
Seeing how other people are already thriving with your product (or facing the same challenges) is a great customer retention tool. This is especially true when there’s also a customer success team guiding the process if that applies to your product.
4. Connection to other people gives peace of mind
Beyond learning product functionality or being impressed with the engagement, offering opportunities for customers to meet one another at different points in their lifecycles is a huge benefit. Not only does this tackle the fourth element of a community, but it’s also good business. Members can talk metrics, apply FAQs to unique contexts, and find common ground. You may even find members who foster business connections.
How connection helps with onboarding: Connection fulfills a deep human need. When you can provide the fertile ground for those connections through an online community or in-person events, your customer associates the good feelings they get with your brand.
5. Having a known support destination reduces customer anxiety
First-time customers often need the most hand-holding. Not because they are less insightful than experienced users, but because there is always a learning curve associated with any product. When you have a customer community, all customers know precisely where to go for support.
You can offer webinars, 1:1 office hours, or other customer touchpoints through the community, giving all members the peace of mind that comes with knowing they can always get support if they need it.
How a known support destination helps with onboarding: When you can reduce a customer’s cognitive load—meaning how much they have to think before taking action—that builds comfort, peace of mind, and loyalty. Having a community as a support destination also takes some pressure off your customer success team, since pre-recorded resources or community-sourced answers mean your team won’t need to worry about handling every request one-on-one.
In the end, all these factors lead to not only a higher quality onboarding program but also more profitability per customer.
Bonus: Community becomes a sales enablement platform
Community is powerful in helping new customers get onboarded, increase retention, and reduce churn. However, this is all client onboarding. It only works after someone has signed a contract.
But there’s a bonus: a thriving customer community is a sales enablement tool because the sales team can talk up the benefits of your community and how it helps create a high-quality onboarding experience. This could become a way to reduce barriers to purchase or overcome purchase obstacles with new customers, turning a customer success win into a revenue win.
Pitfalls to avoid when leveraging community for customer onboarding
Not moderating or no community management: Even with chock full of high-quality content, a community can’t be built and left on its own. Your team needs to actively manage the community—or at the very least keep an active eye on things.
Not using the right community platform: You need purpose-built software with integrations to your CRM when building a customer community. There’s a place for traditional helpdesk software as well, but that’s as a supporting player (no pun intended).
Not having a user journey or onboarding strategy for community members: Think of your community as a product itself. It needs an onboarding process and customer experience just like any other technology product would. Even simple features like a welcome email help build a connection with new members.
Not sending emails or other notifications to users (or sending too many): Members won’t always log in to your community to see what’s new. Sometimes you have to remind them. But at the same time, don’t inundate people with notifications that make them unsubscribe or stop logging in altogether.
Not being clear on what the community is and offers: Never over-market your community. If members aren’t networking with each other yet, for example, don’t advertise that. Instead, talk up all the pre-recorded content you’ve put there. You can work on growing engagement over time, but don’t promise something your community can’t deliver.
Not leveraging automation: Community management is a human sport, but you can still use automation tools—like onboarding workflows or engagement-based triggers—to help scale out a high-quality community experience.
Not building engagement milestones: Your whole customer base could end up in this community. While it’s important to not leave new users in the dark, you also need to create more advanced milestones to keep people coming back. Examples include: Submitting 10 comments is “Silver” level while 100 comments are “Gold”. These digital badges can appear on a user’s profile so other users know they are engaged and helpful.
Not asking for feedback: You won’t solve all customer pain points in your first community launch. And even with the best software, the user experience will need improvement over time. The more you ask for feedback, both in real-time with buttons in the community and through ongoing surveys, the more insight you’ll get about what members really want and need from your community.
Customer-centric community onboarding
Rule number one: your product or service must deliver on its promises. No amount of community, however fantastic, will make up for that shortfall. But beyond the basics, build your community centered around your customer. Help them become more successful and you will be more successful in return. For some that’s education. For others, connection. For others still, something else.
While frameworks can tell you how to get started, only your customers—unique, individual humans—can tell you what they need.
