Reduce manual work with automation

Client onboarding software lets you set automated actions or use customer onboarding templates to free your team up from administrative work and reduce human errors or missed steps. Some examples of actions you can automate are:

1. Client segmentation based on data demographics
2. On-screen video tutorials
3. Payment collection
4. Pre-recorded comprehensive demos

Or you might use a SaaS onboarding software to manage emails and online communication with clients like:

1. Welcoming new clients
2. Promoting discounts
3. Sharing tutorials
4. Providing updates on delivery status
5. Resetting passwords

Impress new clients

An efficient onboarding process starts with identifying client needs and pain points in order to come up with effective solutions and strengthen customer support.

Client onboarding software gives you the chance to:

1. Centralize and analyze customer feedback
2. Manage and resolve customer support tickets
3. Create a unique client experience

Managed systems and data analytics help you champion your clients by anticipating and responding to their needs.

Tip: Here are some other ways you can impress your clients:

1. Being consistent in your client messaging and response times
2. Researching your competitors and establishing your own unique value proposition
3. Being respectful, responsive, and proactive
4. Optimizing your loading times

Grow your business

Client onboarding software makes it easier to scale your operations. By automating customer onboarding processes, you can easily:

1. Build and share a client portal that’s specific to each customer
2. Share async demos or tutorials
3. Collect and manage payments

… all without any manual work.  

In that way, onboarding software can help our client-facing teams handle anywhere from one to a thousand clients without direct involvement.

Reduce pain points

Once you understand your customers’ journeys, you can list and resolve common pain points to enrich the user experience.

Anticipating client pain points also increases user adoption and overall product experience.

For example, imagine your product is an automated time tracker that syncs to your payroll service. For your HR team to pay staff members on time, managers need to approve the whole team's tracked hours.

In this case, one of your biggest customer pain points would be how long it takes managers to approve team hours due to lengthy and hard-to-read reports. That means the payroll team would end up working late to avoid any payment delays, causing dissatisfaction.

Taking customer pain points into account is the only way to make your app an optimal solution for users.

Stay compliant with GDPR regulations

Client onboarding software guarantees data protection and compliance with GDPR regulations.

Under GDPR regulations along with other data privacy compliance such as the 'cookie' law, companies will need to receive consent from users before setting cookies or collecting any personal data.

In addition to client onboarding software, cookie consent tools can aid in developing an in-depth policy while tracking users' cookies with their consent.

Client onboarding software helps you secure customer information so it doesn’t get stolen and protects all parties involved in case of any future mishaps.

1. Inline Manual: Best for established small businesses

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Inline Manual is a digital adoption platform that helps improve the client onboarding experience by guiding them through the product. This includes direct walkthroughs, tool tips and customer support articles.

With Inline Manual, you can onboard new users, explain how new features work, and market other services in your app without writing a single line of code.

Pros

• Enhance user onboarding by creating in-app walkthroughs, announcements, tool-tips, hot spots and help centers.
• Collect user feedback directly from the app.
• Fosters team collaboration with real-time edits, customization and team permissions

Cons

• It looks like pricing increases according to active user count.
• Users need to pay extra for pretty useful add-ons like iFrames support.

Best for:

Inline Manual is a great choice for creating in-app walkthroughs and sending announcements to a segmented audience. Their software would work well for small SaaS businesses that aren’t likely to have a dramatic increase in users.

Pricing

Inline Manual offers a free trial. Then, prices start at $158/month for 250 monthly active users (MAUs). An Enterprise plan is available with a custom quote.

2. Userpilot: Best for medium-to-large businesses

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Userpilot is a no-code software that lets you create user behavior-triggered experiences. That is, it analyzes customer actions within the app and uses that data to send teams segmented information.

This helps you quickly introduce users to your most valuable features and thoroughly target clients based on their feedback and actions.

Pros

• Allows A/B testing to experiment with different customer onboarding flows.
• Collects customer feedback to increase your Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Shares hints and tips to alert users about new features when navigating through the app for the first time.
• Shows in-app pop-ups to drive upsells and conversions.

Cons

• Phone and mobile support is only available on their Medium plan.
• There’s a steep learning curve to build complex flows.

Best for:

Userpilot is an excellent user onboarding tool if you want to educate users on key features and help them adopt your product in a short period of time. Customers also use Userpilot to test out different onboarding flows and get feedback in real-time. Due to its pricing, this software is most popular with medium to large companies.

Pricing

Prices start at $249 per month for up to 2,500 monthly active users (MAU). Prices vary depending on your plan and how many MAUs you have.  

3. Dock: Best for companies with complex onboarding and implementation

Dock is a client-facing workspace that helps revenue teams close deals, onboard customers, and manage renewals. With Dock, your Customer Success team can create a personalized onboarding or implementation hub for each customer, all in a single platform. Use Dock to strengthen the customer experience through each phase of the customer lifecycle, including prospecting and sales.

Pros

• Dock lets you share and brand project plans, onboarding content, and forms in one collaborative workspace.
• Onboarding templates give everyone on your team a pre-made blueprint for onboarding a new customer.
• Embed checklists and product education to give customers one self-serve help center.
• Track onboarding engagement and stakeholder activity to predict and win more renewals.

Cons

• Dock requires some initial setup time to build your company's onboarding and implementation templates.
• Dock is still a relatively new company, so it doesn't have some more advanced features like an API. (That said, they have weekly product releases so the product is improving quickly.)

Best for:

Dock helps Customer Success teams provide a smooth customer onboarding experience and win more customer renewals.

Pricing

Dock has a free trial for up to 5 workspaces. Their business plan starts at $49 per person per month. Their enterprise pricing is available upon request.

4. ChurnZero: Best for mid-sized SaaS businesses

Churn rate is closely entangled with how well you understand your customers. ChurnZero is a customer onboarding platform that helps you gather data about customers throughout their lifecycle and share it with your team.

The customer success tool uses AI, in-app communications, and automation to increase customer retention and prevent churn.

Pros

• Gives you access to the command center with customer information, real-time alerts, and automations.
• Ensures personalization at every stage of the user journey.
• Creates content for different segments and adds user names into all in-app communications and walkthroughs.
• Helps you become a data-driven product owner.
• Gives you access to health scores, reports, and survey data to adjust your onboarding checklist as needed.

Cons

• It can be messy to build different journeys and timelines simultaneously.
• Lacks customization options for different personas.
• Has a steep learning curve and isn’t as intuitive as other similar platforms.

Best for:

Users go for ChurnZero to have access to customer data in real-time as they go through each step of their onboarding journey. They then use those insights to reorganize their onboarding process.

Mid-sized companies find ChurnZero useful because it’s not as expensive when compared with other similar tools on the market.

Pricing

ChurnZero’s pricing isn’t disclosed on their website. You need to fill out a form to get a custom quote based on your in-app requirements.

5. Pendo: Best for enterprise-level companies

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Pendo is a user onboarding tool that helps you build and customize the product experience to increase value and simplify the onboarding process.

This all-in-one platform is designed to increase product adoption and customer satisfaction with a variety of different tools and solutions.

The software gives users access to analytics, includes in-app guides, and gathers user feedback.

Pros

• Tracks how clients use your product and key features, as well as when and how often.
• Lets you roadmap your customer journey and share your insights with key stakeholders to guarantee team alignment.
• Integrates seamlessly with a large list of tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Looker, and Tableau.

Cons

• Steep learning curve for specific features like integrations and setup.
• Customization isn’t granular. For example, if you need to change your branding, you’ll need to start again from scratch.

Best for:

Users sign up for Pendo with the hopes of reducing churn rate, increasing retention, and providing a great customer experience.

But what I think makes Pendo great is its ability to mix analytics with in-app tutorials. Pendo is an excellent choice for large corporations with over 500 employees because it integrates with a large list of enterprise software solutions.

Pricing

Pendo has a free version with limited capabilities. If you want to upgrade, you can ask for a custom quote based on your company's needs.

Softr: Best for easily building your own custom, no-code web app

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Softr is a no-code web app builder that has a zero learning curve and gives you the freedom to customize as much as you want. With Softr, you can build your own web app, include in-app alerts, and create automations to onboard your users all in the same place.

Pros

Offers seamless integrations that let you customize your in-app client onboarding:

1. Intercom lets you add in-app product tours, chatbots, and email campaigns.
2. Mailchimp and Mailerlite let you create email campaigns and automate customer messages.
3. Hotjar, Google Analytics, and Fathom let you gather user analytics.
4. Crisp, Drift, and Hubspot Chat help you solve visitor needs before they become paying customers to increase conversions.

Other pros of using Softr include:

1. Gives you full control over your end-to-end web applications.
2. Lets you create a document portal or a knowledge base to onboard clients who like to read long-form, comprehensive step-by-step guides.
3. Allows you to personalize your onboarding system by gating your content and adding membership access.
4. Being a no-code tool, Softr requires little to no ramp-up time.

Cons

1. Since Softr isn’t a specifically designed tool for client onboarding, using it for in-app guidance will be extra work.
2. Softr only lets you create no-code web apps. If you want to develop a native mobile app, you might need to consider other options.

Tip: If a web-accessible mobile app works for you, you can use Softr’s PWA builder.

Best for:

People usually start out with Softr to create a custom web application. The most common use cases are to build:

• Client portals for better communication with your suppliers.
• Customer service portals to improve B2C relationships.
• OEM partners portal for better planning processes and communication with your OEM partners.
• Sales CRM for managing sales-related communications.

Pricing

Softr offers a free plan with limited records for your back-end database. Then, prices vary between $49 and $269 per month—based on yearly billing.