Top 10 Customer Onboarding Metrics You Should Measure

Attracting new customers in SaaS is always exciting, but what really matters is ensuring seamless integration with a product and successful customer onboarding.

This critical phase of guiding new users from the first sign-up to becoming proficient users serves as a prime tool for building lasting customer relationships and loyalty, moreover retention. To assess the effectiveness of your onboarding strategies, it’s essential to track the key customer onboarding metrics and continually improve the onboarding experience.

Stay with us to learn which are the crucial 10 customer SaaS onboarding metrics that every SaaS company should measure to gain valuable insight into user behavior and pave the way for successful onboarding.

Customer Onboarding Metrics to Track

Customer onboarding is the time to deliver what was promised in a free trial, and there isn’t much room for any mistakes since you’ve got a single chance to persuade your users that your product can make their lives easier by making their workflows more interesting and sped-up.

A good way to evaluate the effectiveness of your onboarding strategies is to measure the customer onboarding KPIs that show how customers interact with your platform, what impressions they have about it, and whether they’ll continue to use it in the future. These metrics for the onboarding process serve as a guide on how to answer the demands of each customer based on the data. 

The Customer Engagement Rate 

It shows the level of interaction a customer has with your service or product over a certain time. It includes various activities like responses to marketing campaigns, interactions with the product, customer support, etc. If a company has a high customer engagement rate, that indicates that a customer base is healthy and involved, and the users find value in the product, which leads to a positive customer experience, customer retention, and loyalty. Therefore, monitoring customer engagement rates can help you identify opportunities for upselling, motivate brand advocacy, and serve as an early indicator of customer churn.

Feature Adoption Rate 

It measures the degree to which users are adopting a new product, features, or functionalities within it. If the feature adoption rate is high, that indicates that the users are satisfied with the additional feature, and the likelihood of churn is reduced. On the other hand, the low feature adoption rate indicates that the given feature doesn’t align with the current user needs, giving you a chance to improve the feature or introduce another.

User Support Request Rate 

The user support request rate shows the frequency at which users reach out to your customer support team for assistance. It successfully evaluates the platform’s efficiency, the functionality of its user interface, and the benefits of the user training materials. If the rates are high, it means that the users are having difficulties understanding the product functionalities, which prompts the need for improvement. By recognizing the patterns in the support requests, you get valuable insights into the specific area that requires improvement, which allows you to include enhancements to features and develop new ones.

Time Needed to Onboard 

Time to onboard measures the duration of a user becoming fully onboarded, from the initial sign-up to the point of becoming a proficient SaaS user. It serves to assess the efficiency of the onboarding process and to help you understand how quickly users can gain value from your platform.

Time to First Value 

TTFV measures the duration it takes for a new user to understand the first crucial value or benefit from a product after the first sign-up.

Customer Churn Rate

CCR shows the percentage of users who stopped using your services or canceled their subscriptions with your SaaS product.

Customer Effort Score

CES measures the level of effort a customer needs to exert to achieve the given goal or resolve an issue when interacting with a SaaS business. 

Free Trial Conversion Rate 

The free trial conversion rate measures the percentage of users who transition from a free trial to a paid subscription. A high conversion rate indicates that the platform’s value is successfully demonstrated within the free trial version and that the users are ready to commit to a full version of it.

Completion Rate 

This type of rate shows the percentage of users who completed the onboarding process successfully. A high onboarding completion rate proves that the onboarding process was successful for a significant number of users, which could lead to improved customer engagement and satisfaction. 

Customer Satisfaction Feedback Data 

This data includes all the information gathered from customers related to the level of their satisfaction with the product and their overall customer and onboarding experience. 

If you’re looking for a platform to streamline all your customer data and perform customer segmentation, we suggest you give the Akita customer success platform a try.

Why is Customer Onboarding Important for Every SaaS Business?

Customer onboarding provides a preview of the whole customer journey and experience that one might have with your platform. It’s the first interaction that usually determines how users will perceive your product and whether they can put trust in your brand. 

User onboarding metrics help you understand your audience better by showing you the patterns in trends in their interactions and behaviours. Most importantly, these SaaS onboarding KPIs serve as guidelines for creating effective onboarding strategies that aim to fit every customer’s needs. This is why it’s important to track crucial customer onboarding metrics and evaluate the effectiveness of your overall onboarding process.

To not miss an important step in onboarding, read the steps to go through of onboarding.

Conclusion

By monitoring crucial customer onboarding metrics, you are getting a framework for assessing and optimizing the onboarding process. From evaluating customer engagement and overall satisfaction to identifying the weak spots of your platform or a new feature. Onboarding metrics in SaaS allow you to align onboarding processes with customer expectations, set up your onboarding process for success, and improve customer retention and loyalty. 

With customer success platforms like Akita, you can centralize all your customer data into a single hub, share relevant information in real-time with everyone on the team, include automated triggers for certain actions, and work on your onboarding process.