Introduction

Retention starts with onboarding. At least that's what we think!

Getting onboarding right is incredibly important. But with commercial teams getting smaller and the startup landscape becoming increasingly competitive, it's harder than ever to ensure that customers get what they deserve.

All is not lost! There's a heap of tooling out there to help you and your startup properly manage customer onboarding. If you're looking for a product that can help supercharge the customer success process then this list should have you covered.

What is a customer onboarding tool?

Customer onboarding software refers to any product that helps you get new customers up to speed with your offering. In many instances, this offering will be a software product but we've written this list so that you can also make use of the tools if you sell a service.

These tools are designed to help take some of the pain out of onboarding. Because of the custom nature of onboarding, the list is quite varied in terms of what pains the tools help solve for.

For example, you might have lots of new customers sign up every week. In this case, you'll need something that is low touch and can handle training and onboarding at scale.

Alternatively, you could only sign one customer a quarter but their needs are extremely custom. You'll therefore want something that helps you design an onboarding plan to cater to these needs, and that allows you to be in contact with lots of stakeholders.

For each tool, we've outlined which type of business it's most suited to. Hopefully it makes finding the right tool for you just a bit easier!

What makes them suitable for startups?

To put it simply, price. We know that smaller teams don't have the same amount of money as big companies to put into tooling. So this list covers products that are reasonably priced and we've purposefully avoided anything that costs more than a few thousand per year.

This list also focuses on those products that offer month to month packages. Because you're still figuring out how your processes work, it doesn't make sense to buy multi-year deals. That said, we'd recommend committing to a product for longer than a few months just to make sure that it's fully adopted.

Now that's out the way, let's get into the list:

whomso 🔗

Best for: B2B teams who need to run custom or complex onboarding for each customer.

For small teams, onboarding can take up huge amounts of time if each new logo needs to be handheld through the process. And more often than not, as the customer base grows the quality of these onboarding sessions goes down.

We built whomso to tackle this. Instead of the inevitable back and forth over emails, you can create onboarding microsites that give new customers a single place to see exactly what's coming.

And instead of wasting your onboarding call tackling admin, you can gather it all ahead of time using mutual action plans that explain what you need to get going.

We wouldn't plug our product if we didn't think it genuinely solved this issue for startups. Why do we think this? We know that startups don't want a huge stack of complicated tools. So that's why we built it to be HubSpot native and to work without having to leave the CRM.

On the subject of the CRM…

HubSpot for Customer Success 🔗

Best for: B2B teams who need a way to keep track of the tasks that need doing.

HubSpot isn't strictly onboarding software but it's a huge help for high touch companies who want to keep on top of the tasks that need doing and the impact they have on customers.

CRM's are ubiquitous at the startup level but customer success platforms like ChurnZero and Planhat are just that bit too much to justify for a small team. Anecdotally speaking, we've found that these products are often bought in by startups at great expense and then never implemented properly.

These types of customer success tools are great if you have a well staffed product team who can add all the data points for you. But if you don't have the resources to build out the infrastructure, it's not going to improve anything.

Instead, using HubSpot as your source of truth is a great alternative. Although HubSpot doesn't offer the level of customisation that a CS platform does, their new Customer Success workspace includes features like health scoring and risk identification to ensure that onboarding and beyond is running smoothly.

eWebinar 🔗

Best for: B2B teams who are comfortable relying on video and webinars to onboard new customers.

eWebinar is a really interesting take and offers a combination of video and webinars. In short, it's on-demand webinars which might seem like a strange concept but bear with.

Instead of running webinars or onboarding sessions continuously, with eWebinar you can record them once and let users access them whenever they need to. It also comes with some of the functionality you'd expect from a webinar like live chat. However, instead of the chat feed like you'd get in an actual webinar, these messages come through as support notifications to your team.

If you're comfortable letting users onboard themselves using video, and reach out if they need help then we'd really recommend using eWebinar.

Stonly 🔗

Best for: B2B teams who rely on repeatable guides or knowledge to train and onboard customers.

Once you've onboarded a few customers, you start to pick up on common questions. In this instance, it often makes sense to turn this training into a formal guide and a tool like Stonly can help you do that.

Stonly frames itself as a knowledge management product but, in simpler terms, it's a product for creating intuitive and interactive guides.

These guides are an excellent way to partially automate some of the work that goes into onboarding. For example, if your product requires some form of installation (through an app or an extension), you could offer an interactive guide that gives users the correct information based on the options they select. Far simpler than walking a customer through it on a call!

UserGuiding 🔗

Best for: B2B teams who have a lot of new customers each month and need to automate product training.

Training is only one part of the onboarding process and UserGuiding does that really well.

For only a couple hundred dollars a month (it's a variable price, depending on how many active users you have. For reference, it's $160/pm for 2,500 MAUs and goes up from there) you can offer scalable product onboarding.

UserGuiding does this through product tours. There's lots of options like this on the market but few are this cheap. Tours are a really simple way to give users a good sense of what your product does and how they can do it themselves:

This type of product makes sense for those with a high throughput of customers (hundreds each month). Any less than that and you run the risk of being too general and skipping over key details that a user needs to see to properly activate.

Typeform 🔗

Best for: Teams who sign only a few customers every month but need to gather information on them. For example, a software development agency or a product that has elements of customisation.

I'm sure you've probably heard of Typeform by now but, if not, it's a product that allows you to build rather lovely forms and questionnaires. This type of product is great for onboarding if you need to get lots of information out of your customers after they sign.

Say, for example, your product needs to be setup by an implementation team before a customer can start using it. You could gather this information on a call. However, it might be a more productive use of everyone's time to send a Typeform over to begin with, collect that data and spend the time meeting to build the relationship or discuss the answers.

Typeform is by no means onboarding specific but it does have many templates to get started with. We've also personally used this tool at whomso and can attest to its value!