How do you onboard customers?
I've been coding for the past 20 years. I have created many projects for others and some for myself. I had a few personal projects with user subscriptions (Communities, Saas, even an online game) and everytime it was hard to help users get to the "AHA" moment very fast.
For example, our browser based game was fun. In 2001 it had a community of about 1000 players worldwide and they were true fans. But onboarding new users was a task they did many times. I had to focus on building new great features. There were so many plans, so many things to do and players were always requesting new things, bugs were found. I felt the same with all of my other projects.. Many times I wished there were more than 24 hours in a day :)
Ofcourse, our onboarding always suffered. Even though I implemented product tours and welcome emails, it was not enough. Product tours were many times skipped ahead and when people really wanted to do one thing, the help documentation was external and they had to jump away from the task they were doing. Other times, they created an account, used the software for 1-2 hours and then never came back. Back to development IDE, I had to implement welcome series spanning over several days/weeks. It was all time consuming and making even simple changes was difficult.
Fast forward to 2020. Now we have great software for everything: we have Stripe for payments, onboarding software like Appcues and Userpilot and many marketing automation tools. But still, these cost a lot and it's hard to create a customer experience that integrates in-app widgets with website messages with email and SMS. My onboarding experience is one. I want visitors to signup and users to become customers. It's that simple. But why do I need to use so many tools to do that?
I wanted to fix that problem, and so Selgora was born.
Selgora enables product & marketing teams to improve conversion rates from visitors to customers inside and outside the product. It has a lot of customizable widgets and it requires no code. Allow developers to work on what makes your product great and make onboarding changes easily.
Selgora is a powerful customer journey automation platform which integrates very easy website announcements, surveys with in-app, SMS and email onboarding. It has website widgets for help, feature release, announcements, a very nice drag and drop email builder and a powerful automation flow builder (with blocks that allow to implement anything imagined).
One more thing. While developing my own products, I was always bootstrapping. I found a lot of external tools that could help me, but they were not cheap. I wanted products which I could use for free in the beginning or very cheap and then pay more as the product grows and I start to make money. That's why I decided to make Selgora free for projects that have less than 100 customers.
I would love to hear your feedback. How does your onboarding look like?
I use Bootstrap Tourist, a library for Bootstrap. Having said that I would have no idea how to onboard if I've not done tens of manual onboardings via screen sharing.
@akfaew I'll have to admit I don't believe in product tours. They are showing up to soon and trying to push too much information into my brain, too early.
First thing when I want to discover a new product is to explore it. I want to see what it can do with my own eyes, touch buttons to see if anything happens. Then, when I get stuck, I need some simple, fast information, that is shown inside the app, not in some hard-to-browse documentation, where I need to read pages and lose time for information that I need fast. A button click in-app that can show me 2-3 paragraphs of text, or even better, a short 2-3 minutes video that explains how I can fix my problem - that's the path to my "AHA" moment. That's what we built at Selgora.
Since you have already done a lot of manual onboardings, you probably know by now where your customers get stuck. I would fix it in 2 ways:
And that's how I would automate the manual onboarding. Of course, I understand the power of demo's, but that's another topic :)
Thank you @aazarshad. Your feedback is very valuable and helps a lot. We are currently testing several niches to see where we trigger more interest.
Userpilot here -- good luck!
Userpilot and our other friendly competitors aren't meant for projects that are low-budget. It's complicated to make full-use of such tools. You've just started, and you'll get it if you become a little or more successful that time/resources are constraint at bigger constraints.
Regardless, I'm rooting for your project.