3. Onboarding - The First Step in the Customer Journey

In this lesson, we will discuss onboarding, which is a critical component of the customer journey. Onboarding sets the first impression for your customer and introduces them to the value they can extract from your product.

What Is Onboarding?

Onboarding is the process of welcoming users to your product and guiding them toward their first success. It's like being a good host—you want to make sure the customer feels comfortable, understands how the product works, and experiences its value as quickly as possible. The objective is to increase the customer's perception of value and reduce friction in their initial experience.

As Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, says: “This is what our product does, and this is what you can do with our product. They seem similar, but they are completely different approaches.” Onboarding helps customers understand not just how the product works, but how they can use it to achieve their goals.

Tailoring Onboarding to Customer Maturity and Engagement

The onboarding process can vary depending on the customer’s level of maturity and engagement. If a customer is new to your product and has little prior experience, the onboarding needs to be simpler and more focused on basic functionalities. On the other hand, if a customer is coming from a competitor or has higher technical knowledge, the onboarding can be customized to present more advanced features.

Most products initially provide a generic onboarding that applies to all users, especially in the first iteration. Over time, however, you can begin to estimate customer maturity and tailor the onboarding to deliver value more precisely based on where they are in their journey.

The Role of Onboarding in Achieving the First Value

The key goal of onboarding is to guide the user to their first success or the first value as soon as possible. For example, Dropbox teaches users to add their first file to a shared folder immediately. This step showcases Dropbox’s core value: making your files accessible from anywhere and easy to share. The faster a customer can experience this value, the better.

The "Aha" and "Wow" Moments in Onboarding

In onboarding, there are two important concepts:

• The Aha Moment: This is when a customer understands how to use the product. For example, learning how to create a landing page or request a ride is an Aha Moment.
• The Wow Moment: This happens when the customer experiences the product’s benefits. For instance, generating leads from a landing page or completing their first ride with Uber.

Onboarding should aim to create Aha Moments by teaching users how to navigate the product and Wow Moments by helping them achieve their first success.

Onboarding Example: RD Station

At RD Station, the onboarding process was divided into key phases to help customers reach their first success:

1. Initial Goal Setting: Before a customer signed up, the sales team worked with them to define their goals for using the product. This consultative approach ensured that customers knew what they wanted to achieve.
2. Delight Phase: The initial onboarding phase focused on introducing the user to the product and creating multiple Aha Moments. Since many users had low maturity in digital marketing, RD Station guided them through the basics, like building a landing page, to give them confidence.
3. First Value Achievement: After the initial delight phase, the Implementation Success Manager (ISM) worked with customers to help them achieve their first real success—such as generating leads through a properly designed landing page.
4. Adoption Phase: After customers achieved their first success, they moved into the adoption phase, where they began using the product independently, without the regular support of the ISM.

Key Metrics in Onboarding: Time to First Value

One of the most important metrics to track in onboarding is Time to First Value (TTFV). This measures how long it takes for users to experience the product's first value—whether it’s their first ride, their first file upload, or their first lead generation.

Tracking TTFV helps you understand how quickly users are experiencing value and can guide efforts to reduce this time. For example, you can measure:

• The median time it takes for half of your users to achieve their first value.
• How quickly the top 10% of users reach their first success.
• Variations in TTFV based on different user segments, such as industries or customer cohorts.

Reducing TTFV is crucial because the longer it takes for a customer to experience the product's value, the greater the risk that they will disengage.

Conclusion

Onboarding is a crucial phase in the customer journey, as it introduces users to the product and helps them reach their first success as quickly as possible. By understanding customer maturity, reducing friction, and creating impactful Aha and Wow Moments, you can improve the onboarding experience and set the stage for long-term engagement. Tracking key metrics like Time to First Value ensures that your onboarding process is continuously optimized to drive faster customer success.