Are there SaaS onboarding best practices? We’ve all come to know the value of onboarding technologies to assist in a number of things, from self service and training, on to special data capture and interoperability and logistical management. The advent of these systems made possible a lot of interesting techniques in business, such as marketing, again self service, and much more.
However, considering these are kind of a new technology and are influencing a surge of new ideas in how to do a lot of different things, are there any SaaS onboarding best practices?
There are no mutually-adopted best practices for onboarding. It’s too new, and the limitations and boundaries of the practicality have yet to been reached let alone pushed. However, as someone with some experience with system-on-system constructs, and have talked at length of the many uses of onboarding to solve otherwise tough problems, I think I stand in a unique place to give some advice.
First and foremost, with onboarding, make sure the software which will host the onboard will tolerate being mapped to, and having its mechanics interfered with. Along with this, you’ll want something that’s built out of light weight components – AJAX and HTML5, rather than flash or java applets.
Second, you’ll want to design any visible elements being displayed by your onboard to not clash with the aesthetic of the web construct in question, but also be able to stand out, so it’s detectable to the user.
But, there’s something more to consider, and that’s adopting a sophisticated onboard software model.
WalkMe, for example, is a tutorial creation program which addresses the learning by doing model of training. Basically, by point and click scripting, you give it things to watch, things to interact with, and things to say based on conditions it detects.
These conditions are acquired by watching web forms, and determining user activity and patterns. Through this methodology, it can lock controls, or send users to different parts of the forms, correct mistakes, and prompt the users on what actions to take.
Along with this, it possesses extra tools like an analytics tool – another big application of onboard software. With WalkMe, you only need the one tool for both of these. The applications are staggering, and it can fill many of the voids other more limited onboard systems do.
It can also be worked into contextual targeting for ad placement and a number of other things, thus covering all the bases that onboarding can offer.
WalkMe is inexpensive, easy to customize and easy to set up.
Something else to bring up, on the side, is that you never overlook the importance of analytics tools. Capturing customer information, browsing habits and how proficient users seem to be is worth its virtual weight in gold.
Onboarding is the gateway to the intelligent assistance software so often shown in futuristic movies and television shows. It’s not quite self-aware yet, but it’s laying the ground for that to happen in the near future. Software is gearing up to account for automatons controlling it like users. So while there are no mutual SaaS onboarding best practices, this is a good start.
