Complete Guide to Customer Onboarding With Steps, Examples, and Best Practices

Introduction to Customer Onboarding

This article has since been updated with new discoveries and research in 2025.

An effective onboarding process and ongoing customer engagement have an increasingly critical impact on your business’s profitability—even more so since the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS).

Simply sharing login credentials and leaving users to their own devices will no longer cut it, as 74% of potential customers will switch to another SaaS solution if the onboarding experience is drawn-out and cumbersome.

Instead, customer onboarding has expanded into a whole sector of customer success tactics, helping retain the 86% who will remain loyal following effective customer onboarding and continuous education.

Customer onboarding processes differ from employee training as a form of external learning. They’re specifically tailored to get new customers up to speed about using your solutions. A successful customer onboarding process improves product adoption, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing churn rate.

Let’s examine the key steps to optimizing your onboarding process and explore a few real-world examples—plus best practices—for maximum customer success.

What Customer Onboarding is and Why Does It Matter?
Key Steps in an Effective Customer Onboarding Process
Real-World Examples of High-Impact Onboarding
Best Practices for a Scalable and Engaging Onboarding Experience
Common Onboarding Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Build a Better Onboarding Process With Thought Industries

What Is Customer Onboarding?

Customer onboarding is the critical first step in the customer lifecycle. It equips new users with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to gain immediate and lasting value from your product or service.

Far more than just initial training, onboarding sets the tone for the entire relationship—laying the foundation for how customers engage with your offering and your organization as a trusted vendor or partner.

Effective onboarding plays a pivotal role in the retention phase of the customer lifecycle. This is where clients begin to use your product or service, assess its impact on their business, and ultimately decide whether to renew, expand, or even champion your solution internally. When done well, it drives long-term engagement, innovation, and customer lifetime value.

For training businesses and customer education teams, managing customer onboarding effectively is essential because it:

Increases product efficiency through structured, comprehensive education
Reduces support tickets by empowering users with proactive learning
Enhances customer satisfaction, retention, and product stickiness

Organizations are increasingly turning to external learning platforms like Thought Industries to drive customer onboarding success at scale. These platforms support self-paced, structured onboarding through features like personalized learning paths, AI-powered content recommendations, and multi-channel delivery formats.

This not only improves knowledge retention but also ensures customers understand the full capabilities of your product or service and are inspired to grow with it.

Key Steps in an Effective Customer Onboarding Process

Here are the five key steps to successful onboarding.

#1 Its purpose built for customer learning

Step 1: Welcome and Guided Introduction

Effective customer onboarding starts with a detailed welcome email or introductory message that includes:

A personalized greeting
How excited you are to work with your new customers
A clear overview of your product
A brief guide to getting started
Your customer success team’s contact information
A Call to Action (CTA) explaining your customer’s next steps

This client CTA can include various directives depending on the specifics of your solution, such as completing their profile or watching an intro video.

A perfect customer onboarding program also includes key tools like:

Interactive product tours
AI chatbots
Personalized onboarding dashboards

#2 unlock the financial power of customer learning

Step 2: Structured Learning Pathways

Structured learning enables achievable, incremental progress that helps your learners better understand your products.

It’s essential to diversify your learning formats to appeal to various learning styles—so include the following:

Live sessions that allow customers to learn from your customer success managers and ask relevant questions
Self-paced courses with informational content customers can access on their own time, whenever they’re ready
Hybrid approaches, such as digital classroom sessions, foster interaction and community while discussing the material customers learned during self-study

Depending on the contents and complexity of your content, you may choose to structure your onboarding in different ways, such as:

Modules
Milestones
Certification programs

These stages not only organize learning but encourage continued engagement and provide a sense of accomplishment as customers complete them. Moreover, combining these progress markers with AI-powered recommendations can adapt your program to learner behavior and better personalize your content to your customer’s needs.

3. We bring innovation to everything we do

Step 3: Driving First Success and Adoption

Structure your onboarding process to include quick wins for your customers, including:

Simple tasks to complete
Setting up an account
Making their first transaction

Such speedy, simple wins and similar kinds of microlearning motivate your customers. They make using your product easy and help them achieve their first taste of success more quickly.

Gamification is another key strategy for successful onboarding. Studies have repeatedly shown that introducing game elements to non-game contexts helps improve engagement and performance.

To make onboarding as fun as it is useful, include badges to earn and leaderboards to climb. Other forms of progress tracking—like percentage completion bars—likewise encourage continued engagement.

At this point, collect real-time feedback via live discussions, surveys, or other methods to help refine your onboarding process to better match your customers’ understanding and needs.

Step 4: Continuous Learning and Ongoing Support

One of the best customer onboarding metrics for measuring success is customer retention. You want your clients to stay with your company, and since up to 90% of customers renew their SaaS subscriptions, you’ll likely have a solid base of recurring contracts.

To keep your customers happy and engaged, you’ll have to provide continuous learning and ongoing support. Onboarding isn’t a singular event; it’s a learning journey.

This journey can help develop a customer community through user forums and peer discussions supported by onboarding activities.

To keep your customers on the right path, engage them with:

Email sequences
In-app nudges
New knowledge bases
Community-driven learning opportunities like forums and peer discussions

Consider Seismic University—an online learning platform powered by Thought Industries. Through their platform, they offer their customers various SaaS certifications that enhance their knowledge of Siesmic’s products and SaaS as a whole.

There’s no real end to education at Seismic University—just continuously useful information that engages customers and keeps Seismic at the top of their minds.

Step 5: Measuring Success and Optimizing the Experience

Alongside retention rates, a few other key customer onboarding metrics to keep track of include:

Course completion rates
Time to first success
Engagement levels

With AI-powered insights from Thought Industries, you can quickly view your performance across these and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Then, you can refine your onboarding process by:

Gauging your customer’s interest and understanding across various topics
Seeing what kinds of resources your learners access
Knowing what material your audience dislikes or struggles with
Reworking your onboarding process to highlight relevant, interesting material
Finding new ways to teach difficult or disliked topics

Real-World Examples of High-Impact Onboarding

As you refine your onboarding process, you’ll find it’s often easier to learn through examples rather than ideas. The following are key instances of high-impact onboarding playing out in real life.

Example 1: Software Company Scaling Customer Education

A SaaS company struggles with product adoption due to information overload. To make their onboarding material more manageable, they:

Create a self-paced course
Use videos that can be rewound, slowed down, and reviewed at will
Include interactive assignments that better engage users

Following this change in onboarding, the company reduced support tickets by 30% while simultaneously improving its product adoption rates.

Example 2: Professional Training Business Enhancing Learner Engagement

A professional training business has an issue with learners not finishing their courses. To encourage completion, they introduce gamification elements—such as leaderboards and earnable badges—to make lessons more fun and engaging. They also offer certification incentives for successful completions.

The changes raise course completion rates by 50% across the board, minimizing dropouts and improving customer understanding.

Example 3: Multi-Tenant Learning Experience for Scalable Onboarding

A company operating across multiple global regions needs to provide localized onboarding content in specific markets. To control learning content from a centralized platform, they use a Learning Management System (LMS) with multi-tenancy features to deliver localized, branded learning portals.

The result? Improved onboarding consistency with keen market-specific customization where necessary.

Best Practices for a Scalable and Engaging Onboarding Experience

To make your onboarding process scalable and more engaging, try the following.

Make Learning Accessible

Format flexibility is key for better onboarding. To help every learner understand to the best of their ability, provide lessons via:

Live lectures
On-demand meetings
Hybrid styles—like group discussions about module work

On top of offering multiple learning models, optimizing all your content for mobile use is key so learners can access it anywhere, anytime.

Personalization Matters

AI can assess a customer’s understanding of a particular concept or topic and suggest further material to review. This allows users to chart their learning path to meet their strengths, weaknesses, and learning needs.

Encourage Self-Sufficiency

Self-sufficient learners not only solve problems faster, but they also put less strain on your customer success team.

Enable independence with:

Interactive knowledge bases that allow users to discover at their own pace
AI-driven chat support that answers specific questions quickly and accurately
Video walkthroughs that can be viewed at your users’ leisure
Guided tutorials that clearly explain topics to minimize manual interventions

Foster a Learning Community

When learners can interact and discuss topics freely, they encourage one another to keep going. Provide discussion forums and other social learning features for an engaging, collective experience.

Mentorship programs and user groups also help customers build meaningful relationships, share the knowledge they’ve learned, and improve engagement with your brand.

Prove ROI With Analytics

It’s not always easy to measure your onboarding process’ return on investment (ROI) in dollars, but you can work out the benefits it brings to your company by tracking:

Learner engagement
Course completion rates
Behavioral trends–like Support Tickets Opened and Customer Retention
Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Key analytical data about your users’ progress helps you address friction points in your program and refine your onboarding materials to better serve your base.

Common Onboarding Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

The most common mistakes in customer onboarding—and their solutions—include:

Mistake 1: The one-size-fits-all approach: This is when you don’t diversify your onboarding materials to reflect the varying needs of your learners. Instead of lumping all your learners into a singular group, use segmentation to identify similar capabilities and create custom learning paths based on roles, industries, and experience levels.
Mistake 2: Information overload: Learners can only process so much information at once. Break onboarding down into digestible modules and use spaced learning techniques that allow your users to set their own pace.
Mistake 3: Lack of measurable goals: The content and form of your onboarding material should align with your overall organizational goals. Define onboarding KPIs early—such as desired engagement rates, time to first success, and support ticket reductions—and then create material that supports your objectives.
Mistake 4: No integration with other platforms: As important as your LMS is, it still needs to work alongside your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), support tools, and other software. Choose a platform like Thought Industries that integrates seamlessly into leading solutions like Salesforce, Zoom, and more.

Build a Better Onboarding Process With Thought Industries

Effective customer onboarding is essential for client education and retention. It gets users up to speed quickly, improves overall satisfaction, and reduces support tickets down the road.

External learning platforms empower companies to create scalable, engaging educational content. With data-driven, intelligent insights to guide you, you can deliver a better onboarding experience that closely reflects your customers’ needs.

Assess your onboarding practices and schedule a demo with Thought Industries to learn how we can help.

With all the planning you put into onboarding your customers, let us onboard you onto a platform that delivers measurable, quick progress for your learners.