Customer onboarding can be a challenge, but the right tools can make all the difference. A well-structured onboarding experience helps customers get up to speed quickly, reducing frustration and increasing long-term engagement. In fact, research shows that a complicated onboarding process will drive 74% of potential customers away. For customer success managers (CSMs), effective onboarding tools automate repetitive tasks, streamline communication, and ensure customers experience value from the start—setting the stage for stronger relationships and improved retention.
Customer Onboarding Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
If onboarding feels like a never-ending cycle of manual follow-ups, repetitive explanations, and tracking customer progress, you’re not alone. CSMs often spend too much time answering the same questions and chasing customers to complete key steps. This inefficiency can lead to slower adoption and lower customer satisfaction.
That’s where onboarding tools come in. The best customer onboarding tools streamline the process, guiding users step by step and giving CSMs more time to focus on meaningful interactions. But with so many options, how do you choose the best customer onboarding tool? Let’s break it down.
What Makes a Great Customer Onboarding Tool?
Choosing the right customer onboarding tool can be overwhelming, especially with so many options on the market. But not all tools are created equal. The best ones do more than just introduce customers to a product—they create a seamless experience that drives engagement, reduces churn, and makes life easier for CSMs. To achieve this, a great onboarding tool should streamline processes, provide valuable insights, and grow alongside your business.
- Automate time-consuming tasks: Free up CSMs to focus on more strategic efforts.
- Keep customers engaged: Ensure users stay on track with personalized guidance.
- Provide clear insights: Help CSMs see where customers struggle and take action.
- Scale with your business: Work just as well for ten customers as for ten thousand.
- Be easy to use: If using the tool is a hassle, it only adds to the workload instead of reducing it.
A strong onboarding tool will set customers up for long-term success. When automation, engagement, insights, scalability, and ease of use come together, CSMs can focus on what really matters: building relationships and ensuring customers find value quickly.
Which Tools Are Best for Customer Onboarding?
A strong onboarding process requires the right mix of tools to guide customers, keep them engaged, and provide the resources they need to succeed. Here’s a closer look at the key types of onboarding tools and how they improve the customer experience.
Product Walkthroughs & Interactive Guides
One of the biggest challenges in onboarding is helping users quickly understand how to use a product. Product walkthroughs and interactive guides provide real-time, step-by-step instructions within the software itself, eliminating guesswork and frustration. They also allow businesses to create tailored onboarding experiences based on user roles or specific use cases, ensuring that each customer gets the most relevant guidance.
These guides can highlight key features, demonstrate workflows, and encourage users to take specific actions, ensuring a smoother transition into the product.
Benefits:
- Accelerate product adoption
- Reduce support inquiries
- Increase overall user satisfaction
Automated Email & In-App Messaging
Consistent communication is key to keeping customers engaged throughout the onboarding process. Automated email and in-app messaging tools help businesses maintain that connection by delivering timely, personalized check-ins, reminders, and helpful content without requiring constant manual effort from CSMs.
These tools ensure that users stay on track by reminding them to complete essential setup steps, offering tips based on their activity, or celebrating milestones to reinforce progress. By sending the right message at the right time, businesses can guide customers through the onboarding process more effectively while reducing the risk of drop-offs.
Benefits:
- Keep customers engaged with proactive outreach
- Reduce the need for manual follow-ups
- Improve product adoption by delivering relevant, timely support
Knowledge Bases & Self-Service Portals
Customers often have questions during the onboarding process, and providing them with a resource to find answers on their own can significantly improve their experience. Knowledge bases and self-service portals offer easy access to FAQs, guides, troubleshooting tips, and tutorials, allowing users to solve issues independently and at their own pace.
These tools reduce the volume of support requests by empowering customers to find solutions quickly and without needing to contact customer service. Additionally, they help users feel more confident in using the product, knowing they have a resource to refer to whenever needed.
Benefits:
- Reduce the number of support requests
- Empower customers to solve problems independently
- Enhance user satisfaction and confidence in the product
Video-Driven Onboarding
Traditional text-based guides and walkthroughs are helpful, but video onboarding takes customer education to the next level by making it more engaging and personalized. Video-driven onboarding allows businesses to create dynamic, visual content tailored to individual customer needs, offering a more interactive learning experience.
This approach enables customers to absorb information at their own pace, revisiting key points as needed. With clear visual demonstrations and personalized messaging, video onboarding not only makes complex concepts easier to understand but also reinforces product value in a more memorable way.
Benefits:
- Increase engagement with personalized, dynamic video content
- Allow customers to learn at their own pace
- Enhance retention by providing a visual and interactive learning experience
For more customer onboarding examples, download The Complete Guide to Customer Onboarding Videos.
The Best Customer Onboarding Tools for CSMs
When selecting the right customer onboarding tools, it’s essential to choose ones that align with your company’s specific needs and your customers’ expectations. Here are some top picks to consider:
- SundaySky: Personalized video onboarding to increase engagement and retention.
- Pros: The platform enables users to create dynamic, personalized videos that are both scalable and designed to drive long-term customer retention through engaging and tailored content.
- Cons: For businesses with complex products, the initial set-up can take time and resources.
- Intercom: Automates customer messaging with in-app chat and email sequences.
- Pros: Intercom streamlines customer communication by automating personalized messaging through in-app chat, email, and push notifications, ensuring timely and relevant touchpoints.
- Cons: The learning curve for setting up and customizing workflows can be steep, and the platform’s pricing may be challenging for smaller businesses.
- Pendo: Combines analytics with interactive guides to drive adoption.
- Pros: Pendo offers powerful analytics combined with interactive guides, allowing businesses to track user behavior and deliver contextually relevant onboarding instructions.
- Cons: The platform’s advanced features may overwhelm new users, and its cost can be high for smaller companies or teams with limited budgets.
- Zendesk Guide: Helps companies create a robust self-service knowledge base.
- Pros: Zendesk Guide empowers customers to resolve issues on their own, reducing support queries and enabling businesses to offer 24/7 assistance through a comprehensive self-service portal.
- Cons: Managing and updating content requires regular attention, and the platform lacks the interactivity and personalized experience found in other onboarding tools.
- WalkMe: Uses AI-driven guidance to simplify complex onboarding processes.
- Pros: WalkMe’s AI-driven guidance adapts to users’ needs in real-time, helping them navigate complex workflows and tasks with personalized step-by-step support.
- Cons: Setting up and customizing AI-driven guidance can be time-consuming, especially for businesses with intricate onboarding processes.
Customer Onboarding Tools List: Top Picks for CSMs
When it comes to selecting the right tools for customer onboarding, it’s important to consider various categories that address different needs and use cases. Whether you’re looking to improve product adoption, automate communication, or provide self-service resources, the following breakdown can help guide your decision-making. Here’s a quick reference to some of the best tools in each category.
- Product Walkthroughs: SundaySky, Pendo, WalkMe, Userpilot
- Automated Messaging: Intercom, Customer.io, HubSpot
- Knowledge Bases: Zendesk, Notion, Help Scout
- Video Onboarding: SundaySky
Customer Onboarding Tools Examples
Here’s how businesses are using the SundaySky Enterprise Video Platform to create customer onboarding videos:
Aetna
Aetna leveraged SundaySky to create personalized healthcare onboarding videos for new members, helping them navigate their benefits with ease. By using dynamic video content, Aetna saw a significant lift in Net Promoter Score and incremental value in cost savings per video view.
Okta
Okta, a leading identity management provider, used SundaySky to drive product adoption and deliver tailored video onboarding experiences for their enterprise clients. The personalized videos simplified complex security processes, leading to 2x customer health scores and a 69% average video view rate.
See what Alana Stoltzfus (Sr. Digital Growth Manager at Okta) has to say about this.
T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price, a global investment management firm, adopted SundaySky to enhance their 401K marketing videos. Personalized video content helped clients understand investment strategies and account features, resulting in 97% of viewers reporting their videos were useful to them.
Discover how SundaySky transformed their onboarding experience using their own platform in Scaling Customer Onboarding with Video: A SundaySky Case Study.
Conclusion
Customer onboarding tools are essential for any CSM looking to streamline the process and improve customer retention. Whether you need interactive walkthroughs, automated messaging, or video-driven onboarding, there’s a tool that fits your needs. By leveraging the best customer onboarding tools, CSMs can create a more efficient, scalable process that keeps customers engaged and sets them up for long-term success.
For those looking to enhance their onboarding strategy, SundaySky is a standout choice, offering personalized videos that make onboarding smoother and more engaging.
Discover all the ways SundaySky can level-up your customer onboarding process—your CSMs will thank you for it.
