Onboarding is an incredibly important process for creating strong customer and employee connections but it’s often a pain point for B2B companies.
According to Forrester principal analyst Shari Srebnick, effective customer onboarding is the launchpad to customer value: “Many fail to understand that the decision to renew is made in the first 90 days of the post-sale journey, making onboarding success a leading indicator of the future health of that customer relationship.”
Establishing a good relationship from the get-go with new customers is pivotal for retention because they see value quicker. Video onboarding can help create more effective onboarding, which in turn leads to accelerated product adoption. “Successful onboarding programs establish a pattern of interaction that breeds trust and confidence,” according to Forrester report Retention Starts At Onboarding.
And the quicker a customer or new employee engages with your business, the more likely they are to remain loyal and long-term. In B2B software, that can mean early renewals and account retention; for new hires, that helps grow job satisfaction and productivity.
Personalization Makes Video Onboarding Better
Onboarding can be a dense experience due to the amount of information that new customers or employees need to consume. Video-enabling the experience allows viewers to go at their own pace – whether it’s skipping over topics they are already familiar with, or replaying information they need to understand more than once.
Personalization is one of our recommended best practices for video onboarding. Some examples of personalized video onboarding include:
- by customer segment (i.e. tier or subscription level),
- by product or service purchased, or
- by audience group or other defining demographic (i.e. employees joining an APAC office vs. a LATAM office).
The following three examples from B2B software companies Okta, IntouchCX, and SundaySky demonstrate three different and successful ways of using personalized and customized video to help onboard new customers and new employees.
Okta: Video Onboarding to Self-Serve New Customers
The digital security company Okta uses video onboarding to guide customers post-sale who don’t have customer success managers to onboard them. Okta needed a way to enable a self-serve motion with limited resources, for customers to adopt and realize value from products purchased.
Okta onboards new customers using video personalization that guides them through the multiple steps of product setup. One of Okta’s core requirements was the ability to use data to follow their customers’ onboarding journey and see what actions they’ve taken (or not). Because SundaySky’s platform allows Okta to easily connect to its Salesforce data, they can provide customers with personalized guidance that gets them to the next step.
A demo example of Okta’s video onboarding:
With video onboarding under their belt, Okta continues to explore creating more videos for different use cases: “SundaySky allows us to create more videos within a few hours at no extra cost. The platform is so flexible that we can explore different use cases that require no further investment,” said Alana Stoltzfus, Okta’s senior manager of digital acceleration and growth.
IntouchCX: Video Onboarding New Hires Across the Globe
IntouchCX helps other businesses provide excellent customer service by outsourcing the function for leading brands in a range of industries. To do this, IntouchCX hires consistently and in large numbers, which means effective, large-scale onboarding is important.
IntouchCX’s global employee experience strategy uses video onboarding to guide new hires through every step of their new job. The company has locations around the world – each with their own local language and regional culture. IntouchCX empowers each location to create their own onboarding videos that reflect the specifics of their region while adhering to a core set of brand settings and creative themes within the SundaySky platform.
“Part of our strategy is figuring out how to not centralize the function of creating videos by really creating a structure that works for different regions and allows them to automate and create their own stories locally that resonate with their people,” says Jay Urbiztondo, IntouchCX’s vice president of global employee experience strategy.
Beyond video onboarding, IntouchCX uses video to tell employee stories, providing an outlet to share successes and career paths to inspire new hires. In an industry with a high rate of attrition, IntouchCX uses video to its advantage to set a new standard for keeping employees aboard and happy.
SundaySky: Video Onboarding New Platform Users
At SundaySky, we like to drink our own champagne and use video as much as possible, and throughout our own customer and employee journeys. Most recently, SundaySky scaled customer onboarding with an automated, tech-touch approach that aimed to get new users to immediately start creating videos in our platform – without waiting for a scheduled training.
By embedding videos across 20 digital touchpoints, including in-app guides and help center articles, and within personalized video emails, we empower our users to hit the ground running within the first 30 days of joining SundaySky and accelerate their ability to quickly build videos themselves.
The below video onboarding example is what users see the first moment they log in to the platform:
This video onboarding program has freed up our customer success managers’ time, allowing them to offload manual onboarding and focus on other high-value actions like performance measurement and optimization opportunities.
All Aboard for Video Onboarding
Onboarding can take many forms, but its importance can’t be overstated. As these examples show, personalization is a value-add that makes video onboarding better by enhancing engagement, deepening loyalty, and cementing long-term relationships.
For more information, check out these resources:
- Level-Up Your Onboarding Experiences
- Forrester Trends Report: Retention Starts At Onboarding
- The Complete Guide to Customer Onboarding Videos
- Okta: Driving Product Adoption and Early Value Realization
- IntouchCX: Elevating the Employee Onboarding Experience with Video
- Meet the EX Leader Behind Creative Employee Onboarding With Video
- SundaySky Scales Customer Onboarding With Video
