10 insightful customer onboarding statistics for 2023

From creating a loyal customer base to accelerating value delivery, a well-designed customer onboarding process plays an essential role in shaping your business.

But only if it keeps up with the ever-changing market demands. 

And what could be a better window into the latest trends than some fresh onboarding statistics? 

Rocketlane, a customer onboarding software, surveyed nearly 290 customer onboarding and implementation experts in the SaaS and technology industry to discover their pain points and how they can be eliminated or minimized.

Exploring the current stats and trends in the world of customer onboarding will help you set the right benchmarks and bring your A-game to work each time! 

This article will cover 10 incredibly important customer onboarding statistics. We’ll also cover a few onboarding metrics you can use to track the onboarding program.

What is customer onboarding?

Simply put, customer onboarding is the process of helping your customer find quick value in your product through walkthroughs, training, integrations, product guides, and effective communication. 

Rather than just explaining what the product does, a customer onboarding process helps a customer solve their problems or reach their goals through your product. 

Some benefits of a successful onboarding program are:

1. Enhanced customer engagement
2. Faster value delivery
3. Better product adoption
4. Reduced churn rate and improved customer retention

But how can you stay ahead in the onboarding game?

Let these statistics lead the way: 

10 interesting customer onboarding statistics you should know

Let’s take a look at some essential onboarding statistics from the survey:

Statistics on the importance of quality customer onboarding

Companies should prioritize building a quality customer onboarding strategy for effortless customer engagement, retention, and satisfaction. 

Here’s why:

1. 78% of companies felt the need to shorten time to value to improve client experience. 

In simple terms, time to value (TTV) is the time your customer takes to experience the product value for the first time, a.k.a. their ‘aha moment.’ 

A short TTV is desirable for any company. In fact, 50.3% of companies use TTV as a vital KPI to measure the success of their customer onboarding teams.

Why?

The longer your new user or customer has to wait for value, the more likely you’ll lose them. In fact, US companies lose nearly 136.8 billion annually in avoidable customer churn. 

This becomes more evident if you’re handling multiple customers. 

In our study, around 75.1 % of companies claimed they handle more than 5 projects in one go, while 52.3% of companies have customer onboarding teams consisting of just 1-5 members. 

But your TTV may suffer if you don’t have the capacity to give each client your hundred percent.

And if your existing customer feels that you aren’t fully engaged in delivering value, they may switch to a better alternative with a shorter time to value, affecting your retention rate.

Barriers to streamlined product usage can also affect TTV and lead to a poor onboarding experience. For example, in a LinkedIn poll we ran, 16% of consumers said they would quit if a product were glitchy, and 45% would quit because of a delay in TTV.

You can tackle this issue by providing a structured onboarding process and a dedicated customer support service that can solve any issues a new user or customer may face.

2. 94% of companies felt developing a powerful onboarding strategy is one of the top responsibilities of an onboarding team.

Onboarding programs that offer a faster value delivery experience have an undeniable impact on customer satisfaction and relationships.

As Girish Mathrubootham (CEO & founder, Freshworks) states, “a great implementation and onboarding experience quickens product adoption and shortens the time to value. This makes onboarding a potent weapon for battling downstream churn.”

To achieve this feat, companies must develop a digital onboarding process that’s simple and easy to use, yet highlights all the necessary information about their product. 

3. 48% of companies felt they needed to improve project progress visibility.

A single project consists of multiple dependencies, complex documentation, and implementation issues. 

And if your project manager or onboarding specialist handles various onboarding tasks, it may be impossible to access all the information simultaneously and be aware of customer pain points.

But that’s not all:

Insufficient project visibility doesn’t just hamper your employee; it affects your clients too. Using multiple onboarding tools will scatter vital information they need to see and disrupt communication.  

For example, around 67% of companies felt follow-ups with internal and external teams were their biggest time sink, leading to inefficiency and time wastage.

Here are some customer onboarding best practices to increase project visibility:

1. Ensure your customer success team knows all the customer expectations and the project scope. 
2. Use timesheets to track the project progress for real-time insight into onboarding tasks.
3. Align customer service with customer success to ensure effective onboarding.
4. Invest in a user-friendly customer onboarding tool, like Rocketlane, to gain complete project visibility for you and your new customer.

Clear visibility helps the digital onboarding teams and clients track project statuses, maintain good client relationships, offer great customer service, and eliminate potential risks that’ll lead to a poor onboarding experience.

This brings us to another essential factor necessary for a smooth client onboarding: Trust.

Statistics on developing trust while onboarding

If you’re looking to create long-term client relationships, you’ll need to gain their trust. This makes room for potential cross-sells in the future or partnerships that benefit both sides.

4. 23.7% of companies feel there’s a need to establish a more transparent onboarding process

Being transparent about project progress at every stage of the customer onboarding process is one of the best practices for developing trust and an effective onboarding process. 

For example, an employee in your customer success team or the onboarding specialist can create an onboarding workspace for a new customer.

They can then access it anytime to view tasks, project updates, and documents in real-time. 

This will also give the customer complete project visibility, allowing them to see exact project statuses. You can then offer a solid customer support service to address your client’s issues.

As a result of such structured onboarding processes, they’ll be better prepared for any last-minute decisions

5. 58.7% of companies felt they needed improvements in collecting customer feedback.

A lack of continuous feedback prevents companies from knowing what their new customer thinks about their products. In the long term, such feedback could be all the difference between gaining and losing a competitive edge.

But that’s not all:

48% of companies in our 2022 survey stated that they collected feedback manually through emails or calls. 

This leaves no room for a centralized platform to gather feedback and generate Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) scores. Especially when nearly 46% of the companies regard CSAT scores as a vital KPI to measure customer onboarding teams’ progress. 

To solve such issues, Rocketlane offers an in-built CSAT tool that measures customer satisfaction at regular intervals. 

Additionally, you can use Rocketlane’s native forms to intake requests, collect feedback, conduct customer surveys, measure customer engagement and migrate data. 

With this intuitive feature, you can prevent third-party client onboarding software for your onboarding programs and maintain all customer data in the same place. Teams can turn responses into tasks, saving time and ensuring no action item slips through the cracks. 

This will help ensure an effective onboarding experience and boost customer satisfaction.

Statistics on what companies face during onboarding

Being aware of the difficulties your contemporaries face while onboarding their clients may help avoid the same mistakes and improve the onboarding experience you offer.  

6. 78% of the companies aimed to improve their customer onboarding experience in 2023.

Ed Powers, a Customer Success expert, says intuition and emotions influence 70-80% of decisions made by the human brain. That’s the gap that a powerful onboarding experience can bridge for any company. 

These are some of the best practices you can follow to offer a seamless onboarding experience are:

1. Understand customer expectations and deliver value that exceeds them.
2. Personalize product onboarding for each customer.
3. Create a smooth sales to Customer Success Management transition.
4. Use client onboarding data tactically to offer the best customer experience.
5. Develop a conversational product guide and customer service to help customers navigate your product. 

Following these customer onboarding best practices and having a dedicated customer success team or onboarding specialist may make all the difference in your onboarding programs.

For even better results, opt for purpose-driven client onboarding software like Rocketlane to deliver a customized, consistent, and delightful client onboarding experience.

7. 74.7% of companies stated ensuring customer accountability is one of their most challenging tasks. 

A customer onboarding process is a two-way street that requires complete client cooperation. This means you’ll occasionally need to follow up with their onboarding tasks and deadlines. 

But how can you make the customer accountable for their end of the bargain in an onboarding program?

With a dedicated customer onboarding tool!

Rocketlane lets you assign tasks to your clients and add deadlines for each task. You can also gently nudge your clients with automated reminders. This ensures you and your clients keep up with onboarding tasks and activities — helping you prevent a poor onboarding experience. 

8. A negative growth rate of 56% was noted among SaaS businesses that didn’t invest in customer experience during the economic downturn.

Many customer-centric SaaS companies were able to make their way out of the 2008-09 recession. That’s because they prioritized their existing customers and focused their resources on losing as few clients as possible, improving their retention rate.

This is especially true in a saturated market that allows a new user or customer an easy choice between roughing with a poor onboarding experience or switching over to a new product. 

An excellent customer onboarding strategy can reduce the effects of an economic downturn through:

1. Improved customer retention
2. Repeat purchases
3. Cross-sell revenues

9. 53.7% of companies felt tracking across multiple tools was their biggest time sink.

Using multiple onboarding tools creates information silos across many tools, folders, and departments, leading to poor onboarding processes. 

This results in inconsistency and poor project visibility. It may also limit your opportunity to learn and improve your onboarding strategy.

That’s why you should invest in an all-in-one dedicated customer onboarding tool like Rocketlane that holds all files, communication, and workflows in a single place. 

10. 76% of companies spend over 2 hours weekly on follow-ups and reminders.

Our study states that 56.7% of responders use 2-5 hours on reminders weekly, while another 19.3% spend more than 5 hours on the same.

How does this happen?

Using multiple platforms to manually onboard clients slows down the onboarding process, makes you prone to errors, offers zero visibility into projects, and affects client engagement.

You’ll also struggle to check deadlines, provide necessary customer support, and do the necessary follow-ups for all projects. 

This may be why our onboarding statistics state nearly 67.3% of companies wanted to automate follow-ups and reminders, while 64% of them wanted to automate performance analysis and reports. 

Rocketlane solves this problem by automating reporting and follow-ups. This way, you can gain important insights without spending much time and set up email reminders to remind clients about task statuses for a smooth customer journey.

You can also create custom project templates and reuse them to maintain consistency and accelerate the customer journey.

While these onboarding statistics are insightful, the most important stats will be the ones you track for your own company. Next, we’ll cover a few metrics to keep an eye on.

10 important customer onboarding metrics 

Measuring how successful your client onboarding process is will help you check if you’re on the right track. And if you’re not, these metrics may help you figure out where you’re going wrong. 

Here are a few such metrics:

A. Quality metrics

Quality shows how you’re doing in two areas:

1. The kind of customer experience you deliver
2. The consistency of experience delivery

The following metrics help you track quality:

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: This onboarding metric measures how satisfied a customer is with a particular interaction in the client onboarding process or the overall onboarding experience.

1. Escalations logged: This onboarding metric measures the number of issues raised by a customer.

B. Time & effort tracking metrics

With these metrics, you’ll shed light on how much time and effort your customer invests during each customer onboarding process. 

The following metrics help track time and effort:

1. Time to first value (TTFV): This onboarding metric measures the time a new customer takes to get the first real value from your product through your client onboarding process.

1. Average time to resolution: This metric measures the time taken between logging a complaint and its resolution. 

1. Customer effort score: This score measures a client’s interaction or experience in their customer journey with your product. 

C. Advocacy & customer engagement metrics

These metrics show how your clients engage with your products or how well they rate your overall service.

The following metrics help track advocacy and engagement of an effective onboarding program:

1. Net promoter score (NPS): This onboarding metric measures how likely an existing customer will recommend your company’s product or service to their friends, family, or associates.

1. Customer engagement rate: This score highlights how much your customers actively use your product. 

D. Product adoption & outcomes tracking metrics

The higher your product adoption rates, the more likely your customer onboarding process will succeed and improve customer retention rates. In fact, 68.3% of companies consider product adoption and usage as a top KPI for measuring customer onboarding teams.

The following metrics help track adoption, retention, and outcomes:

1. Return on investment against milestones: The ROI tracks the value delivered on milestones of 30-60-90 day durations. 

1. Net revenue retention: This onboarding metric measures recurring revenue generated from existing customers over a set period. 

1. Customer retention rate: This metric measures the number of existing customers after a specific time period. 

So how do we sail through all these scores?

Simple: Get a dedicated customer onboarding tool!

How Rocketlane helps you rise above the stats

Rocketlane is a collaborative customer onboarding tool that helps you easily hit project milestones, accelerate time to value, offer excellent customer service, and deliver an effortless customer experience.

With Rocketlane, you can:

Deliver a delightful customer onboarding experience

1. Customize the logo, domain, and theme according to your brand.
2. Offer interactive walkthroughs of effective onboarding plans.
3. Let clients access important project information like task status and deadlines.

Get complete visibility across all projects

1. Track the status and progress of all tasks and projects at a single glance.
2. Send weekly status updates to clients via Rocketlane.
3. Manage your team better with effective resource management, time tracking, and easy approvals. 

Leverage templates for a faster project set-up

1. Ensure consistency via reusable, automated project templates 
2. Set up onboarding tasks, projects, forms, and documents with a single click.
3. Tailor project templates according to project type, size, and industry.

Boost productivity through effortless collaboration

1. Create documents within Rocketlane.
2. Leverage Kanban and Gantt views for super smooth project management.
3. Improve client accountability by automating customer reminders for onboarding programs and tasks nearing deadlines. 

Create a powerful customer onboarding process with Rocketlane

Customer onboarding statistics may keep changing, but an outstanding onboarding experience never goes out of style.

At Rocketlane, we take these stats seriously. 

That’s why we made a product dedicated to onboarding. 

We offer customizable walkthroughs, free templates, time tracking, accelerate customer journey, and more for the best customer experience.

So why wait?

Sign up for Rocketlane’s free trial to see how the tool delivers an effortless customer onboarding experience!