Every software as a service (SaaS) business yearns to provide a quality user experience. But what if users fail to leverage it to its maximum potential? In such cases, they may feel that your product is lacking, turning them to your competitors.

You must show what your product does and what users can expect. Because if they run into problems during initial use or feel the product is too complicated, many will be quick to stop using it. Adequate SaaS product training for new users is one way to keep your customers engaged and happy.

Product training also helps identify potential bottlenecks and expectation gaps that help mitigate customer friction and attrition by offering product training.

In this post, let’s explore how you can train new users effectively such that it drives business growth.

Provide Product Tours and Tool Tips

An onboarding email is just the start. A comprehensive product tour shows users that you care for their experience.

Therefore, start with setting up a product tour for new users of your SaaS product.

Ideally, your tour should aim at:

• • Building customer engagement.
  • Shortening the learning curve.
  • Getting users to the ‘aha!’ moment quickly.

Here are some key tips to consider when creating product tours:

• • Highlight your best features and how users can leverage them in everyday use.
  • Showcase the ideal user flow to show what to do next.
  • Provide a concise and to-the-point explanation that doesn’t demand much of the user’s attention.

On the other hand, tool tips are small, contextual messages that users can find handy when they are stuck. Keep it interactive, so when users click on them, they learn more about that function or feature. Since tool tips only appear in response to a user’s actions, they are often considered less invasive.

Look at these two examples of feature announcement tool tips that inform customers about core feature updates.

For instance, here is a tooltip used in Calendly.

Another example you can emulate is from Slack. This can also take the form of introducing users to new features your existing users are yet to use.

Adopt Scenario-based Knowledge Sharing

Often, you can incorporate input from your sales and support teams and address common complaints they encounter. You might have some customers waiting for a response as support staff members who juggle hundreds of issues and try to find the best answer.

Ideally, you’re also using customer service software that helps store valuable information about customers, including their pain points and unresolved issues. Leverage this information to offer tailored solutions to such customers while using the same to train new customers.

Hit two birds with one stone as you offer a scenario-based solution to the support team and include these scenarios for knowledge sharing amongst new users. Educate your customers about the self-help knowledge base, interactive videos and other features. Walk them through different scenarios based on your current database of frequently asked questions.

And once you capture their interest, delve into the specifics of your product’s features.

Encourage Feedback

Feedback is essential in any business, from restaurants to eCommerce and even SaaS. It involves engaging customers and hearing them out. Just as restaurant customer service is incomplete without asking how the food was, SaaS businesses need to nudge their customers by using customer satisfaction surveys.

Not every customer will appreciate your SaaS product offering. But the key lies in holding a two-way dialogue to get their training feedback that gives you new ideas to fine-tune your product.

Improving your existing products based on customer feedback can help determine their expectations. If users want something difficult to execute in a short time, explain it to them and suggest alternatives.

By showing your concern and reliability, you’ll earn your customers’ confidence and increase their loyalty.

Key feedback sources include:

• • Bug reports.
  • Customer support interactions.
  • Feature requests.
  • (UATs).

Collecting user feedback requires implementing some of the following:

Customer Surveys: Collect customer information via surveys like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms.

Email: Sending out surveys via email can be an excellent way to get feedback from your customers.

Social media: Leverage user-to-user interaction that helps you get more feedback beyond what you could gather on your own.

Visual feedback: There are tools that can help you get highly contextual feedback from your users in real-time, with annotated screenshots and video recordings in your app.

Conduct Workshops and Webinars

Everyone has their preferred approach to SaaS product training. Some prefer audio-visual content like videos and podcasts, while others prefer textual information like knowledge bases and FAQs.

Therefore, think of conducting virtual webinars or seminars. Customers who learn best with live professionals’ presence and two-way interactions can benefit greatly from webinars. A live webinar offers a great platform for customers to ask questions, resolve issues and network with other users.

Once you’ve settled on a format for your workshops and webinars, the next step is to spread the word by sending out newsletters and creating events on platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

Ensure a solid understanding of your product for customers by following up after the webinars to know if they encounter any issues.

Over to You

Often, the success of your SaaS customer training boils down to your team’s ability to understand the most important requirements for new users, identify expectation gaps and pick effective onboarding methods.

A user training program doesn’t necessarily lead to a greater customer retention rate. Your business growth is defined by consistency, which involves follow-ups, frequent training and workshop communication and helping customers overcome challenges.

With these ideas in mind, focus your company’s next whiteboard session on how to allocate resources toward user training.