HOW I BOOSTED GROWTH, CUT REFUND REQUESTS IN HALF AND REDUCED CUSTOMER SERVICE CONTACT BY OVER TWO-THIRDS
discovery
One of my first tasks was to assess the state of the User Experience (UX) via a heuristic evaluation of the Intry Careers web app, where I discovered:
1. 50 out of the last 225 customers who canceled listed their reason for cancellation as “too difficult to use” and 64 listed the reason as “too expensive.” Collectively that is over half of the total, and both reasons are attributed (at least partially) to a less than stellar onboarding experience (since that’s where value is established).
2. Between 30% and 40% of support requests were attributable to confusion or lack of understanding of Intry’s core features even after going through the native onboarding wizard.
3.The native onboarding wizard began with a 1-minute demo video and with the subsequent feature walkthrough took an average of 3 minutes 34 seconds to complete, start to finish.
How onboarding impacts users
This report from Profitwell investigated how a company’s onboarding impacts customer willingness to pay and retention. They looked at just under 500 different software products spread between B2B and B2C serving nearly twenty-five thousand customers. Here’s what they found.
1. Customers who perceived a company’s onboarding positively had between a 12% and 21% higher willingness to pay than the median. Those who perceived it negatively had a 3% to 9% drop in willingness to pay, indicating that poor onboarding alters customers’ perception of software value.
2. Retention is where things get really interesting. When comparing the first 60 days of customers with poor perceptions of onboarding to those with positive perceptions, those customers with positive perception have a much lower drop off in the first three weeks.
discovery
The length of an onboarding experience (especially via mobile) is as important as the content. Onboarding research confirms that you have a short window to make a good impression — ideally less than two minutes. This makes it essential user onboarding is clear and concise, and doesn’t overlook the power of beautiful branding, because it doesn’t take any fraction of your two minutes to perceive and appreciate, yet it has a big impact; there’s no better value for time.
Even more proof that efficient user onboarding is pays big dividends later comes from Dan Wolchonok Head of Product and Analytics at Reforge (and formerly employed at HubSpot. In his talk at Price Intelligently's SaaSFest conference, he described how improvements to the user onboarding in HubSpot’s Sidekick product proportionally increased the number of users using the product at every week in the customer lifecycle. Take a look at his graph.
RED LINE = previous (baseline) user attrition over time
BLUE LINE = attrition over time after improvements made to onboarding experience.
User onboarding improvements drove Week 1 retention up to 75% (from around 60%).
And at Week 10, they were retaining 25% of users versus the 10-to-15% they’d seen previously, almost doubling their revenue.
Brand Strategy
Case Study
Creating a
Brand Strategy
from the Ground Up
Product Marketing
Case Study
User Retention ↑14%
Refund Requests ↓50%
Customer Service Contact ↓66%
Demand Generation
Case Study
Impressions: 4.1M
Views: 498k
Return on Ad Spend: 166%
Brand Strategy
Case Study
Creating a
Brand Strategy from the Ground Up
LEARN MORE
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Product Marketing
Case Study
User Retention ↑14%
Refund Requests ↓50%
Customer Service Contact ↓66%
LEARN MORE
Demand Generation
Case Study
Impressions: 4.1M
Views: 498k
Return on Ad Spend: 166%
LEARN MORE
