High-touch clients can bring a lot of value to the table, but they also demand a lot from SaaS providers. They expect personalized attention, customized solutions, and fast responses to every communication. While these efforts can pay off for SaaS providers in the long-term, it can often put a strain on an organization’s capacity and resources.
The expectations high-touch clients have for service start with the product onboarding process. If too much of the process relies on manual hand-holding and communications, SaaS providers may establish strong relationships with the clients, but they’ll do so at the expense of their onboarding team’s satisfaction and to the detriment of other client relationships. Not to mention, they’ll lack the bandwidth to grow their client base.
Alternatively, when you adopt a tech-touch approach to product onboarding and implement product onboarding best practices, you can cater to high-touch clients without pulling away resources from other business areas.
The goal of tech-touch onboarding isn’t to fully remove the human element from the product onboarding process; it’s to put technology at the forefront of SaaS implementation.
While tech-touch onboarding can work with low-touch or high-touch programs, it is particularly useful in helping SaaS providers efficiently cater to high-touch clients. You can give high-touch clients the level of control, user engagement, and collaboration they want in a product onboarding process, without stretching your team thin. Here are some examples of how.
High-touch clients don’t take kindly to long wait times for answers to their questions. With tech-touch onboarding, the system will enable users to find a lot of answers on their own with convenient access to webinars, knowledge bases, and FAQs. High-touch clients will appreciate the ability to better understand software features and troubleshoot issues on their own time. Onboarding teams, meanwhile, will appreciate having fewer product onboarding support requests to field.
From automation and self-service capabilities to consistent communications, tech-touch onboarding lends itself to a more structured, well-defined product onboarding process. While that standardization is beneficial from a scalability standpoint, this baseline makes it easier to customize onboarding workflows for high-touch clients — whether it’s a matter of a tailored onboarding timeline, training paths, or the use of industry-specific templates. You can also track client behavior during onboarding to identify additional ways to support their needs and deliver more of the experience high-touch clients want.
When high-touch clients can actively monitor the product onboarding process, they feel more in control. They’ll have peace of mind knowing that projects are on track — and when there is a bottleneck or issue, it won’t be an unwelcome surprise to learn about from their onboarding rep. Project visibility is another upside to tech-touch onboarding. Through convenient dashboards, high-touch clients can easily monitor project progress, including when key milestones are reached. These markers help to reassure clients of their investment and streamline collaboration with providers based on the data they see.
As the demand for personalized service grows, more and more clients are falling under that “high-touch” umbrella. Providers that haven’t already embraced tech-touch product onboarding should reconsider. It’s the key to providing clients with a smooth product onboarding process while allocating resources in an effective way that accommodates more growth.
Setuply’s all-in-one platform features the tools and automation to support a scalable yet customizable product onboarding experience. Learn more about how it can support your product onboarding process — request a demo!