Solving for complex onboarding: Paving a path to value for your customers

Product teams often fall into the trap of spending most of their time on the core functionality of the products they’re building. But focusing on the core product can often come at the expense of deeply considering what the onboarding process – the real-world process customers have to go through to start getting value from the product – will be like.

Onboarding is critical to the success of your product

At Interlock, we aim to deliver outcomes. Without an accessible onboarding process, customers may never reach the stage where they can use the game-changing features your team has worked so hard to build, making outcomes difficult to achieve.

Focusing on the onboarding process at the beginning of new product development is critical to overcoming this. This is especially true when you’re building for mid-market and enterprise customers. Businesses use buying committees to make the decision to use a new product. These committees are essential, even if the product is free, because every new product necessitates a process change.

“As companies get larger, process changes impact more people, and the buying committee tends to grow”

In a small startup, the “committee” could be a single person. But as companies get larger, process changes impact more people, and the buying committee tends to grow. Larger buying committees mean more people and steps involved.

It’s easy for customers to stop onboarding at any hurdle the buying committee experiences. At best, poorly thought out onboarding could mean customers take weeks or months to start using a new product. At worst, a poor onboarding experience could prevent them from ever getting started.

We experienced this first-hand while building our WhatsApp integration. In the early days of the beta, we realized it was taking a long time for customers to get started – with no clear answers as to why.

“We had spent the majority of our time focusing on day-to-day features customers would love, but not the processes they would need to go through”