Self-Service Onboarding: Helping Users Help Themselves

Getting new customers to sign up for your SaaS is exciting. But seeing those same customers give up halfway through the onboarding process can be confusing. 

You might have already used all the traditional onboarding tricks in the book, actively funneling users towards product adoption via customer-facing teams—only to bear witness to an early leave.

What gives?

Instead of using high-touch onboarding methods, self-service onboarding empowers your users to discover how to use your product themselves. All you need to do is to supply the tools to do so.

In this article, we dive into self-service onboarding, how it works, and how you can start providing self-service support immediately. 

Self-service onboarding is a strategy that helps your users start using your product successfully without the assistance of customer support or sales. It empowers users to explore your product independently while giving them helpful nudges along the way. By providing resources like tooltips, product tours, and help centers, users have access to instructions that support their entire experience.

We hear you: “I’m essentially doing less, and that’s somehow…better? Aren’t I supposed to help my customers?” 

We also appreciate how counter-intuitive the notion might seem. But as it turns out, self-service onboarding actually helps you do more for your customers. Here’s how. 

Self-service onboarding’s main benefit is that it empowers customers to use your product based on their specific needs—AKA personalization. It gives them the contextual guidance to adopt the features they need—and avoids lengthy tutorials that don’t help them perform their jobs-to-be-done.

Here are some more benefits:

• High scalability: An in-app guide, help center, or tooltip can support thousands of users simultaneously. Even the most disciplined, productive, and efficient customer care team can’t do that (unless they’re super-geniuses, in which case, have your recruitment team give us a call).

• Faster time to value: Self-service onboarding lets your users dive into the specific features immediately, giving them context to learn on the go and reach “aha!” moments faster.

• Increased product adoption: Many users learn by doing, not by sitting through extensive product demos detailing every single product feature. Instead, they need action to use your product successfully.

• Higher retention: Self-service leads to a better experience, and a better experience leads to happy customers who stay with your product. 

Self-service onboarding doesn't give customers a smooth ride to product adoption, but rather puts them in the driver’s seat for the journey. 

Traditional onboarding requires your customers to get in touch with your team. By the time that happens, they’re likely already confused, frustrated, or a combination of both. The truth is: customers don’t want to have to reach out to you. It’s extra work, uses up time, and puts a strain on your resources too.

Instead, using self-service onboarding users can get familiar with your product by themselves while having all the necessary sport. They get a better, faster onboarding experience and you get a happy customer and more bandwidth for your employees. It’s a win-win.

Empowering your users to successfully interact with your features only works if you give them the right onboarding support for the job. That’s where onboarding modals come in. Think of these helpful UIs that populate your product’s interface as road signs, quickly guiding users toward product adoption. 

Here are a few of the most crucial ones to include in your new and improved self-service support.

Onboarding checklists are clear, visual modals that list tasks for your user to complete as they interact with the product. 

The effects of checklists are two-fold.

Firstly, they provide your user with a sense of accomplishment, encouraging them to keep using their product. Secondly, they provide self-service help by showing users which jobs-to-be-done they’ve completed with your features, coupled with a planned path ahead. 

Keep in mind that checklists should be personalized and highly relevant to your user’s journey. 

For example, take a look at Pipefy’s checklist built with Chameleon to help users interact with the platform more efficiently.

Feature deep-dives are powerful, self-paced tutorials that help users understand and successfully interact with more nuanced and advanced functionalities. These are the Big Enchiladas of self-service onboarding, so only apply them when absolutely necessary. 

Feature-deep dives typically use a combination of interactive documents, infographics, and step-by-step guides. Chameleon Launchers let you consolidate different information sources for a single feature

For example, if your product had an analytics page, you could show:

• a recent blog post announcing changes

• a help article with FAQs

• a couple of product tours for the most common workflows

All from the same Launcher.

You can also show variations of Launchers based on the role or persona of a user to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio from the user perspective.

Make it easy for users to get reading on your product with help centers. Often dubbed the backbone of self-service onboarding, it’s easy to see why. Help centers are like product manual conglomerates containing blogs, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides for relevant resources. 

There’s no need to push these into your reader's screens, but a small tab in the help menu ensures they can easily find their answer whenever they need it. 

One wonderful example is Shopify’s help center, organized by major tasks users aim to complete. There’s even a chatbot just in case users need extra assistance.

Reading is one thing, but what about the visual learners? Short, digestible video tutorials are their onboarding best friends. Use these modals to explain nuanced and complex workflows. They're especially helpful for bundling together feature combos to complete larger tasks. 

Organize your gallery videos by features and topics, and include timestamps within the videos so users can get to your nuggets of wisdom ASAP. 

PicMonkey’s series of video lessons is a good example of how you can use this format to educate users on some of your best features. 

Ah, the classic tooltip. There’s nothing quite like contextual, succinct pop-ups that save your user from confusion at the perfect moment. 

Tooltips are diverse, and you can use them to highlight features, contextualize use cases, and clarify best practices whenever you need them. They're especially useful to sprinkle in as little nudges as part of your larger, overall onboarding tour. Just make sure to give users the ability to snooze them. No tooltips are more helpful than annoying ones.

Some masterful examples come from Hubspot’s first-user onboarding process. It’s nothing fancy, but that’s okay because fancy doesn’t propel product adoption. Simple, helpful, non-invasive tooltips do.

Once you have all the tools for self-service onboarding, it’s merely a question of implementing them correctly for your users. Here are three best practices to ensure your switch to self-service onboarding is successful.

Not all your users are the same, so it follows that they won’t all want to do the same things with your product. We recommend doing user research and collecting insights to help segment your users. 

Next, create multiple onboarding flows for different types of users based on your segmentation. Once users sign up, ask them what they intend to use your product for and then give them a list of jobs-to-be-done.

You’ll likely need a personalized onboarding tour for each. Personalizing your onboarding tours this way ensures users get the features of most use to them while still being able to independently explore your product. 

With self-service onboarding, the old maxim “less is more” is a good rule of thumb. Of course, you don’t want to leave your users hanging, but a flurry of heavy-handed, spammy tooltips can quickly get annoying. 

Instead, determine the user journey and only include the necessary modals. Your instructions should be short and clear to ensure they’re actually helpful for users. Your goal is to be both maximally helpful and brief. Limited modals, short onboarding, and punchy phrases act like a three-piece combo strong enough to knock your reader’s socks off (or a few hours off their usual to-do list at the very least).

Your users evolve, and so does your product. It’s only good sense to make sure your onboarding is updated, too. And we don’t mean slapping on a few new tooltips to your just-released features. 

Instead, start implementing microsurveys within your user onboarding to create a feedback loop. With your insights, you can fine-tune modals, features, and user onboarding to ensure you’re being maximally helpful to users shifting needs.

Whether it’s for new users experiencing your product for the first time or long-time customers, you can leverage self-service learning to drive discovery, adoption, and engagement of your product.

By adopting self-service principles, you empower users to walk their own journey toward product adoption while you stand by with a helping hand along the way.

Chameleon’s mission is to enable teams to drive product success (and product love!) through a combination of in-product experiences, and Launchers are a critical component of that.

To discuss your in-product experience strategy, simply get in touch.