The world is no longer “going mobile”—it is mobile. The threshold of 5 billion mobile users globally was passed in 2017 and by 2020, 75% of the population will be connected by mobile. How do you optimize mobile customer onboarding in this new landscape, though? Many SaaS companies are developing mobile apps to supplement their web-apps and meet this mobile demand. Just because the platform has changed doesn’t mean your customer success efforts can go out the window. It’s important to maintain a focus on driving success across all platforms, regardless of device.

The critical elements of customer success are the same between platforms, but strategies need to be tailored to the mobile experience. Here are 5 ways you can translate your onboarding strategies to the mobile customer journey.

How to Optimize Mobile Customer Onboarding

Make a map to success

It’s impossible to track user success and understand their level of adoption without setting out guidelines and benchmarks. Just like you would in your web-app, this starts with knowing the customer’s desired outcomes.

What impact do they expect your product to make on their business? What do they want to impact, grow, minimize, or change? By understanding what each user segment wants to accomplish with your product, you can better introduce them to the feature or set or features that will get them there.

Success isn’t one-size-fits-all. What it means to be “highly engaged” will translate differently for different groups of users. Also, keep in mind that the same user can move through different segments along their customer journey.

Action Item: Make a list of the critical steps a mobile user needs to take during onboarding. These relate to their goals as well as how they’ll use the mobile version of your app. Note what features they should be using and what milestones you want them to hit.

Encourage feature adoption

Whether on a desktop or mobile phone, onboarding is a crucial time that affects long-term customer success. What happens in this period has an effect on the entirety of a user’s relationship with your app. Therefore, your customer success team’s focus should be on creating “wow” moments and showing the user the value of your product as soon as possible.

The most effective way to do this is through quality, not quantity. You want onboarding to be thorough, but overloading a new user with information about every bell and whistle available to them is overwhelming, especially in a mobile setting where the environment you’re working in is much smaller. Instead, lead with the features that are most relevant to them based on what success is to them.

By introducing critical features right away, you’ll drive a faster time-to-value.

Action Item: Choose the must-see features for each segment based on their goals. Set up customized onboarding in-app tours.

Monitor engagement

In a survey of more than 450 SaaS leaders, one of the top findings was that companies struggle to measure user adoption. This isn’t surprising when you consider that only about 1/3rd of SaaS companies have visibility into their onboarding process.

Product usage analytics bring clarity to what is happening within your app. When you can track what features segments are loving, and which they are ignoring, you start to gain an understanding of why your churn levels are the way they are. Churn is an important metric that can be caused by a number of reasons. The first avoidable reason, however, is the inability to adopt using a product successfully.

Without insight into how your onboarding program is performing, though, you are left in the dark.

Action Item: Establish a way to monitor customer engagement and feature adoption.

Ask for feedback

Sometimes the best strategies are the simplest. When creating a strategy for mobile customer onboarding, you should establish a way to ask for feedback.

UserIQ’s customer feedback tools make it easy to collect real-time feedback on specific features. Instead of waiting to contact users outside of the app, these in-app opportunities capture feedback as your product is top of mind.

It’s also important to gather feedback during a customer’s first interactions inside your product.

Action Item: Determine when and where you’d like to ask for feedback. It can be used to gauge satisfaction with certain features, to measure the effectiveness of onboarding, or to calculate NPS scores post-onboarding.

Make decisions based on data

As you set up your strategy for mobile customer onboarding, you should plan to make updates. Product usage analytics deliver data to support decisions about how to improve your onboarding strategy and app as a whole. Data can also be integrated with information from the apps you use to run and monitor your business, such as Salesforce and Zendesk, to create a holistic view of customer health.

Action Item: Set up integrations to gain the most insights from usage data.

Mobile customer onboarding is a critical starting point for long-term customer success. While the same KPIs and principles carry over from your web-based onboarding strategy, consideration should be given to how goals and engagement may vary between mobile and desktop. Schedule a demo to see how UserIQ can make the mobile onboarding experience seamless for you and your customers.

Want to evaluate your customer onboarding experience? Try our simple grader.