The 8 Best Customer Onboarding Software in 2022

Onboarding customers is an exciting time, but it's also a critical step in developing a healthy, long-term relationship. Think of it like a first date. If you make all the right moves, you show the other person why you're special, what's in it for them, and why they should stick around. But if you're late and sloppy, you're likely not going to get another chance. 

A well-designed customer onboarding experience is essential for developing an affinity for your product—and maybe come to love it one day. But according to Wyzowl, over 90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from “could do better” when it comes to onboarding new customers.

Furthermore, only 30% of users show signs of regular product engagement in their first 90 days after onboarding. Oftentimes, it's a matter of "it's not me, it's you" issues. Customers can't use your product, so they don't see the value, so they stop engaging and eventually churn.

Overcoming these common new customer onboarding issues is easy with an effective onboarding solution. That's why we've analyzed the eight best customer onboarding tools to help you evaluate customer success software and start impressing customers.

8 Best Customer Onboarding Software

A thoughtful customer onboarding makes for happy teams and users. The following customer onboarding solutions have been tried, tested, and reviewed by companies of all sizes, so all you have to do is find the solution to fit your company's client onboarding needs.

1. Pendo

Pendo is a code-free tool that provides solutions for in-app customer onboarding. It helps improve and streamline onboarding by guiding customers to the features they value the most, without having to sit through frustrating tasks. It also allows you to segment your customer base so you can guide users to a particular goal or walk them through a complex task. 

Without having to leave an app, users can quickly onboard into your software and begin using it to reach their goals. Once customers are onboarded, you can also use Pendo to analyze how people engage with your software, which features are popular, and even create self-service resources that walk customers through support issues—all within your app.

"The best thing about Pendo is the ability to deploy in-app educational content and resources to customers, real-time. Pendo's tagging makes it quick and easy for us to create user walkthrough guides to get our customers educated on our product." - Issac J, Manager of Customer Enablement & Education (source)

2. Gainsight

Gainsight’s innovative customer-centric technology is driving the future of customer success. The company’s Customer Cloud offers a powerful set of solutions focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, customer experience, and customer data, that together enable businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do. Companies that use Gainsight grow net retention by up to 33%. Learn how leading companies like Okta, SAP Concur, and Box is their products.

Don’t let your customer feedback disappear into a black hole. Gainsight CX has the tools you need to close the loop and dig deeper into holistic customer experience data to uncover what’s really important to your customers.

“The health scorecard is massive. I can finally engineer for Customer Success and not just rely on soft skills or good situational awareness and instincts about when we should do what and how we should handle customers. Our adoption health score gives us exposure to usage risks that need our attention.” Dino Kuckovic, Customer Experience Manager (source)

3. ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a customer success management solution that's designed to battle churn and improve customer retention. Since onboarding is the first touchpoint customers have with a product, ChurnZero helps you automate common onboarding activities and keep an eye on customers' progress. 

Automated emails and in-app notifications ensure customers complete tasks in the correct order so your team doesn't have to troubleshoot the same issues again and again. If you want to know how a customer is interacting with your software—and whether or not they're about to jump ship—ChurnZero's unique health score gives insight into their overall satisfaction, engagement, and retention. 

"ChurnZero allows you to track customer health scores (risk) but is so much more than that. By segmenting customers and setting up appropriate playbooks and journeys, you can give a personalized experience to your customers through automation." - Laura D, Customer Success and Support Manager (source)

4. Totango

Engage with customers at every step of their customer journey (including onboarding) with Totango—customer success software that's used by top companies such as Zoom, SAP, and Google. You can use pre-built templates and fields to automate onboarding tasks, create campaigns to guide users through the entire setup process, track their progress, see what needs to be improved, and gather feedback using CSAT and NPS campaigns. 

With access to tools that allow you to set goals, set and analyze customer segments, and automatically trigger workflows, any customer onboarding can be customized to fit your business needs and your customers' needs.

"Totango provides me with a visual motivator to take appropriate actions to improve the experience for my clients. I love the health score calculation and the ability to access this information." - Amber G, Founder & CEO (source)

5. UserGuiding

UserGuiding makes it simple to design an interactive customer onboarding experience that's simple, informative, and enjoyable with product walkthroughs that don't demand any coding. Create step-by-step checklists, gamified goal tracking, custom designs that fit your brand, and quick tips boxes to share information about features or functions.

Using the platform's segmentation and targeting features, you can prompt the right in-app experience at the right stage of a user's journey. And if any roadblocks pop up along the way, you can troubleshoot through in-app messages and make changes according to customer feedback surveys.

"With the help of UserGuiding, we were able to create interactive guides for our SaaS solution. Now, new users can onboard themselves and know exactly how the software works in less than 15 minutes." - Sarah A, Digital Process and Marketing Manager (source)

6. GuideCX

GuideCX helps you keep internal onboarding tasks organized and private while creating an onboarding experience that's just right for customers. This client onboarding and project management platform lets you create on-brand workspaces where you can assign tasks to customers, internal team members, and third parties to make sure everyone has the information they need to onboard quickly and get tasks done on time. 

An intelligent forecasting algorithm gives you the ability to forecast, automate, and optimize onboarding to see what can be completed within a set timeframe. And automated reminders, tasks, and updates ensure people stay on track and interact as needed.

"I love how the interface is simple to use for everyone, even if they are not tech-savvy! It is simple to follow, allowing communication to be wide open for everyone involved in the process." - Kaylee S, Customer Success Specialist (source)

7. Rocketlane

Shorten the time-to-value for customers with Rocketlane, a collaborative customer onboarding platform that combines project management with live document collaboration and communication features. Customization tools let you create unique portals for each customer and resume templates that work. 

You can design interactive walkthroughs of your onboarding plan, and see the status of all projects with real-time, automated assessments. As customers move through onboarding, you can even automate CSAT surveys to understand how they feel and take steps to improve the process.

"After using Rocketlane for customer onboarding we were able to track all the documents, tasks and communication in a single platform and it has made it easy to see the progress of each project and our customers love it." - Tejaswini P, Senior Customer Success Manager (source)

8. Arrows

Guide your customer accounts to success. Arrows is a shared home for your customers’ tasks and goals. Plus, there’s an internal overview so you can see exactly what each account has done, needs to do, and where they’re going next.

One of the hardest things about onboarding is getting everybody on the same page. Using Arrows, you can get "mutual buy-in" from your customers to build trust throughout the onboarding process. Plus, with due dates and automated email reminders, they'll always know what should be done next. Arrows is the place for you to collaborate, strategize, and coordinate together.

“The Arrows dashboard is a game changer. I'm trying to figure out where nine customers are at any given time, which used to be a ton of manual work. But with Arrows, I just feel more effective. We've started talking about creating Arrows workflows for everything—it just makes our lives easier!” - Hillary Engelman, Senior Customer Success Manager (source)

The Best Client Onboarding Software

Customer onboarding is the start of long and successful relationships with users, if done well. By using tools to streamline the onboarding process, it's possible to provide value, minimize effort, and reduce costs for you and your customers.

One part of customer onboarding that’s often overlooked, yet very painful is onboarding customer data. You can’t onboard customers anymore without bringing their data along.

One of the biggest challenges is populating your product with your customer’s data as quickly as possible, so that they can use it and have that ‘aha’ moment. We solved this.

Learn how to streamline this part of the process with Osmos—which ultimately leads to more satisfied customers, a less-burdened team, and a better overall customer experience.