Every business needs customers, that would be the whole point, wouldn’t it? Crucial as it is, there are many ways in order to gain and retain them, depending on your business, target audience, funds, etc.
Customer or user onboarding is a term that encapsulates the whole process from them starting as potential customers to them becoming regulars. And just like everything nowadays, this process too can be simplified by using specialized software solutions that do much of the heavy lifting for you.
Need help with #employee #training and #user #onboarding? These SaaS tools are perfect for the job!
On the other side of the preverbal fence stand your employees. You can have the best strategy, top-notch tools, a virtually unlimited budget, but without the personnel to put it all into action, it won’t mean much.
Stemming from the assumption that your vetting process is up to standard (i.e. you’ve hired people that can handle the job), you’ll still need to train them in order to fulfill their potential. Again, there are software solutions that make the training much easier on you, especially if you take on fresh staff on a regular basis.
Here, in this article, we’ll be focusing on the best services that will allow you to do both of these actions that are essential to your business. Some will lean more towards the customer, while others will lean more towards your employees, but all will have features that will help you grow both.
So without further ado, and in no particular order, let’s begin!
Waybook
Waybook enables you to build a playbook for your business. All your training, onboarding, process documentation and best practices in one place. This means you can focus on scaling and growing your business. Good process and documentation is a huge driver of the valuation of your business when you come to selling it too.
The idea for Waybook spun out of startup studio Turn Partners. Initially created to service their own need of storing, optimising and training on internal processes. They started building a tool for this which allowed them to stay small and efficient, running several large businesses with a team of highly trained employees. This tool became Waybook and it is now open to all, including you.
The main benefits of Waybook are:
- Waybook houses all of your business documentation, process, onboarding material and knowledge in one place and makes it easy to search. So you and your employees always have the information you need to do your job.
- It makes documenting and following your processes enjoyable. You can use all sorts of content to bring your docs to life by easily adding screen recordings, GIFs, PDFs, images and videos to your documents. You can even add quizzes to test knowledge retention.
- Tracking progress is a doddle. You can assign reading material to each of your teams or employees individually. And you can track their progress through it all so you always know who’s up to date and who needs a nudge. Whenever a document is updated with new best practices, Waybook can notify all the relevant people that there is a change to their work process.
- Best of all, Waybook is super simple to use and is supported by extensive documentation and how-tos. The product itself is intuitive and when you need additional support, the team responds on live chat within hours.
We estimate that Waybook will save 100 hours of management time or around $2000 of costs in the very first month alone for each newly hired employee. Try Waybook for free today at Waybook.com.
Trainual
The unique thing about Trainual and therefore its main selling point is the feature that allows you to track how both your employees and customers behaved after going through the manual.
Users can be divided into groups, for easier follow up, and groups or even singular users can be enabled with varying degrees of access (employees will generally need to interact with more things than customers).
You’ll get to see who and when completed a training segment and track their progress throughout the whole training.
While tracking their progress and how they’ve retained knowledge you’ll get to forward them info about new content that’s available (videos, tutorials, etc.). While this is mostly applicable to employees, you can also look into using this feature for customers as well. For example, you can include it upon logging onto your site after a big update has been done which caused the way of interacting to change.
It’s also important to point out that you won’t be the sole force driving everything forward. Namely, there is an internal knowledge base implemented where both core groups can gather info and share knowledge without your direct input.
Making employees self-sufficient like this will enable them to grow proactively instead of only on demand (by you or some other superior). And making your customers self-sufficient means they will have a better understanding of what they can do on your site, which in turn means fewer support tickets and an overall more enjoyable browsing experience.
Userlane
More skewing towards the customer side of things, Userlane is a great tool that enables you to ease in new users to the way you do things. With it, you’ll be eliminating the need for comprehensive tutorials or training videos because instructions are quite literally tacked on to your existing interface through a “top layer” and shown in real-time.
Just imagine how much more convenient that is compared to conventional ways of training. Never-ending manuals will actively push people away just by the sheer size of them, making the person who has to go through them less open to actually learn from them.
Even training videos could have various issues going against them – having to switch screens, pausing all the time, potentially low audio/visual quality, etc.
Instead of all that, with Userlane, you have a guiding hand that you can shadow until you get the hang of everything – what could be better.
Because it is separate from your site in the sense that it doesn’t need to be integrated directly into the code, it’s easy to set up as well as to use. Naturally, you’ll need to create walkthroughs, but even that isn’t such a big deal thanks to the great editor and virtual assistant that are ready to help you out.
Try to diversify the walkthroughs intended for customers and employees. Since employees will spend much more time on the backend using many more features, don’t be afraid to be more detailed and offer more comprehensive content.
On the other hand, walkthroughs for customers should be made simple (as well as their interface) since no one will want to lose time by going through a convoluted process to get where they want to be. They’ll just look for a different solution instead.
Nickelled
If for any reason you don’t see the appeal of micromanaging employees by tracking their moves or aren’t into creating layer tutorials, you’ll be happy there’s a solution like Nickelled for you.
Using it, you’ll be able to easily create walkthroughs that will seamlessly train your staff or your customers.
Because of light approach to the matter at hand, this could be ideal to accompany updates and smaller changes to your site’s features and functions as well as after a product launch or the introduction of a new service.
However, don’t let the simplicity fool you. While it’s easy to use, you can get enormous amounts of data through a plethora of various reports and specific analytic tools. And using all this data you’ll get to pinpoint problematic parts of either the way your site is used or your guides.
If anything is proving to be too complex you’ll have the ability to break bigger walkthroughs into smaller guides that are easier to follow, but when complied, as a whole, get you the same results. So don’t be afraid to experiment with these groupings.
Summary
There are numerous other solutions out there you could look into using. The ones we’ve covered are just the ones that stood out to us and prove to have good overall features as well as something specific, that makes them unique.
Regardless if you opt for using any of these, or find something else for yourself, we urge you to use any solution of this sort, that will help you grow your business even more.
