Canopy is a cloud-based accounting platform that offers practice management software for accounting firms and tax resolution products for clients of these firms.
They’ve been effectively onboarding customers and answering support questions with UserGuiding’s interactive user guides.
Onboarding Users is a huge cost and burden on customer support
User onboarding can have a heavy toll on your business’ resources, especially if you’re relying on customer support to deal with any questions that might arise. If you have a very limited flow of new customers to your product, it’s not at all hard to deal with this burden.
However, if you’re interested in scaling up your business and making your product available to an even larger audience you’re either going to either A) scale up your support team accordingly, which is going to have a high operating and management cost, or B) have a difficult time meeting the needs of every customer, which will cause more churn and dissatisfied customers.
“There’s this huge cost and burden to support teams when you’re onboarding customers to your product. We wanted to ease the workload of our customer support.”
Answering the same questions over and over again
Every customer that uses your product goes through roughly the same process.
They signup, discover your product, love/hate it, adopt or not adopt it.
And as long as your UI/UX stays the same, most questions they will ask about the functionality of your product will stay the same.
“After a while, you’re essentially having the same conversations again and again in customer support.”
You can of course create templates for customer support to easily answer these questions when they’re asked or link them to an article that talks about the subject, and it’s also possible to answer these questions before they’re asked during the user onboarding process.
What about knowledge bases?
Knowledge bases can be extremely helpful for customers looking for specific and detailed information about your product and business.
It can hold up to unlimited amounts of knowledge that both users and customer support representatives can utilize. But is it the best way to address the problems and questions of your users?
“Knowledge bases are too overwhelming that people can’t actually get into it.”
As many have discovered before, reading an article on an external page on how to use a feature is mostly frustrating. A user needs to switch between tabs to follow steps of a solution to their problem or comprehend a long paragraph that answers their question.
Users should be able to solve their problems and get their questions answered right inside the product, as if an expert was sitting right beside them and telling them where to click and what to do.
Remember Microsoft’s Clippy?
Microsoft’s Office Assistant Clippit, more commonly known as Clippy was arguably a failed feature that aimed to assist users on their tasks. The concept was used many times in software products, and it showed the potential to help.
The problem with Clippy was that it would offer the same kind of help over and over again at random times. This was annoying for many users and the feature was deactivated by Microsoft.
With a basic examination of customer support requests businesses can find common questions and problems users encounter especially during their onboarding and with recently-popular concepts such as user behavior and product analytics they can understand when exactly these challenges start to emerge.
Thus, a more advanced Clippy can be used for today’s software, one that knows the right time to pop up with the right content and the right method to help users solve their problems themselves.
“We really needed a solution that could hand-hold someone through our onboarding process and show the benefits of our solution. We basically needed a solution like Microsoft’s Clippy.”
Canopy was very aware of these challenges, and they were looking for a solution that could:
- help them reduce the workload of customer support,
- address common questions before they were asked in an interactive way,
- and hand-hold users through a well-structured user onboarding process.
They’ve found UserGuiding
Canopy, as they searched for a user onboarding solution has tried many products, but decided that UserGuiding was the most suitable for them because it offered a simple way to solve their user onboarding needs.
“We wanted a solution that could do really well in the user onboarding vertical. We’ve used Intercom, WalkMe, and Pendo; but they were trying to do so many things at once it felt overwhelming. UserGuiding felt like a simple strategy that we could easily adopt for our solution.”
Visible Growth with UserGuiding
With UserGuiding and the interactive UX and onboarding elements it provides, Canopy has significantly reduced the cost of user onboarding for their support team. Also, they’ve seen an improvement in user engagement and their NPS after they’ve adopted UserGuiding.
UserGuiding is the perfect product for companies of any size that are looking to keep user onboarding costs low while scaling up.
With UserGuiding, you can create:
- interactive product walkthroughs,
- onboarding checklists,
- hotspots,
- feature highlights,
- NPS surveys,
- and interactive help centers easily.
This allows you to train your users in an automated fashion. Also, whenever there is a new feature or an update, you can change your onboarding elements with a few clicks.
Interesting, right?
You can improve user onboarding with UserGuiding as well.