How Five SaaS Companies Use Videos to Nail Customer Onboarding

SaaS onboarding is a process that introduces a cloud-based tool to the users and educates them about its features and functionalities. This process helps users utilize the software effectively to get the desired value.

Brands use various ways to onboard new customers and users, such as help docs, product demos, and interactive training sessions. Companies, often, offer multiple options to their audience about how they want to learn about their products to cater to different preferences.

Videos, of all the options, often are the most preferred. 

For instance, research shows that 83% of people choose videos over text or audio when it comes to educational or instructional content.

In this article, let’s look at five ways brands can use videos to enhance their SaaS customer onboarding framework to help their users get the most out of their offerings.

1. In-app training

In-app training is a method of user onboarding where the customer is provided with guidance about how to use the software within the app itself. This method can be quite effective as it engages the user in their working environment.

Task checklists, tips through pop-ups, and interactive tutorials are some ways in which the app businesses can provide in-app training to their customers.

Customer success teams can elevate their in-app training by embedding videos within their product’s interface. Short clips that provide contextual help based on the actions the user has taken so far can personalize the SaaS onboarding experience.

Mural, a visual collaboration tool, has embedded the training videos within their product. This allows users to gain a quick understanding of the features as they explore the platform:

The user can watch the tutorial right within the platform:

It is interesting to note that Mural’s customer success team has created a lot of how-to content in the form of screen-recorded videos. Such videos can be quite effective while walking a user through a feature or explaining a workflow.

2. Embedded help center

An embedded help center refers to the functionalities within a SaaS product that give the user access to support resources. These support resources can be FAQs, communities, how-to articles, and, of course, explainer videos.

These functionalities deliver a more insightful user onboarding experience to SaaS customers as they can serve themselves. This can greatly enhance the user experience, particularly for users who want to explore the app at their own pace.

Wix, a popular no-code website builder, gives more freedom to their users in how they use their product. Whatever your question is, just pop into the embedded help center and search through thousands of help docs.

Here, too, Wix has created various videos where the narrator walks through the features in simple screen recording videos. These videos enhance the overall SaaS onboarding process for the user through visual, hands-on content.

These how-to videos are quite easy to create, as we all have explained something to someone at some point. However, it can be challenging to polish these videos so that the user can enjoy a distraction-free learning experience that drives action.

Polishing these videos encapsulates tasks like adding pan and zoom effects, removing background noise, modulating the voice, trimming irrelevant portions, inserting captions, etc., which make the videos more engaging and helpful.

Depending on the team, tools used, and process followed, the journey from a screen-recorded video to a professional, studio-quality explainer video can take anything from hours to several days.

Clueso does all of that for you in minutes. It transforms raw screen recordings into polished, studio-quality explainer videos to enhance the SaaS user onboarding experience. This will help customer success teams create how-to video guides within minutes.

All you need to do is record your screen, explain the process while walking the user through the steps, and upload the video to Clueso.

Within minutes, the platform will remove background noise, give an AI voiceover by extracting the script from audio, add zoom-in effects to bring focus to actions and buttons, attach an intro and outro, etc.

Ready to enhance your user onboarding framework and help your users get the most out of your product?

You can get started in 15 minutes.

3. Product-focused academy

A product-focused academy is a dedicated platform where users can learn how to use saas tools and build workflows around them. These academies feature content in a wide range of categories such as product features, updates, functionalities, and best practices.

Moreover, there are dedicated tutorials and in-depth courses created for users who need an advanced hold on that tool.

Canva’s product-focused academy, the Design School, features courses and tutorials to help users of all levels of technical expertise create better designs. The primary format of content is videos to keep the content more interactive and easy to follow.

Additionally, Canva has opted to keep the UI minimalistic and has docked the index on the side for easier navigation across the chapters.

Moreover, users with specific needs or questions can access their huge library of feature tutorials. These videos, like the ones with Wix and Tolstoy, are screen-recorded explainer videos that walk the user through the steps of the process. The hands-on approach can be quite effective in increasing information recall.

4. Knowledge base

A knowledge base contains all the details about your product including the how-to content for users and developer documentation for the software engineers who build using APIs. Knowledge bases can also contain information on how your software works and how the customer data is being collected and managed.

The knowledge bases can be internal (for the team members) and external (for the end users). 

All kinds of KBs help their respective audience to practically use and understand your products quickly. It is usually a large repository of articles that are, traditionally, text-heavy.

Many businesses like Basecamp are taking a novel approach – using videos.

By sticking videos at the top of the knowledge base articles, they are giving an option to the viewer based on their needs. For instance, if you are looking for something very specific, a text-article can be better. 

Videos are more suited for an audience looking for a more comprehensive and actionable understanding of the topic in an engaging way.

However, writing detailed how-to articles for your knowledge base with the right GIFs and images with annotations can be challenging. From deciding the topic to preparing the outline and finally producing the draft, it can easily take days.

Clueso can write detailed articles like that in minutes.

The platform can extract the steps from the transcript of the video you uploaded. This is the same screen-recorded video where you walk the user through the steps. Then, Clueso will write the steps in simple language and compliment them with accompanying visuals.

The visuals will be perfectly cut and annotated images and GIFs with pan and zoom effects. This will make your knowledge base content more impactful as it will draw the audience’s attention to the action areas.

5. In-app hint buttons

You might have seen little buttons with an “i” mark icon on it at various places within a SaaS product. These buttons provide tips and tricks that help the user get the most out of that relevant feature.

Customer success teams can also embed images, GIFs, and links to external help articles to guide their users better.

Framer links videos in these buttons to enhance the SaaS onboarding experience.

This method of using videos for customer education in this manner can be quite effective. The user can view content as they explore the platform at their own pace, without being overburdened with too much information.

Wrapping up

Videos play a crucial role in enhancing the SaaS onboarding experience. 

Brands can integrate them across various touchpoints—from in-app training and embedded help centers to product-focused academies, knowledge bases, and customer support—SaaS companies can significantly boost user engagement, comprehension, and satisfaction.

Whether it's through quick explainer videos, detailed tutorials, or interactive courses, these visual aids help demystify software functionalities and empower users to leverage the full capabilities of the platform.

Ultimately, the goal of using videos in SaaS onboarding is to ensure that users not only grasp the nuts and bolts of the software quickly but also feel supported throughout their journey with the tool. 

This approach not only enhances user satisfaction but also contributes to higher retention rates and a stronger overall user experience.

Clueso makes it easier for businesses to create professional quality explainer videos from raw screen-recorded clips in minutes. Customer success teams can create how-to videos in minutes, not days.

‍Let’s get you started in 15 minutes!

FAQs

1. What is the importance of videos in SaaS onboarding?

Videos make complex software functionalities easier to understand, enhancing user engagement and retention by providing an interactive and visual SaaS onboarding experience. Clueso can help teams produce studio-quality explainer videos within minutes from screen-recorded clips.

2. How can in-app training videos improve user experience?

In-app training videos offer real-time, contextual guidance directly within the software, helping users learn functionalities as they navigate the application, thereby personalizing and enhancing the onboarding process.

3. What role do explainer videos play in embedded help centers?

Explainer videos in embedded help centers allow users to quickly grasp application features through visual learning, reducing reliance on text-heavy manuals and speeding up the learning process.

4. How does a product-focused academy benefit SaaS users?

A product-focused academy provides structured and comprehensive video tutorials that guide users from basic to advanced features, fostering deeper understanding and skill development in using the software.

5. Why integrate videos into a SaaS knowledge base?

Integrating videos into a knowledge base caters to users preferring visual content over text, offering an engaging way to understand complex processes, which improves their ability to use the software effectively.

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