Guide: Onboarding Confusion

After going through all the hard work of getting someone to one of your landing pages and then getting them to signup for your SaaS product, you can’t afford to lose them to confusion while they go through your onboarding process. Using the technique described below, you can:

• Identify which customers are confused and reach out to them.
• Track how modifications to your onboarding change the overall “confusion rate”.
• Convert more signups to activated customers.

The Question

In this article, we’re discussing asking your new customers the following question:

Do you have a good understanding of how you can use [Product Name]?

Who should be asked this question

This question should be asked of brand new customers right after they sign up. If a customer has no idea how to use your product after signing up, there is much room for improvement!

Where should this question be asked

This question should be asked very soon after the user signs up and before they’re expected to convert into an activated customer. This means that the question can be targeted to appear on an “onboarding” page or a “dashboard” page. It could also be asked on any page after a certain amount of time has passed. For example you could have the question shown to customers that are between 3 and 60 minutes old.

How to analyze the results

There are several ways the responses to this question can be utilized.

Identification: You can use this question to identify confused people (the people who answer No) and reach out to them directly.

General Tracking: As a Long Running Question (LRQ) you’ll want to turn this question on, and never turn it off. Every week (or possibly every day if you have enough responses) you’ll want to look at what percentages of people are answering Yes, No, or Abstaining and compare that with responses from previous time periods.

Segmentation: If you are a more mature (or just extra savvy for your age!) company, you may have multiple marketing campaigns driving you different types of signups. If you save this data and pipe it into Ramen, you can compare the “confusion rate” between Segments.

How to setup this question in Ramen

Below we describe how to setup this question in Ramen. There is also a screencast explanation.

Step 1: Target the question with an Audience

You’ll want to use the New Customers audience for this question. This audience is automatically created for you in your Ramen account, but if you deleted and needed to recreate it, the criteria are simple:

• Became customer less than 1 day ago

Step 2: Create the Question

This is a Yes/No question with the following details:

• Question: “Do you have a good understanding of how you’ll use [Product Name]?”
• Possible Response #1: Yes
• Follow up #1: None
• Possible Response #2: No
• Follow up #2: Oh no! Do you want us to contact you do discuss further?

Step 3: Setup the Question details

There are a few other options you’ll want to setup for this question:

• Delivery Location: This question should only show up on your Dashboard page
• Delivery Delay: You can show the question immediately, after a delay (20 seconds for example), or you can set Ramen to ask the question on the subsequent pageview (whatever that may be).

Step 4: Put it live

Click the Publish button!