Why is it so important to get the onboarding of the sign-up process right…
You may have a great service & amazing looking website but if your onboarding process is not up to scratch and provide a poor user experience, you’re going to see a high level of drop-offs of potential customers.
This could make or break the potential of gaining new customers to your service & your bottom line.
The main issues I see a lot of is the setup of customers username & password, this can be a little clunky, and the amount of information required to sign up before gaining access to the system. Recommended having a streamlined process with minimal information required allowing the customer to essentially enter minimal information at the start.
In most cases, SaaS providers, do provide a Single Sign-On (SSO) service for customers so they can sign up with their social accounts like Gmail, Facebook, or Microsoft 365 account. Allowing customers to sign up by social account allows customers to manage & separate their personal & business accounts.
I have seen a lot of customers use their employment email address to sign up for personal services and end up not having access to it in the future if they leave current employment, cut off from the email use. This could have been avoided by the employer’s setting up the organisation domain to not allow access to any outside services to their employers. This is very important at current based on the number of employers working from home or remotely.
The authentication & validation process can also be a little bit clunky, but it is a very important part of the process that often can see user drop off. The validation of your email address by sending an email to the entered email, in some cases, the email sent ends up in the user’s junk mail folder. The user then thinks that the email has not been sent & resend the email to be sent only for it to be sent the junk once again, ending up in the user giving up.
It’s funny to see the message “please check your junk folder if you do not see validation email” but this is generally based on the set-up and how the email is being sent to the customer.
In some cases, a mobile number validation is also required by the user, this is done by SMS sent to the user’s mobile number that has been entered. This is most cases is a simple process for desktop uses but once it moves to the mobile device things can get a little tricky for the user, there are ways that UI designers & frontend developers can make this a seamless process for the user.
From here further information can be asked from customers, note at this point you have them logged in secured and could allow them to progress along the onboarding process. And providing a save function so customers can continue at a later date to enter further information that was needed if the customer did not have on hand at the time, it always frustrating to users if they lose entered details.
A unique experience I see a lot of is the use of video or voice providing helpful information to the user that needs further understanding on what is required of them.
If you would like further information on this topic, please feel free to reach out happy to help…