How to Use AI Chatbots to Improve Product Onboarding and Training

Updated on September 5, 2024

Customer loyalty is deeply intertwined with their first experience with a product. For most customers, the first experience is the product and user onboarding process. 

According to Gitnux, 76% of customers will continue using a product if they receive a welcoming onboarding experience. Additionally, according to Userpilot, 63% of customers rely on onboarding as a critical metric when deciding on product purchases.

However, designing a product onboarding experience comes with a lot of challenges. If it goes wrong, your customers can become disengaged, affecting the NPS and CSAT scores at a macro level. 

This article will tackle the problem of inefficient product onboarding and illustrate how we can solve it using AI chatbots. We’re going to cover:

1. What is Product Onboarding?
2. Popular Method of Product Onboarding
3. Onboarding Chatbots: Personalized Training at Scale
4. Benefits of Onboarding AI Chatbots
5. Possible Drawbacks of AI Chatbots for Product Onboarding
6. Conclusion

What is Product Onboarding?

Product onboarding is the process of making a user familiar with your product. You must do this to engage your users as they use your product daily. 

There are three standard stages for product onboarding:

1. Primary Product Onboarding – You onboard users through tutorials and in-app guides. This is also done through training and demo sessions handled by customer success professionals. 

2. Secondary Product Onboarding – This is where you introduce new or advanced features. This can be done through knowledge-base articles or video tutorials that engage customers through their product journey. 

3. Tertiary Product Onboarding – In this stage, you focus on continuing engagement. This is done with proactive engagement and content that provides additional value to your customers. 

However, throughout the product onboarding process, there are a few common challenges that keep cropping up. 

Challenges for Product Onboarding

Three common challenges in product onboarding are:

1. Disengagement – Unengaging content or unhelpful tutorials can make the customer disengaged. This might mean that the customers stop using the product.

2. Abandonment – When the content of your product onboarding doesn’t cater to the customer’s personal use case, they might abandon the process. This also leads to them unsubscribing from the product itself.

3. Steep Learning Curves – Every enterprise software has a learning curve. If the product onboarding isn’t concise and helpful, people might not be able to use the product at all. 

Now that we know about product onboarding and the persistent challenges let’s take a bird’s eye view of the current methods. 

Popular Methods of Product Onboarding

While there are multiple product onboarding methods today, we will focus on some processes we’ve found to be the most popular. These are:

Synchronous Training and Onboarding

This method uses video calling and in-person meetups to drive product onboarding. Usually handled by customer success managers, this process is effective because it allows people to connect with the product personally, and they can ask questions throughout the process. Let’s discuss the pros and cons of this process.

Pros

• It can be personalized and tailored to the client. 
• A question-answer format is available.
• It is easy to focus on specific features for better engagement.

Cons

• It takes a long time since this is usually a one-to-many endeavor. The process might take hours.
• It is difficult to scale because you need dedicated training slots for each client and their personalized use case.

Video Tutorials

Videos have become a popular way of managing large volumes of product onboarding. This usually translates to someone recording a video related to a particular process and then sending it to clients. While more scalable, this also has some pros and cons:

Pros

• Very scalable, videos can be re-used again and again. 
• Can send small tutorials about advanced tutorials to clients.
• Short-form videos can be very engaging.

Cons

• These are generic videos that are not personalized.
• Long-form product videos can be difficult for a client to understand
• No question-answers possible

In-App Tutorials

In-app tutorials are a popular product onboarding process. Here, you provide some goals for a user to complete so that they can get hands-on experience in working with the product.

Pros

• Easy to scale, the same tutorial goes out to multiple users.
• Gamified and highly engaging for basic processes.

Cons

• Difficult to implement for more complex workflows.
• Not personalized, some customers may lose interest
• It doesn’t address questions which might affect non-tech-savvy customers

Interactive Tutorials

These are a new product onboarding process class that uses software to create interactive product tutorials. Here, the users walk through a recorded workflow within the product and can scroll back and forth to understand the product better.

Pros

• It is easy to understand because the walkthrough can be done at any pace.
• It is interactive and short enough to be engaging.

Cons

• It is not personalized, so users need help finding value.
• No question-and-answer function is available, so it might be hard to find specific answers.
• Users still face a steep learning curve regarding complex processes.

As you can see, there are multiple ways to do product onboarding, but offering personalized product onboarding at scale is challenging. Since onboarding processes are essential, getting a tool that trains and supports a customer throughout the product lifecycle is critical. This is where generative AI chatbots can help.

Onboarding Chatbots: Personalized Training at Scale

Generative AI chatbots provide a unique opportunity for product onboarding. These can be put into the product and armed with your Help Center and Knowledge Base articles to give the proper knowledge to the customer. 

Also, since AI can be trained with RLHF, you can optimize for better customer satisfaction with each iteration. Onboarding chatbots can:

1. Answer Common Questions – These chatbots can pull answers from FAQs and knowledge bases to provide answers to pertinent questions at every turn. 

2. Simplify Complex Workflows – Modern AI chatbots are armed with advanced NLP, simplifying complex workflows.

3. Can Answer Questions for Every Use-Case – While writing separate knowledge base articles for every user is impractical, a chatbot can customize these documents for every user.

Aside from this, onboarding chatbots also offer a specific competitive edge to businesses. 

Benefits of Onboarding AI Chatbots

Some benefits of onboarding chatbots include the following:

1. Faster Onboarding

Since these chatbots can answer technical questions in a personalized manner, they can reduce the onboarding time for any customer. 

2. Continuous Training

While it is challenging to scale an operation where you need a separate human being to assist every client, a chatbot can handle multiple conversations at a marginal cost. This enables these AI FAQ chatbots to train customers even when customer success managers are unavailable. 

3. Greater Retention

As we pointed out in the beginning, customers use the product onboarding experience as a benchmark for the product itself. So, when the onboarding is continuous and fast, more customers stay with the product. 

4. Basic Troubleshooting

A user who doesn’t know the product will make basic mistakes, and a chatbot is the perfect partner to solve these mistakes as they arise. 

5. Real-Time Product Reviews

Internally, these chatbots’ conversations can be considered product reviews. This can help you identify bottlenecks in the product and find workflows that need to be simplified.

CSAT scores and retention numbers can be used as a good indicator for revenue. According to SurveySparrow, a 1% increase in CSAT scores leads to a 5% increase in revenue. 

Similarly, a 5% improvement in retention can boost your profits by 25-95%. These statistics underline why onboarding chatbots can be very important for the overall product experience. 

However, before you start implementing these chatbots at scale, it helps to be aware of the drawbacks you might face.

Possible Drawbacks of AI Chatbots for Product Onboarding

While the current generation of generative AI chatbots is a significant leap in technological progress, they’re not a silver bullet. Some drawbacks that might affect you are:

1. Hallucinations

While multiple methodologies prevent AI chatbots from giving incorrect information, they might still do so sometimes. Most companies use RAG to eliminate these hallucinations and only use LLMs for natural language generation.

2. Security Risks

Since AI handles large amounts of data, a data breach can be a potential risk for any business that uses this tech. It’s better to opt for solutions that have robust certifications, including GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2, and PCI-DSS.

3. Technical Know-How Required

Optimizing and implementing an AI model from scratch is not a practical solution for most teams. This is because of the experience required to pursue this mode of implementation. Many vendors (like Kommunicate) are available if you want a no-code chatbot builder instead. 

4. Lack of Empathy

While chatbots can offer personalized responses, they cannot provide empathetic responses. This might alienate your customers and force them to disengage.

While there are some limitations to this technology currently, several workarounds help you implement the AI solution without facing any of the above drawbacks. This is why onboarding chatbots will see increased implementation shortly. 

The Bottom Line

Integrating AI chatbots into the product onboarding and training processes can help solve many inherent challenges. Since AI chatbots provide personalized, scalable, and efficient support to first-time users, they have become a training tool.

Since most customers are loyal to products that provide an excellent product onboarding experience, it can also drive better top-line revenue for you with time.

Given their current capabilities, we predict that AI chatbots will play an increasingly critical role in delivering a seamless and engaging onboarding experience.