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The step-by-step guide to customer onboarding in Confluence
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The step-by-step guide to customer onboarding in Confluence
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What is customer onboarding?
Why Confluence is perfect for customer onboarding
Confluence vs traditional customer onboarding
How to onboard customers in Confluence
Get your customers up to speed quicker. Discover how to create the ultimate customer onboarding experience with Confluence Cloud.
Want to start customer onboarding in Confluence? You’ve found the right place. Our guide to customer onboarding covers what customer onboarding is, why it’s important, best practices, and appropriate software. Now you can learn exactly how to onboard customers using Confluence.
Ready to create interactive, tailored onboarding paths that break down overwhelming information into relevant, bite-sized steps for a better experience? Let’s get started.
Ready to create interactive, tailored onboarding paths that break down overwhelming information into relevant, bite-sized steps for a better experience? Let’s get started.
What is customer onboarding, and why is it important?
Customer onboarding is where you deliver what you sell! It’s the first step you take towards building loyal advocates for your business by getting customers up to speed on using your product/service and setting them up for success with the right documentation.
A customer onboarding journey is critical to avoid souring the relationship, and effective onboarding can significantly enhance the customer experience, leading to increased customer retention and loyalty.
Learn more: Everything you need to know about customer onboarding
A customer onboarding journey is critical to avoid souring the relationship, and effective onboarding can significantly enhance the customer experience, leading to increased customer retention and loyalty.
Learn more: Everything you need to know about customer onboarding
Why Confluence is perfect for customer onboarding
From centralised documentation and customisable spaces through to integration capabilities, Confluence is the perfect platform for customer onboarding.
Great customer onboarding requires you to simplify the complex. Confluence makes that a reality.
Here are some other key benefits of Confluence for customer onboarding:
Great customer onboarding requires you to simplify the complex. Confluence makes that a reality.
Here are some other key benefits of Confluence for customer onboarding:
- A clear and logical journey to onboarding success without overwhelming customers with too much information, too soon.
- Team members don’t need to try and create their own documents and explainers, as everything can be easily located.
- Confluence supports feedback mechanisms such as comments and mentions, so new customers can easily ask questions.
- Confluence boards allow team communication around onboarding, allowing everyone space to suggest useful content.
- Confluence offers customisable spaces and pages that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different customer segments. Each space can be configured with unique workflows, permissions, and templates, providing a personalised experience.
- Internal checklists within Confluence ensure nothing is ever missed in your onboarding process.
- The central hub allows an eagle-eye view of all content to find useful pieces, while the labels and search function ensure documents can be found when needed (and you can spot missing items).
Let’s compare Confluence to other customer onboarding methods:
Confluence vs traditional customer onboarding
While these methods all have merits, most are far better suited to getting your new employees up to speed. Employee onboarding is another business challenge! Learn more with our article on some of the new hire onboarding resources you may need.
Video onboarding
Benefits:
✔ Can be personalised
✔ Can be repurposed
✔ Can be broken into easy-to-watch chapters
✔ Ability to track views
Drawbacks:
✘ Hard to capture all relevant or technical information
✘ Follow-ups are likely to be needed
✘ Costly to record/edit
✘ Some customers prefer written documentation
PDFs and documents
Benefits:
✔ Easy and cost-effective to create
✔ Easy for customers to refer back to if they forget information
Drawbacks:
✘ Documents can be mislaid without proper documentation management, which is time-consuming
✘ The threat of version control issues
✘ Usage can’t be tracked
✘ Can under/overestimate customer knowledge or misjudge their challenges and goals.
Verbal onboarding
Benefits:
✔ Can be personalised
✔ Gives customers a chance to ask questions
Drawbacks:
✘ Follow-up documentation is required (sometimes legally)
✘ The customer has no information to refer back to
✘ Hard to deliver a consistent experience at scale
Confluence onboarding
Benefits:
✔ Easy to create
✔ Can be customised with company branding to make it look professional
✔ As it is stored digitally, onboarding materials cannot be mislaid once they’ve been created
✔ Usage can be tracked with Confluence Analytics
✔ Pages can be easily updated with the latest information
Drawbacks:
✘ Requires a Confluence account (free for up to 10 team members)
✘ Not instantly personalised (though easy to replicate pages for different customers)
How to onboard customers in Confluence: five simple steps
Step 1: Create an onboarding space
To create a new space, click Spaces in the top bar in Confluence and select Create new space. You can choose from a template space or start completely from scratch.
Step 2: Add content to your space
Next, you need to add pages to your space. With just a little effort, you can create a comprehensive multi-step guide to your business, and when a new customer is onboarding, that information can be with them in an instant.
The best part? This isn’t a pile of PDFs customers will resent reading. With Confluence, documentation can include attachments, multiple pages linked with more detailed information, and keyword labels - so not only is it neat, but it’s also accessible and well organised.
You might like to include:
The best part? This isn’t a pile of PDFs customers will resent reading. With Confluence, documentation can include attachments, multiple pages linked with more detailed information, and keyword labels - so not only is it neat, but it’s also accessible and well organised.
You might like to include:
- Welcome page
- Product tour video
- Detailed self-service guides
- Troubleshooting guides
- Visual walkthroughs
- Knowledge base
- Tips and tricks
- FAQs
Your Confluence knowledge base should be a masterpiece crafted to guide customers through steps at their own pace.
Tip: Create guides for all the customer onboarding information you need, from technical information to team intelligence, FAQs, or developer information, and use tagging labels to categorise each piece. This will ensure the content is saved in Confluence in easy-to-find areas.
Step 3: Style your pages with Smart Designer
Now that you've created your onboarding content, you want customers to actually read it! Smart Designer, included in Mosaic: Content Formatting Macros & Templates, brings a powerful design wizard to Confluence. It lets you highlight text, choose from a range of stylish macros, and immediately preview your macro in place of your text, all in a few clicks.
The best part about Smart Designer? You don't need any design know-how, and you don't need to spend hours copying and pasting your text into new macros. Just choose your design and see your text come to life.
Step 4: Train your teams
When you use Confluence, the support lines might be eerily quiet! Great documentation served to the right people in the right way at the right time leaves you with a lot of time that would have been spent chasing old documents, adding attachments, and sourcing the same material over and over.
Put your time to good use and get the whole team involved in passing on customer feedback.
But expect the unexpected! Team members may not actually know your product as well as you thought! Ensure you harness Confluence with an add-on to ensure learning management is up to date. Smart Courses for Confluence lets you set up an online training solution for your teams and deliver courses, tests, and surveys inside Confluence with single sign-on experience.
Tip: Explore the full marketplace to find the apps that will work for your teams.Â
Put your time to good use and get the whole team involved in passing on customer feedback.
But expect the unexpected! Team members may not actually know your product as well as you thought! Ensure you harness Confluence with an add-on to ensure learning management is up to date. Smart Courses for Confluence lets you set up an online training solution for your teams and deliver courses, tests, and surveys inside Confluence with single sign-on experience.
Tip: Explore the full marketplace to find the apps that will work for your teams.Â
Step 5: Use add-ons to amplify onboarding experiences
You may find that as your product changes, so do the needs of your customer onboarding process.
Apps can help, and you don’t need to be a designer or coder to extend and improve Confluence's functionality.
Apps can help, and you don’t need to be a designer or coder to extend and improve Confluence's functionality.
- Want to make pages more interactive and engaging? Mosaic is a complete macro toolkit that helps you create branded, memorable pages.
- Looking for feedback on your customer onboarding process? Embed Forms for Confluence at the bottom of your onboarding pages to gather useful insights and ways to improve the onboarding experience.
- Working with leaders who want to see top-level statistics in graphs and charts? You can do that in Confluence, too! Table Filter and Charts for Confluence lets these users build more sophisticated, flexible tables and present data in ways that standard Confluence functionality doesn't allow.
With Confluence, customer onboarding isn’t just easy, it’s fun!
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