Customize your user onboarding with these 11 onboarding tools

With the release of Product Tours, our new feature for building interactive guided flows, all the critical capabilities you need to onboard new users are now available in a single platform, Intercom.

Furthermore, the possibilities for customizing your onboarding experience are endless when you take into account our app integrations. Want to survey new customers about their user experience or invite new signups to join a Zoom demo? An integration is only a click away.

Let’s take a look at how connecting user onboarding tools to Intercom can power up your onboarding flow, plus get the details on our favorite integrations for extra features like videos, surveys, analytics and support.

How to choose the onboarding tools you need (and avoid tool overload)

Onboarding tools are tools created for the purpose of improving the user onboarding process. They streamline, guide and introduce new users to your product and show them how to use it. To decide what kinds of onboarding tools you need, determine what parts of your onboarding experience you need to improve first. Ask yourself and your team questions like:

• “What do users like about our onboarding?” – This could be based on analytics or customer feedback. These are your strengths and areas you don’t necessarily need a tool for right now.
• “Where are they having trouble?” – Look to user feedback and bounce/exit rates on specific pages for this information. These are the areas where you should add a tool.
• “How do our users like to learn?” – Are you sending email campaigns to reinforce the lessons taught during onboarding? How about videos? Thinking about your overarching onboarding messaging campaign may spark ideas about new tools to try or the activation of a new feature in a tool you’re already using.

With these answers, you’re ready to upgrade your onboarding experience. To that end, we’ve collected some of the best onboarding tools that you can connect to Intercom, plus a few of Intercom’s own features that may prove useful along the way.

11 user onboarding tools to set users up for success

With the video options built into Product Tours, you can walk your newest users through the onboarding experience as if you were with them in person:

But simple how-to videos aren’t the only way the onboarding experience can be improved. Here are three more video tools you can connect to Intercom to show (not tell!) users how to succeed in those crucial early moments of onboarding.

1. Encourage next steps with Wistia videos

What do you want your users to do after they watch an onboarding video? You might want to suggest they opt in to an onboarding academy newsletter, visit a specific page in your app or even view another set of videos. Nudging your users toward these next steps are easy with Wistia.

Wistia’s user-friendly video tools make hosting and displaying actionable videos an easy experience. Customize your video player with options to embed calls to action like signup forms or links. That way, if you want to direct users to your email list when they’re finished watching a how-to video, it’s a breeze – and your users never have to leave the app.

With Wistia’s Intercom integration, people who watch your videos are tagged with the video that referred them – for example, “App Intro Video” or “How to Add New Users.” The integration sends viewing data into your Intercom account, allowing you to get helpful insights on the videos used as part of your customer onboarding, so you can further customize your campaigns.

2. Use Bonjoro to greet your newest users

A new user will start your onboarding flow, but what happens if they leave before it’s finished? Can you nudge busy users back into the app or ask churned customers to give you another try?

Bonjoro is often used by sales teams to send personalized videos to leads, but it’s also ideal for users in the midst of onboarding. Bonjoro notifies you whenever a user takes an action you’ve flagged – for example, completing a task or viewing a tutorial video – so you can record and send them a personalized video. The personalization is the key: Bonjoro says these videos have open rates over 70% and click-through rates of 50%, making them up to 10 times more effective than email alone.

The Bonjoro-Intercom integration makes it even easier to send videos to users when they need them most. With events or tags from Intercom imported into Bonjoro, you can see a list of all of your users and how they last interacted with you, so you can start recording the right videos ASAP.

3. Create your own onboarding videos using CloudApp

If you don’t have a video producer in-house or can’t make room in the budget for professional video design, it might seem impossible to create effective onboarding videos for your users. But with a tool like CloudApp, you can do just that by simply recording what appears on your screen.

CloudApp lets you record videos meant to support customers at multiple stages of the user onboarding process: when they’re in-app, in email, or seeking help from your customer support team. Record a detailed tutorial demonstrating how to set up your app from start to finish, or create a 30-second video to answer a specific customer’s question – the choice is yours. (In fact, those are both great ideas!)

CloudApp’s integration with Intercom is particularly useful for supporting your newest users: with it, you can set up your automatic messages to include videos recorded in CloudApp, plus images or GIFs. Your support team can also use it to send media directly to customers, quickly answering queries and getting users back on track.

4. Verify contact lists with NeverBounce

The onboarding process isn’t over when a user finishes a guided tour or watches a video. The goal of onboarding is to establish habits and reinforce repeatable behaviors, and that can require two, three, 10 or maybe even 30 visits to your app. That means striving for increased user engagement in your onboarding process.

Email can prove very useful in establishing those behaviors. It brings users back to your app even if you suspect they’ve churned. And with the right content, your emails will nudge users into creating the habits that make your app a crucial part of their lives.

If your email list health is low, you might start seeing more of your messages than usual flagged as spam, keeping them out of inboxes and reducing the number of users you’re able to bring back to your app.

NeverBounce and its integration with Intercom:

• Verifies new email addresses added to your list
• Removes any that no longer work
• Sends a “clean” list back to you
• Automatically imports the cleaned list into Intercom for use in your automated campaigns

This keeps your list health high, which is crucial for preventing your emails from being tagged with the unwanted spam flag. If you can get more of your onboarding campaign emails into your users’ inboxes, you’re more likely to bring them back, so they finish what they started.

5. Use Smartlook to see what’s working – and what’s not

As your product and customers both grow and evolve, so should the onboarding flow. Allowing your onboarding experience to become outdated will frustrate new users, raising your churn rates to dangerous levels.

If you’re not sure how well your onboarding is resonating with users, you can guess… or you can actually watch users experience it. Smartlook gives you the power to see exactly how users are responding to your onboarding flow, so you can identify and resolve potential issues quickly.

Smartlook’s features include:

• Always-on session recordings that show how users go through onboarding
• Heatmaps that display where users are clicking the most
• Conversion funnels, including recordings of the visitors who churned between the steps of your funnel (for example, between the welcome page and first tooltip)

With all this data at your fingertips, you can much more easily identify potential stumbling blocks in your onboarding experience. Additionally, the Intercom integration brings recordings from Smartlook right into your Intercom dashboard, giving you the power to see exactly what kind of experience a user has gone through before contacting you.

6. Visualize customer data with Grow

Sharing information among your teams about the successes – and difficulties – of your onboarding is easier if you can do it visually. Data in charts, graphs, or other visual forms is easier to understand and allows your teams to more quickly spot trends.

With Grow‘s data visualizations, you can present data from onboarding to anyone using a wide variety of visual formats: pie charts, bar graphs, area charts, bar/line combos and much more. It’s far more appealing and engaging than anything on a spreadsheet.

Grow’s Intercom integration allows you to quickly turn Intercom data into visualizations about the metrics that matter most – like onboarding messages viewed and acted on. Present them to your team in the format that works best.

7. Use Typeform to quickly collect feedback via forms

Analytics tools can tell you how long your customers spend within the onboarding flow, the actions they take from a particular message or what they do when they’re done, but they can’t tell you how those customers really feel. Survey tools are one of the best ways you can dig into what customers think about your user onboarding flow or tours, giving you even deeper insight into what’s working and what could be improved.

Typeform’s form builder is as powerful as it is beautiful, which makes it an ideal solution for product creators hoping to collect feedback on their onboarding. Create forms quickly with many templates or design your own to match your branding and customer needs.

Typeform’s integration with Intercom makes it possible to embed a typeform in Messenger, so you can seamlessly collect customer information and feedback. You can also integrate typeforms with our Custom Bots to do things like send links to follow-up surveys after a support experience. Both of these options give you the power to collect feedback about your onboarding that can then be put to good use by your development team.

8. Distribute surveys to users with Survicate

The right time to ask users about their onboarding experience isn’t always when they’re in the middle of it or even after they’ve just completed it. Survicate is one of the best onboarding tools for measuring customer feedback: it gives you the power to create multiple surveys about various stages of the customer journey, including signup, onboarding, and potential churn.

The Survicate integration for Intercom gives you the power to send surveys to your customers when and where you choose, including:

• On your website
• In-app, via the Intercom Messenger
• Within Intercom email messages and automated campaigns

9. Measure customer effort with Wootric’s simple surveys

How easy is your onboarding process? Wootric allows you to get the answer to this question quickly with Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys. When it comes to getting started with your product, you want the experience to be as effortless as possible. The CES survey helps you identify and remove obstacles, so your customers can find success with ease.

Sending CES surveys in Intercom is easy with the Wootric integration, and the surveys can be timed to appear in Messenger based on a customer’s activity or other data. The integration also logs scores and associated comments in Intercom, allowing your support team to personally reach out to new users who might be having trouble or are at risk of churning.

10. Suggest relevant help docs with Article Inserter

While onboarding is meant to address common questions and eliminate confusion, your users may still need a helping hand during these early moments. If they can’t find a feature or understand how it works, Intercom’s Resolution Bot can provide instant answers in-app… but there’s no shame in wanting a few more options to cover all your bases.

If you’re already using Intercom’s knowledge base solution, this little feature is one of the best ways you can support users during the onboarding process. Our Article Inserter integration gives you the ability to share links to single articles in a message to specific users based on specific behavioral triggers.

For example, if a user has been on the same “Add New Project” screen for more than 60 seconds, you could show a link to an article about planning your first project. Or if they’re visiting a specific page in-app for the first time, you can trigger a link to a different article with an overview of that feature.

11. See what users are seeing via coview

If new users do need to reach out to your support team, you should make the process as delightful as possible. Often the most complex parts of your product are the ones that will provide long term value for users, and if a Product Tour hasn’t managed to guide users through the process, a step-by-step walkthrough with support might be required to get the job done.

Coview lets you provide top tier support in style by giving your support team the ability to view a user’s screen in real time as they use your app.

With the coview integration for Intercom, your support team has three options that make guiding users through onboarding a breeze: screenshots, screen recordings, and real-time screen sharing. The user doesn’t have to install anything to allow access, and your support team’s request for images or recordings will come through right in the current Messenger conversation.

Set your users up for success with the right onboarding tools

Creating a successful onboarding experience, iterating on it, and measuring its results requires the right tools. To avoid tool overload, first look for options available within (or that integrate with) what you’re already using. Consolidating your onboarding tools prevents confusing experiences both internally and externally, while helping to keep your costs low.

So keep this list of Intercom-friendly tools in mind as you set out to improve your onboarding experience. And if you’re looking for more tools to connect to Intercom, visit our App Store, where you’ll find dozens of integrations that will help you acquire, engage with, and retain more customers as they move beyond the onboarding experience.