First impressions matter: what we learned while improving our client onboarding

According to Harry Mills in his book, Artful Persuasion, first impressions take just two minutes to form. After two more minutes, you’ve made up your mind. If you don’t click in your first impression, you might never connect. We only have one chance to make a good first impression. No pressure 😳!

Seeing a new product for the first time might feel a little overwhelming. And to be honest, it truly is a lot to take in, especially if it has a lot of features and options like our LMS. That’s why part of our team spent six months improving the client onboarding process. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way.

Your success with the tool depends on how quickly you can familiarize yourself with it.

Onboarding

The term“onboarding” is commonly used among human resource managers to describe the process of getting new employees started. Cambridge Dictionary defines onboarding as ‘the process in which new employees gain the knowledge and skills they need to become effective members of an organization.’ At Easy LMS, we use the term onboarding too. Not only do we onboard our employees, we onboard our clients too. We define the client onboarding phase as the time from when a person first hears about Easy LMS until the end of the first month of a paid subscription. We include the entire first month because clients learn the most about Easy LMS during this period. Your success with the tool depends on how quickly you can familiarize yourself with it.

Why we focused on client onboarding

A new interface is a lot to take in. Yes, even ours. We try to make Easy LMS as intuitive and user-friendly as possible. Still, learning how to navigate a new tool takes time, regardless of how simple it is to use. It’s up to us to show you whether Easy LMS is the right fit for you. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide if you want to invest your time and money on us.

Patterns in client behavior

While researching our onboarding process, we included several people from the team at different stages. Our implementation consultants, for example, noticed a pattern. Anna mentioned that she noticed clients getting stuck on the same stuff. An example of this is comparing the different subscriptions to each other. Which subscription fits the client best?

Patterns in client questions

We value meaningful contact with our clients. Answering the same three questions is not the intention we had in mind, especially if they were supposed to be clear at a glance. Don’t get us wrong. Our implementation consultants love to help you. We just want your precious time spent as effectively as possible. That doesn’t include you asking something that should be more intuitive like: ‘How do I create a question in an Exam?’ 😉.

What we learned

We need to change our view on clients

You have a different perspective on Easy LMS than we do. We noticed this during user testing, reviewing survey results, and looking at Hotjar data. For example, while testing the pricing page, we expected people to scroll slowly over the page while taking everything in. But this was not happening. Users were scrolling quickly, having trouble finding what they’re looking for, and clicking on features and random things.

The results made us realize that we need to change our view on clients. For us, something might be easy, as we work with Easy LMS every day. For you, that same thing might be difficult to grasp. At Easy LMS, we must keep reminding ourselves of this realization. Especially during our decision-making process and sprint plannings.

We are proud of what we do, and we want you to be happy with what we deliver. That is why, from now on, we keep these things in mind while discussing onboarding or an onboarding-related sprint:

• A client not understanding something is on us.
• A client has different wants and needs than we do.
• A client’s context influences their needs and decision-making process.

Let’s elaborate a bit more on that last point. By context, I mean everything around you. It includes having a tight budget or deadline and if an online LMS is a priority or just a side project. Also, it includes things like how you interact with your colleagues or if you want a promotion.

What we’ve done so far

To get the client perspective on the top of everyone’s mind, we made a presentation about the client onboarding process. We addressed the results from the onboarding research, and we discussed our view on clients. We did this with a so-called user journey. This infographic shows the steps a client takes with their corresponding thoughts during a set time.

We also devoted a three-week sprint to pricing. Our goal was to make it easier for you to understand our pricing model and various subscription tiers. We noticed that some clients sign up for a subscription that doesn’t suit them well. Before, they’d have to contact support to change their trial. To address this, we made it easier for you to see and change your trial subscription yourself. We also added the option to see what your trial subscription was before it ended.

The goal is to make it easier to decide on a subscription

To improve the pricing page, we are testing out several versions with an A/B test. In this case, it is actually an A/B/C/D test. So, we have four different versions of the pricing page live at the same time. We want a comparison of our different subscriptions to be straightforward. The goal is to make it easier to decide on a subscription. It is hard to get it 100% right the first time. That’s why we will be doing iterations to get as close to perfection as we can.

The most popular questions during client onboarding concern what features we have, what our features mean, and which subscription includes which features. That’s why improving the pricing page also included the creation of the Subscription Advisor. It is an Assessment that helps you decide which subscription suits you best. It makes pricing easy to understand even if you are in the orientation phase, do not understand the jargon, or are not tech-savvy..

What the future holds

We’ll keep using the information we’ve gathered in the past six months, which is continuously updated. By doing so, we will base our sprint direction on client feedback and data.

One result is that Courses, next to the Exam and Academy, will have our attention this year. These parts of Easy LMS are used most by our clients and our target audience. They must suit their needs in the best possible way.
At Easy LMS, we’re eager to learn and improve every day. We can’t do that without your feedback. We’d like to know more about your first impression and experiences with Easy LMS!

Client onboarding is only a small part of improving our usability. Are you interested in how we make other parts of Easy LMS even more user-friendly? Read ‘7 ways we've made Easy LMS user-friendly’ to find out 😉.