Strategies to address techincal onboarding failures

When assessing the technical failures of your onboarding process, you should start by collecting as much data as possible.

The more issues you find, the more targeted you can be with your communications – and therefore, the more users you can save.

The long loop is the end game and will help to make onboarding easy for your users. But in the short term, you can be proactive and reactive to resolve onboarding issues.

Let's look at some examples of how you can tackle technical onboarding failures.

React to onboarding issues immediately

Every product has well known moments of failure.

The most common example is when a user tries to connected to 5GHz Wi-Fi instead of 2.4Ghz. 

All of these points can have events sent to Copilot.cx. You can then set up a sequence whenever these events occur, including an in-app message, video explanation, and even a follow-up email if they still haven't resolved the issue.

With this approach, up to 40% of users experiencing issues end up connecting the product successfully.

Be proactive to avoid failure in the first place

For some failures in your onboarding process, you can't react directly.

In this scenario, you could send a proactive message before the failure occurs, with a clear and concise explanation of what's about to happen. For example, if users often deny access to Bluetooth, you could add a message before this popup to give extra context.

But beware. Messages that help some users can add friction for others. If you show a popup that has a low CTR and doesn't improve onboarding success, it may not be worth it. It's all about testing things to see what works for your users.

The fireman's blanket

You can't call each and every user that fails onboarding, and you'll never cover every single use case for every user. This is what being proactive is all about.

One of the first things you'll want to do in Copilot.cx, even before benchmarking your data, is to add a support email to your onboarding journey.

This usually triggers after around half a day and gives users easy access to your FAQs, help center, and any other resources available – all designed to make sure this won customers does not become a lost user.

With some subscription-only products like GPS trackers, you may want to add multiple steps here to help resolve any problems that pop up. 

One final note. It's vital that you keep researching and expanding your understanding of your technical onboarding issues. Because the more exact your system responds, the better your results will be.