The Key to SaaS Growth: Understanding the Difference Between Product and Customer Onboarding

Proactive customer education is crucial for reducing support costs and driving long-term SaaS success. By focusing on contextual learning and user autonomy, companies can improve feature adoption, engagement, and retention.

Adoption: The Key to SaaS Growth and Retention

In the world of SaaS, customer support can quickly become a major cost center. On average, a SaaS company spends €50 per support ticket, a cost that becomes harder to sustain as your user base grows.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, part of this cost can be alleviated, especially with the help of copilots managing simple and repetitive queries. But one thing remains true: users don’t become experts overnight. More importantly, they won’t become autonomous with customer support alone. In fact, the more you answer their questions, the more dependent they become, creating a vicious cycle of escalating ticket volume...

Proactive vs. Reactive Support

Many SaaS companies rely heavily on support to answer user questions. The problem? This approach is reactive. Support addresses a one-time issue but doesn’t solve the underlying cause: the user’s lack of autonomy.

Training, on the other hand, is proactive. It helps users gain a deeper understanding of your product, build long-term skills, and solve problems independently. By giving users the tools they need to explore the product on their own, you reduce dependency and increase engagement. If a user doesn’t even know a key feature exists, support can’t help. But targeted, contextual training can make all the difference.

Two Common Pitfalls in SaaS User Training

When it comes to training users in SaaS products, there are two major pitfalls to avoid:

1. The “Quick and Dirty” Approach (Product Tours)
   Too many teams think that a simple guided product tour is enough to train users. While product tours are effective for quick tips, they don’t address the need for true skill-building. It's no surprise that companies like Intercom, known for their customer support tools, have leaned into this space — but product tours are designed for support, not for comprehensive learning.
2. The One-to-One Culture
   Many Customer Success teams spend countless hours training users individually. While this approach is helpful in some cases, it’s simply not scalable. The solution? Implementing digital customer success strategies that automate parts of the training process, empowering users while freeing up time for CS teams to focus on high-value interactions.

Best Practices for Customer Education

To truly drive engagement and adoption, here are some best practices for building an effective customer education strategy:

1. Analyze Support Requests
   Identify recurring issues from support tickets to create targeted training content that directly addresses these needs.
2. Vary Your Formats
   Microlearning is often the most effective method. Offer short, 3–5 minute lessons that allow users to absorb key concepts without losing their focus.
3. Personalize Training
   Tailor training based on user maturity, goals, industry, and even language. The more relevant the content is, the more impact it will have.
4. Choose the Right Delivery Channel
   Emails can be ignored. External LMS platforms are fine, but they pull users out of the product, which disrupts the experience. A more innovative approach? In-app learning — delivering content directly within the product where users are already working, right when they need it.

Growing Your Users Alongside Your Product

Support can help users in the short term, but training is what empowers them for long-term success. By educating your users, you enable them to get more value from your product, integrate it into their workflows, and drive their own success. This leads to improved retention and a more engaged user base.

Customer education is a winning strategy for SaaS companies. While Customer Success teams have understood this for years, they are now looking for solutions that scale better than endless 1:1 calls.

In a time when software companies are under pressure to cut costs and protect revenue, user education is proving to be one of the most powerful ways to ensure long-term product success.

And the last barrier — creating content at scale — is falling fast. Thanks to AI, generating high-quality learning content now takes seconds, or almost.