Offering exceptional customer onboarding gives your company a competitive advantage that yields results in the long-term. It's crucial for driving user activation, engagement, retention, and growth. However, many customer success teams still take an ad hoc approach without measuring performance, leaving opportunities for improvement on the table.
After all, what gets measured gets managed, and accurately tracking your customer onboarding metrics gives you visibility, helps you set targets, and enables your team to make data-driven decisions about your onboarding processes.
In this article, we’ll explore how to measure onboarding success. Rather than relying on gut feelings, incorporate these onboarding metrics into your KPI dashboards this year to elevate your strategy and outcomes.
Tracking SaaS onboarding metrics can help your team continuously improve, delivering results to your business in the form of increased efficiency, better collaboration, improved customer satisfaction, longer customer lifetime values, and a better bottom line. Not only does tracking onboarding metrics help you improve the customer experience, it can also help businesses figure out ways to operate more efficiently.
Here’s a glance at how onboarding metrics and onboarding KPIs can help your business:
In the end, tracking customer onboarding metrics can help you drive conversions, reduce customer churn, and boost overall customer engagement. But tracking these metrics doesn’t just happen overnight – your team will need to create systems and methods to maintain accurate data and establish practices of analyzing that data on a regular basis to adjust your strategy accordingly. So, let’s dive into the most important customer onboarding metrics you should track in 2025 to get your business to the next level.
Tracking how long your customers take to get concrete value from your product is crucial — after all, quick wins are priceless. To get a sense of this, you should track the following key customer onboarding metrics.
Simply put, this measures how long it takes before new users officially finish onboarding and graduate to be full-fledged customers. The trick here is to keep this time as short and efficient as possible. Your onboarding process should focus entirely on how to use the product in applicable terms, incorporating key insights that fit into their workflow so they can soon go off and use it independently. The key? Get up and running as fast as possible – wasting as little of their time, and yours, as possible – without skimping out on the educational value that customer success leaders can offer. You want your customers to feel supported, without spending excess time getting started.
TTV tracks the time it takes from when a new customer starts the onboarding process to when they start seeing benefits from using product or service – in the world of SaaS onboarding metrics, this is the customers’ “aha moment.” Of course, the sooner your customers realize the value you add to their business, the better off you are, as this will reduce other negative metrics like customer churn. Note that the value here is in the eyes of the customer, not your company, so it’s important to always be offering your customers features and capabilities that matter most to them. One key to keeping this time as short as possible? Having a well-orchestrated onboarding process.
Activation metrics quantify whether your product makes a killer good first impression. Track the following metrics to see how customers are receiving your product or service.
This metric tracks the percentage of new signups that activate their account. Low rates indicate onboarding friction and can indicate areas where your team needs to make essential improvements.
These metrics analyze the percentage of your customer base that use certain features of your products in a time period, helping your company determine how popular various features are. This can help you identify areas of focus for the onboarding process, as well as indicating feedback for the product team. First, you will need to determine what level of usage indicates adoption (is it once per day, week, etc.) A higher adoption means your onboarding drives engagement with key product capabilities.
Use these metrics to track the percentage of assigned onboarding tasks and activities users fully finish. As it sounds, the Completion Rate measures how many new customers entered an onboarding program and finished it. Higher completion rates signal an effective onboarding structure, which is a win for your team. Low rates can also show you where customers might not be following along with the process, or understanding features of the product or service, indicating that your team may need to modify some processes.
This shows how many users transitioned from a free trial to a paid version of your product or service – an important SaaS onboarding metric. Users who are satisfied with the free trial will often upgrade to a paid version once that trail ends, which is a good sign for your business. But at that point, onboarding becomes even more important to retain those customers.
Engagement metrics reflect overall usage and interactions within your product which is an essential indicator of a customers’ behavior and satisfaction in the early days of customer onboarding.
This metric tracks how often users actively use your product daily, weekly, or monthly. Higher usage rates highlight sticky adoption resulting from quality onboarding. Lower adoption rates mean your team might have some work to do. Similarly, In-App Interactions measure the number of clicks, taps, searches, and other actions within the product. More interactions signal engagement.
Tracking engagement means assessing how many views or clicks your onboarding materials received. This can include engagement with guides, videos, messaging, and more. Lower engagement may indicate ineffective content that your team should work to improve. Your engagement rate really assesses how involved your customers are throughout the onboarding process.
Your onboarding process should logically follow a route of progression for customers so that their learning is efficient and effective. Beyond that, you can look to see how far along customers are getting in this progression by measuring Customer Progress. By offering training in various formats, such as videos, quizzes, guides, articles, blogs, and infographics, you can help customers move through the information, so they gain an understanding of how to adopt your solutions.
Satisfaction metrics provide qualitative data on the user onboarding experience. And without customer satisfaction, a business cannot continue to thrive – so pay particular attention to these key indicators and onboarding metrics.
This is a standardized metric that shows the likelihood of users recommending your product. Onboarding plays a key role in driving advocacy, and determining this metric requires customer feedback in the form of a survey or poll. Companies will commonly ask questions after service, such as “How likely are you to recommend this to a friend?” That is an NPS survey.
Tracking how many support tickets you get in a customers’ early stages can indicate how successful the onboarding process has been. It monitors the volume and sentiment of support tickets immediately after onboarding. High volumes of tickets filled with complaints signal clunky onboarding requiring refinements.
Customers typically want instant resolution and support when they have issues, and providing fast service is key to maintaining high customers satisfaction scores. One way to measure this is to track how long it takes to resolve a complaint from the time it was submitted. Tracking these durations can give you a glimpse into the customer experience and help establish more efficient processes.
Since robust customer onboarding boosts retention, analyzing associated metrics is crucial for effective customer onboarding.
This indicates the percentage of customers who churn during the onboarding phase – a strong sign that your onboarding process has problems affecting the wider business. The key is to keep this dropout rate low, so that customers get the chance to realize the value of your product.
The Customer Churn Rate indicates how many customers have ceased to use your product and service. This indicates the level of satisfaction with your product/service, and a high churn rate is a risk for the business. If your churn rate is high, it’s reasonable to conclude that customers are not getting what they hoped from the product, which is an issue that can implicate the onboarding process, as well as many other parts of the business. Homing in on your onboarding strategy can help you reduce the churn rate, and orchestrating improvements across the wider business is also usually necessary.
The Retention Rate is the flipside of your Churn Rate. It is the percentage of customers who stay with your business over a given period – a number that you want to keep as high as possible. A strong onboarding process can help customer retention by equipping them with the skills they need to succeed with your platform or service.
This metric used across industries measures the monetary amount that a singular customer is poised to spend over their entire life with your business. This helps companies measure the highest-value customers that they absolutely cannot lose. The onboarding experience impacts CLTV, establishing a positive first experience with the brand and making it more likely they will be incentivized to stick around for the long-haul. The longer a customer stays with your business, the more they will spend in total, so it’s important to be tracking this metric closely.
Gauging customers' understanding of your product functionality is also a key customer onboarding metric. Track the following KPIs to stay on top of this area.
Test your customers’ knowledge of product functionality after onboarding via assessments or surveys. High scores indicate onboarding drives understanding of capabilities. Conduct pre-and post-onboarding knowledge tests to quantify information gain. Significant score improvements spotlight successful training through onboarding content. Low scores indicate that you may need to make improvements for clarification in your onboarding materials.
Let's be real — one-size-fits-all simply doesn’t cut it. Reporting generic, broad metrics misses the key ingredient: customization. Instead, here are the useful personalization metrics to track.
What percentage of your customers get white-glove treatment with tailored onboarding experiences based on attributes like role, level, industry, etc.?
These personalized approaches often yield better results, but it’s important to track this to make sure your team’s efforts are paying off to result in customer success.
Also, make sure your team is keeping track of mapping the customer journey and how many flavor variants of onboarding paths you have built for niche segments.
Horizontal expansion of tailored pathways aligns onboarding tighter to specific customer need.
Analyze how inputs like demography, psychography, and behavioral data from user profiles manifest in tailored onboarding elements. More profile data triggering custom onboarding means deeper personalization maturity.
Rolling out the red carpets for customers has very real budget implications. Quantify if your efforts provide intended ROI with the following customer onboarding metrics.
What's the all-in price tag for guiding a new user from signup to “aha moment”? It helps measure if your budget supports stellar experiences at scale. Determine how much it costs your business in resources to onboard a single customer and relate those onboarding costs to key outcomes like capability adoption rates, retention boosts, and revenue expansion per customer. High multiples signal every dollar invested in onboarding pays itself back over time.
The ROI of Onboarding metric tracks the relate revenue per customer to costs. Healthy multiples enable worthwhile investments. A low multiple could indicate that you are onboarding customers at the wrong price-point or are misaligned with your ICP. Optimizing the onboarding process can also ensure that customers offer more ROI in the long run to your business.
Onboarding does not end after implementation. To convert customers into brand advocates that drive growth, relentlessly measure and optimize their experience from first contact through renewal. With the right customer onboarding metrics framework, you can build onboarding processes that accelerate user value and promote lifelong loyalty.
Want to see industry-leading onboarding in action? Schedule a demo with OnRamp and experience the world-class customer onboarding platform firsthand.