The step-by-step guide to customer onboarding in Confluence

Why Confluence is perfect for customer onboarding

• A clear and logical journey to onboarding success without overwhelming customers with too much information, too soon.
  
  
• Team members don’t need to try and create their own documents and explainers, as everything can be easily located.
  
  
• Confluence supports feedback mechanisms such as comments and mentions, so new customers can easily ask questions.
  
  
• Confluence boards allow team communication around onboarding, allowing everyone space to suggest useful content.
  
  
• Confluence offers customisable spaces and pages that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different customer segments. Each space can be configured with unique workflows, permissions, and templates, providing a personalised experience.
  
  
• Internal checklists within Confluence ensure nothing is ever missed in your onboarding process.
  
  
• The central hub allows an eagle-eye view of all content to find useful pieces, while the labels and search function ensure documents can be found when needed (and you can spot missing items).

Confluence vs traditional customer onboarding

Video onboarding

• Can be personalised
• Can be repurposed
• Can be broken into easy-to-watch chapters
• Ability to track views

• Hard to capture all relevant or technical information
• Follow-ups likely to be needed
• Costly to record/edit
• Some customers prefer written documentation

PDFs and documents

• Easy and cost-effective to create
• Easy for customers to refer back to if they forget information

• Documents can be mislaid without proper documentation management, which is time-consuming
• The threat of version control issues
• Usage can’t be tracked
• Can under/overestimate customer knowledge or misjudge their challenges and goals.

Verbal onboarding

• Can be personalised
• Gives customers a chance to ask questions

• Follow-up documentation is required (sometimes legally)
• The customer has no information to refer back to
• Hard to deliver a consistent experience at scale

Confluence onboarding

• Easy to create
• Can be customised with company branding to make it look professional
• As it is stored digitally, onboarding materials cannot be mislaid once they’ve been created
• Usage can be tracked with Confluence Analytics
• Pages can be easily updated with the latest information

• Requires a Confluence account (free for up to 10 team members)
• Not instantly personalised (though easy to replicate pages for different customers)

How to onboard customers in Confluence: five simple steps

Step 1: Create an onboarding space

Step 2: Add content to your space

• Welcome page
• Product tour video
• Detailed self-service guides
• Troubleshooting guides
• Visual walkthroughs
• Knowledge base
• Tips and tricks
• FAQs

Step 3: Streamline onboarding with Guided Pathways for Confluence

• You can then turn pages into steps of your guide, allowing a logical flow between the steps that creates a story from information.
  
  
• Instead of overwhelming, you can break information into chunks within each pathway to allow users to dive deep into the most important follow-up pieces and digest information at their own pace.

Step 4: Train your teams

Step 5: Use add-ons to amplify onboarding experiences

• Want to make pages more interactive and engaging? Content Formatting Macros for Confluence is a complete macro toolkit that helps you create branded, memorable pages.
  
  
• Looking for feedback on your customer onboarding process? Embed Forms for Confluence at the bottom of your onboarding pages to gather useful insights and ways to improve onboarding experience.
  
  
• Working with leaders who want to see top-level statistics in graphs and charts? You can do that in Confluence, too! Table Filter and Charts for Confluence lets these users build more sophisticated, flexible tables and present data in ways that standard Confluence functionality doesn't allow.