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Intercom on Onboarding

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Getting new users to sign up is easy. Getting them to come back again and again is the hard part. That’s where onboarding comes in – it turns signups into happy, successful customers.

Intercom on Onboarding features nine chapters of the most valuable lessons we’ve learned onboarding tens of thousands of customers. Simple and straightforward advice on getting your customers to that “ah-ha!” moment, and making sure they never look back.

108 pages, ebook

Published September 13, 2016

13 people are currently reading
188 people want to read

About the author

Des Traynor

10 books42 followers

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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Profile Image for Michael.
Author 1 book16 followers
August 10, 2019
A very quick read - with useful prompts and a couple of frameworks that can help you think about onboarding. Three quick quotes help make the case for speed-reading this volume:

"Fun fact: when Microsoft asked their users what they wanted added to Office, they found 90% of the requested features were already there. They had just done a terrible job of onboarding the right users on to the right features at the right time."


"Good onboarding comes from focusing less on your own business, and more on your users. Onboarding isn’t a metric, it's an outcome – successful users. Once you learn that, everything follows from there."


"The first step to successful free trials is knowing what “success” looks like for your customers. Once you’ve asked them that, you have to ensure you have targeted support, docs, tutorials and case studies to help them succeed. Finally you need a picture of what failure looks like, and once you see the tell-tale signs you need to step in to prevent it."


At the more detailed level, the section on performance vs. change in context is particularly useful - helps you figure out when to optimize vs. redesign the process.

Profile Image for Anna Petruk.
892 reviews563 followers
October 10, 2021
I've read a couple of Intercom e-books in the past which I thought were good. This one though... it's like 100 pages long, but it took me 1.5 years to finish, which I think is telling.

It sort of aims to give an overview of approaches to building good onboarding experiences. But here's what I found lacking:
- close to the beginning of the book, there was a section on how you can make a superb onboarding flow by incorporating chat. This was so obviously tied to some release of theirs, it destroyed the credibility of the ebook. Mostly because what they described sounded like an awful onboarding experience and calling it great was completely disingenuous
- the other sections were fine and consisted of points considered to be universally true. But they didn't provide anything new nor helpful with regards to their recommendations. It was like "Build an onboarding flow, and make it good". Well, duh. The question is how.

Overall, I was incredibly bored and barely forced myself to finish this.
Profile Image for Oleksandra Manson.
118 reviews2 followers
June 7, 2021
"Great businesses are built on high customer retention. It’s not about everyone
hearing about your product, it’s about everyone who does hear about your product using it successfully."

High customer retention, in turn, is built on a great onboarding experience.

If you doubt where to start onboarding, how to build user guiding correctly, and why tooltips' and help center's designs are integral parts of the product, read this book!
Profile Image for Vandana Guru.
5 reviews9 followers
January 7, 2018
If you're into Product Management, I highly recommend you to read this. The book talks of how customer onboarding isn't a one-time event, it isn't something you create for one type of customer and so on. One of the chapters talks of how your organisation's structure impacts your user onboarding. I couldn't agree more.
Profile Image for Maria Martin.
7 reviews2 followers
May 3, 2020
Fantastic read. In fact, while reading this book, I formed the welcome message for one of the products that I manage, and for a long time, it was a pending task, which never got attention.
It is not just relevant to Product managers but to all people in the company.
3 reviews
August 15, 2017
A good, quick read—but definitely geared a bit more towards B2B/SaaS onboarding.
1 review
June 9, 2021
Just ok

I thought it would have included more templates or provide a checklist. It is just ok. Nothing spectacular about this book.
Profile Image for Pavlo Huk.
37 reviews23 followers
December 31, 2016
Не очікував, що книга настільки крута і корисна. Тут і про дизайн, і про маркетинг і про правильну взаємодію сапорту. Must!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews

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