Communities of Practice for Customer Onboarding

Feb 24, 2025 | Articles, Customer Training

Key Takeaways:

  • Building a community of practice during customer onboarding fosters engagement and makes customers feel supported.
  • Communities of practice allow customers to share resources, success stories, and use cases, enhancing their learning experience.
  • Effective onboarding through communities of practice can significantly boost customer satisfaction, retention, and product mastery.
  • Tailoring the community of practice to the size and needs of the onboarding group ensures maximum impact and relevance.

When you’re onboarding new customers, you’re probably thinking of the information you need to offer them. What learning do they need to use your product effectively? What do you need to teach them in order for them to become power users, and how can you give them the best possible experience?

You might not be thinking about what your customers can teach each other about your product. Your customers have a lot to offer one another during the onboarding process; tips, tricks, their successes and “aha moments.” For these reasons, you may want to consider building a community of practice as part of your customer onboarding program.

What is a community of practice?

A community of practice is a group of people who share a common interest, profession, or passion and engage in ongoing learning and knowledge-sharing to improve their skills and expertise.

Communities of practice can often be found among learners who work together. For example, a group of learners who are all moving into management positions at a particular company may create a community of practice that helps them learn how to be better leaders. In many schools, groups of teachers work together as communities of practice to improve their teaching skills.

Why build a community of practice for customer onboarding?

One of the important features of a community of practice involves identity; learners who actively participate in communities of practice develop a role and an identity within the group. This is similar to brand communities; customers who are active members of brand communities aren’t just consumers of a product, they’re power-users, brand ambassadors, and identify with the brand’s values. Customer communities are known to increase engagement by providing customers the opportunity to interact with each other and brand representatives for support.

A community of practice can offer the same level of support, as well as engagement, for learners. This is particularly important during onboarding, when customers need the most support.

“When your form communities of practice, you’re providing a network,” says Litmos Chief Learning Officer Dr. Jill Stefaniak. “It’s really about making sure that they have some form of a social network or a peer network to support them as they’re going through onboarding.”

How can communities of practice benefit customers?

Communities of practice offer learners a chance to direct their own learning by interacting with one another. This means that they might engage in problem solving collectively or ask questions about onboarding modules. It also gives learners a chance to connect with instructors or company representatives in a different way. Rather than sending an email that may get buried in someone’s inbox, a customer can turn to a forum to send messages directly to customer representatives.

There are several other benefits as well:

  • Community: Branded communities of practice connect learners who might not be able to see each other in person, but who still need the extra support of a community of learners.
  • Additional resources: Communities of practice offer a forum for learners to share resources with one another.
  • Success stories: A community of practice allows power users to share their tricks, tips, and hacks, and the way the product has benefited them.
  • Use cases: A community offers users the opportunity to network with others who use your product in similar ways.

How to set up a community of practice during customer onboarding

No two communities of practice are likely to be the same, especially since the kind of community you build is dependent on the customers you are onboarding. The more learners you have, the more successful a community of practice is likely to be, says Dr. Stefaniak.

“Communities of practice tend to be, on average, larger,” says Stefaniak. “Usually, you need at least 10 individuals to make a true community of practice.”

So, if you’re onboarding mostly small teams or individual users, your community of practice may look different than if you’re onboarding large teams of users.

  • If you’re onboarding individuals: In the case of individual users and small teams, you may want to build your community of practice right into the brand community. This will allow your learners to interact with a wide range of users, as well as with a cohort of learners who are also just starting to use your product.
  • If you’re onboarding teams: If you’re onboarding teams of 10 or more users, you may want to create a community of practice for just those team members, so that they can work together to learn more about how their team is using the product to solve their own business problems.

The role of community in onboarding

There’s plenty of research out there demonstrating that a trained customer is a happy customer.

According to Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA), 68% of trained customers report higher adoption rates. Trained customers were also shown to renew subscriptions more often than untrained customers. The impact of customer education on overall customer experience is evident in recent research that attributes a 25% boost in customer satisfaction to proper customer training, and shows that the lifetime value of a customer increases by 35% when they receive training. And, considering that it’s 5-25 times more expensive to find a new customer than to keep an existing one, it makes sense that you’d want to make sure your customers get all the support they need.

Onboarding is a key piece of that customer support; it’s an introduction to your product and your brand. It’s your chance to make an amazing first impression —to show your customers how to use key features, demonstrate the value of your product, and nudge them into having the kind of “aha moments” that make your product unforgettable.

However, onboarding is more than a series of courses or in-person training sessions for new customers. It can also be community-based. If you want your customer onboarding to make a real impact on customer satisfaction and retention, your business can and should encourage customers to learn from one another.

Strong, sustainable, and profitable customer relationships start with better customer onboarding. Streamline and scale your customer onboarding strategy with The Ultimate Toolkit for Continuous Onboarding – an expert-curated collection of customizable customer onboarding resources. Download your free copy today!