Your customer onboarding process determines if your customers will be retained or not. You must have a definite process for onboarding your customers.
With this article, we will be studying how you can modify your onboarding process to retain customers at their best!
55% of the customers return a product if they don’t know how to use it.
Importance of customer onboarding?
Adopting best practices for customer onboarding will help your company attain success. The market and business trends are ever-evolving, and customers’ expectations are also changing.
Following the best customer onboarding process will help you in the following ways:
1. Ensures customer success
An efficient customer onboarding builds confidence among your audience and helps them place their trust in a product or service.
63% of the customers think onboarding is the deciding factor for the purchase.
2. Prevents churn
With the unsatisfied customer experience, you can expect the churn rate to go high! It is important to ensure your customers have a great experience with your product or service to reduce the churn rate.
3. Improves the product value
With an effective onboarding process, the customers value the product or service you are providing.
What are customer onboarding best practices?
1. Build an excellent customer program
The first step in retaining customers is building an excellent customer onboarding program. To build customer lifetime value, you must understand the customer’s requirements. Acquiring new customers is always more expensive than retaining the old ones. With an excellent customer program, you can make sure to retain your customers and build new relationships effectively.
2. Customer onboarding software
Onboarding has now been modified and modernized with the customer onboarding software. To ensure you have a smooth onboarding experience, it is now important that you choose an ideal customer onboarding software.
You can use different tools to help with email series, product videos, or demos.
3. Set your milestones
Onboarding an ideal customer means defining your success definition. Simply put, it defines how you will define your ideal goals. To complete the goals, you must define the customer success milestones.
You must let your customers decide the success factors during the sales process. Make sure you set mutually achievable and practical goals.
4. Customize your experience
One size does not fit all; this also applies to the customer onboarding process. To make the experience unique and to make customers feel valued, the onboarding process must be customized for each customer.
The elements you can customize for your customers can include creating VIP access portals or personal profiles. To build a personal structure for your customers, ask as many questions as you can.
You must have regular check-ins with your customers to understand where they are in the whole success or buying process.
5. Ensure the best onboarding activities
Just onboarding your customers is not enough, you must engage them as well. You can implement different activities such as Q&A sessions, webinars, or tutorial videos.
64% of companies use in-app videos to improve workflow.
Experimenting with different activities for your customers will give you better chances to understand your audience. You can easily accommodate the different learning styles of your audience so that you can give them the best experience. You can fabricate your resources accordingly to give the best value.
6. Have the best team
Your customers are not onboarded by a single person, but rather through the collective efforts of your team. Anyone included in the onboarding process of your customers should know the pain points and solutions of your customers to best assist them.
You must align your team in such a way that the workflow is proper. The seeds of churning are planted during the early stages of the sales process; hence, you must know the highs and lows of it.
7. Gather data
Collect as many statistics as you can! Analyze the website analytics or the purchasing patterns. Analyze everything that you can to build the best customer onboarding experience.
If you are clueless about your customer’s needs, you are certainly hurting the relationship among your customers.
8. Focus more on the relationships
When you are onboarding a customer, try to build relationships rather than trying to complete your sales target. Selling your product will not always work in your pitch, you must tell the customer why it is important to invest in your product or service.
A relationship is based on the communication that you have with your audience. Make sure you communicate well with your customers, and it will help you understand their buying nature too.
9. Follow-up is important
Your customer support should not end with your onboarding process. To make sure you give the best experience to your customers, you must modify and change your process consistently. The best way to make changes is to have feedback from the audience.
After your onboarding process, you can ask your customers about their experience and if any improvements are needed.
10. Assess the needs of your customers
Your onboarding process and the customer’s goals must align with each other. Onboarding is a long process, and the process must justify your customers’ requirements.
Evolve your process as your customer journey evolves to make it relevant for them.
Things to include in your onboarding
Onboarding can be customized to the industry or product requirements. The steps can be customized and can be made with steps like:
- Mails for different stages
- Call a success manager
- Virtual or on-site training
- Knowledge-based articles, videos, or other resources.
- Customer success program access
- Community platform access for the customers
The ideal customer onboarding process
- Sign-up process – the process must be short and simple for your customers. To ease the tasks, you can also allow your customers to log in from pre-used platforms like Gmail or LinkedIn.
- The welcome email – send a greeting email to your customers showing gratitude, you can also send resources and encourage them to use your product or service.
- Guide the first login –help them with their first login and guide them further.
- Integrations for customers’ tech stack – help them with the integration of tools to ease their onboarding process.
- Product walkthrough- to help your customers understand your product or service better, it is important that you give them a product walkthrough.
Customer onboarding determines the success of your product and also determines its sales. As a result, make your customers’ onboarding experience memorable and worth purchasing your product.
