Customer onboarding sets the expectations and conventions for your business relationship. Therefore, it becomes important to prioritize onboarding and give the best experience to your audience.
We all tend to create the finest plans, but we all make mistakes occasionally. We’ll look at the most typical errors made during client onboarding in this article, all of which you absolutely must avoid.
Top 10 mistakes to avoid during customer onboarding!
1. Optimize your website first!
This must be your first step, and you should never overlook it. Make sure your website has a friendly user interface and that the loading time is minimal.
You must take customer complaints seriously and search for every solution possible if they are expressing frustration with the loading time.
2. Not sharing your customer onboarding process
As a member of your organization, for sure you will know all about it, but expecting this from an outsider will be unfair. When you are onboarding a customer, you must ensure there is complete transparency in what you do and how your process goes further. It will create a problem if you do not have any transparency in your schedule, processes, or practices.
The major problems as an outcome of poor transparency are:
- Unrealistic expectations
When the clients or customers do not know what to expect they tend to expect wrong and have unrealistic expectations from you.
- Scope creep
When the clients do not know the efforts put into the work or have the full picture of the process, they tend to ask for more and more things. Sometimes the expectations are out of your scope, and then there is a risk of your image getting depreciated. So, having a clear image of what your clients should expect is important.
3. Not communicating often or clearly
When you are onboarding your customer, make sure you are always in touch with him/her to know where they are on the customer journey.
You must understand your customer’s journey and provide the essential resources for the same. Initially, you can provide the demos, and later on, you can provide the eBooks or whitepapers. While communicating, you can ask directly about their expectations. But you can overcommunicate, and that, too, will make the client’s journey a bit uncomfortable.
You can include the following while establishing communication with your client:
- Decide how often you should send them the project update or any mandatory information.
- You must determine the preferred communication channel; email, calls, or WhatsApp.
- Who will be the point of contact and who will have access to the client?
- Discover how you will reach out to the clients in case of an emergency.
4. Not establishing boundaries
One of the most difficult things for a business to do is say no to a client. When you are establishing your relationship with the client, you must set your boundaries beforehand.
You must make all the necessary concessions when you think the client is interfering in your personal space. You must maintain the proper channel for communicating the time for communication and other factors that you find necessary.
5. Not setting a clear goal
When you do not know what your common goal is, how will you work together toward it? From the initial stage itself, you must determine what the shared goals are and what your customer expects from you. You can solve the problem by answering the following things:
- Determine the business requirements for your product or service.
- What the stakeholder wants to achieve through your product or service.
- What the client wants to achieve for their customers through your product or service.
6. Making assumptions
You have worked very hard to develop your product or service but do not make the mistake of assuming your customer’s requirements.
For a successful onboarding, you must understand the client’s requirements and present your product accordingly, not mold the client’s requirements according to your product. This might work when your business is on a small scale, but it won’t go on in the long run. Make your customer your priority and set your services accordingly.
7. Use the attention span wisely
The client will not come to you repeatedly. Hence, you must make the most of the opportunity given to you. Your aim should be to help the user sign up as quickly as possible and get them to use your product.
8. Follow-ups are mandatory!
Onboarding a customer is not enough, you must follow up after that and make them feel heard. After the onboarding process, you can ask them about their experience, and if they need anything or have any problems with your product.
Try to automate the process to make the whole experience seamless for the customers. They will be getting a quick response that will help them move toward the next step much faster.
9. Take your time to respond!
Well, this is only applicable to your customer and not to you. Make sure you are responding to your customers on time. Delaying the conversations will just disengage them from the process and they will go to find another distributor
To retain the customer, make sure you are responding on time with the relevant answers.
10. Overload the customers
It is good that you are helping your customer to understand your product and make the most out of it. But make sure you are not overloading your customers with resources. You must go with the customer journey and ensure they are getting just the right resources and nothing more.
Analyse and act!
Analyze what you can offer your customers and then make your onboarding plan. To make the process easier and faster, you can also take advantage of learning management systems such as Acadle. It will help you onboard your customers with engaging courses, automate the process with drip emails, and create an engaging environment with the community and live chat.
You can check how can you measure your onboarding success:
