How do you onboard a customer?
Customer onboarding is getting new customers started with a product or service and showing them how it works and what it can do for them. Companies bring new customers on board to set realistic goals, teach them how to use the product correctly, and eventually get more people to use it and succeed.
Depending on the company and what it sells, buyer onboarding could include the following:
- Live shows and tours of the goods
- Documentation in depth
- Help with discussions and questions
- How-to guides and tutorials
Online classes and workshops for training
As soon as a new customer signs or makes a payment, the sales process doesn’t end. We’re only halfway done. The deal is over when the customer can use the new goods independently.
The sales team is usually in charge of making sales and finishing deals. The hiring process is usually taken care of by customer success teams. On the other hand, smaller businesses will usually have one person or team in charge of both.
Like words
- Getting a new customer started
- Getting users started
- Signing up for SaaS
Why good customer onboarding is important
A good program for onboarding new customers eliminates confusion and anger, builds trust, and speeds up customers’ time to start using a product. Also, it can help your customer service team answer fewer questions each day. In an ongoing connection, this is the key to making it work.
It brings in more money
Nine out of ten customers say they’d spend more with a business that gives them personalized care. Onboarding is the first time a customer success rep talks to a customer. Setting the tone for future encounters is essential.
Growing your business with customers you already have is one of the most important ways to make more money. A good scheme for getting new customers will make them more loyal. Ultimately, you’ll have a steady flow of people who stick with your business.
Their businesses will get bigger, adding more users, buying more goods, and moving up to more expensive plans. That’s how businesses keep more than 100% of their net income.
Lowers the rate of churn
A study from Salesforce found that 70% of customers say hiring is one of the most important things determining whether a business wins (and keeps) its business. And it’s not their fault.
People won’t buy or keep using a product if it doesn’t give them what they want. If too many customers are leaving, one of the first things a business should do is look at how they bring new customers on board.
Lowers the cost of customer service
Fixing every support ticket a current customer puts in takes time and money. Often, these tickets are for simple issues like misusing a feature, not for technology problems.
People who buy a product can quickly learn how to use it with the help of a training program. When a customer is onboarded correctly, the number of tickets related to simple user mistakes almost disappears.
It makes the customer experience better
When a company’s hiring process works well, customers feel good about the product and the team that made it. It improves the customer experience and helps them get the most out of the product.
Greeting and helping new customers can help them find hidden value in a product and give them access to help materials and customer service reps when needed. Reps only have a short time to show off the software during sales demos, so they pick the most critical features to hit first. Through onboarding, customers are given more help to get up and running with the product.
Problems With Getting New Customers
Even though training new customers is essential, it can be challenging.
Automation and being able to grow
Many businesses depend on automatic programs for onboarding new customers to help them grow and meet rising demand. Automation does have some benefits, such as making things run more smoothly and quickly.
But let’s not forget that technology has its limits.
- You get more personalized care when you talk to real people instead of automated systems.
- Less background information during the customer onboarding process
- Customers might get lost if there isn’t anyone to help them through the training process.
- Long digital hiring processes can cause customers to leave or stop caring about your business.
- Software for onboarding customers can help a business grow, but businesses must keep customers feeling valued and linked during onboarding.
Spending time and money
Onboarding a new customer takes a long time and a lot of resources. It can take up to 100 days to get a new business client up and running. It’s not just making material, either. Customer education is essential to ensure people fully understand the product or service. That means having long talks, giving a lot of demos, and providing direct product help.
There are only so many tools that even large companies can use. Too much work for the teams in charge of training could cause them to make mistakes or lose interest in the new customer.
Instructions and paperwork that are not clear
Companies often forget the importance of hiring good tech writers to make their paperwork and onboarding materials. Some people will know a lot about technology. Some people won’t. Widespread adoption is not expected unless most of the information can be shared by everyone.
Also, it’s important to note that some companies don’t even make product paperwork. If a customer only has an onboarding call or webinar, they must remember everything they wrote down and call for help if they can’t figure something out.
It’s not doing its job when the onboarding process for new customers causes more stress and anger for both the company and the customers. Every minute that goes by, the chance of losing a customer increases.
Problems with technology
Of course, technical problems can happen anytime, even if the customer onboarding plan is done correctly.
Anyone can have trouble with any software. These problems happen often when businesses depend too much on automation and don’t check their processes carefully for mistakes and bugs.
Having downtime, entering wrong data, and other technical problems while onboarding new customers can cause you to lose those clients. Product and customer success teams should put QA testing at the center of their work to prevent this.
Best Practices for the Customer Onboarding Process
One of the most essential parts of the customer journey is onboarding, which sets the tone for the rest of their time with the product. Let’s look at some of the best ways to get people to stick with you for a long time.
Make a checklist for onboarding.
The first thing every company should do is make an onboarding plan that everyone follows. It needs to have:
- A meeting with customer success reps
- A show or tour of the product
- Instructions on how to fix technical problems
- Setting up and deploying the system
- Hands-on product instruction and tips for doing things right
Set up tools and channels for customer service
A list of ways to get more involved with the product, such as through webinars or live talks.
Short and easy is best.
Do not give your customers too many steps or pieces of pieces of information at once. So, instead of one extensive process, break it up into smaller jobs and show them to them individually. Customers are less likely to give up and lose interest if they can finish the training quickly.
For instance, don’t give people a single 15-point checklist. Instead, split it into three 5-point checklists and send them out over three weeks. That way, they can ensure they fully understand each part and slowly add to what they already know.
Make the experience smooth.
Ensure that every part of the training process for new customers is simple to understand and get around. This means giving clear directions with in-app help, unified content, and help tools like FAQs, videos, and tutorials.
Pay attention to the value of the product.
Perceived value is a big part of buying and why people stay with a business. In some ways, a business wouldn’t even bother to get a new customer if they didn’t think the product was helpful. On the other hand, that value can go down fast.
To focus on value, think about these things:
- Clearly describe the product’s benefits.
- Draw attention to the good things about each feature.
- Show people how they can benefit from them.
- Show examples of how your customers have been happy.
- Talk about quick wins and accurate results.
Another essential part of showing value is giving new buyers the right content, which you should also make yourself. Customers can stay interested in a product and learn how to use business-critical features with the help of blog posts, video lessons, and eBooks.
Ask for Feedback
It helps to set up a feedback loop throughout the process. Use surveys, one-on-one talks, and usage analytics to check on the progress of customer onboarding regularly.
B2B SaaS companies often sell their products to whole teams, so it’s also helpful to talk to the product’s most heavy users, who might not be the people who make decisions or lead teams. For instance, a sales executive might be the primary person to talk to about the product, but 20 or more salespeople would be the ones who use it every day.
People in charge of training often forget about lower-level team members, but they’re the ones who matter when it comes to getting people to use the app. There will be no gain for the company if they are less effective.
Provide interactive training.
It should be built into the product for collaborative training to work best. For software, it’s as easy as setting up guided user flows with popups every time a new user is registered.
They should also have easy-to-use digital onboarding tools to help new users get the hang of the hang of the product. Help can also be interactive and include workshops, conference calls, and other live events.
Check out the knowledge base.
Gather the most common customer questions and put them in one place. Making a knowledge base saves customers time and makes it easier for support teams to answer more complicated questions.
A well-designed information library that is easy for people to use can also be linked to the onboarding process for new customers to offer immediate assistance. For example, an email that welcomes you to the product and tells you how to use it could include links to helpful how-tos that give you more information.
By adding an AI chatbot to a website, companies can handle simple customer questions without involving a team member. This makes the central store more useful. Customers having trouble don’t have to contact customer success; they can click through a few pre-written answers and find the information they need.
Keep in touch with new users.
Get in touch with customers and ask for feedback after they’ve signed up. You can do this via phone, email, chat, or in person. After giving them access to the product, check in with them once a week and once a month.
Follow-up gives the business a chance to fix any problems that haven’t been fixed yet before they get worse. Additionally, customers should be able to share their thoughts on the hiring process and ask any questions they may still have.
Use tools for onboarding.
Training tools are the best way to speed up the process and ensure customers are happy. Many tools, like email auto-responders and learning management systems, can help teams get new customers up and running quickly.
Email: Email automation sends drip campaigns with onboarding material like product guides, discount codes, and how-to videos.
Learning management system (LMS): Make interactive courses with video lessons that go into depth and tests to see how much you understand. There are a lot of third-party LMSs to choose from, but more prominent companies with more complicated goods build their own.
Guided onboarding workflows: To make onboarding flows that look good in the app itself, use a product-focused tool like Appcues, Pendo, or Chameleon.
Watch These Metrics for Customer Onboarding
The value of a customer over their lifetime
Customer lifetime value, or CLV, is the total amount of money a customer brings to your business throughout their relationship with you. A rise in CLV a year after starting an onboarding program would show that the program worked.
Time to Value
The time it takes for a new customer to see the value or benefits of using a product or service after they buy it is called its time to value (TTV). This means the time between when the customer buys the goods and when they have their first significant result or “aha!” moment with them.
A shorter TTV means that the hiring process works better and faster. It’s a subjective metric because all goods are different in complexity. A business should look at itself and work to improve it based on what its customers want.
Rate of Churn
Customer turnover is a clear sign of poor hiring. If many customers are leaving, it means you’re leaving something out during the hiring process.
If the churn rate is higher than the average for your business, you should keep an eye on it for any patterns or sudden jumps. Aside from forced churn, most reasons customers leave (like not being a good fit for the product or having a bad experience) are easy to spot during hands-on training.
Value for Money (NPS)
The net promoter score (NPS) shows how likely a customer will tell others about a business. Most of the time, businesses with higher NPS numbers are better at keeping customers and getting new ones through word of mouth.
Customers can tell customer success teams what they think of their business, goods, and services by polling users during the onboarding process. Surveys done after the hiring process can help them figure out what the company missed during the onboarding process.
Sending referrals
Knowing how likely a customer is to tell someone else about the business is one thing. But how many are there, really?
One of the best ways to sell something is through word-of-mouth. The number of hot leads from word of mouth shows how happy customers are with the product. The proper training can explain why they’re using the product and how it’s meant to be used.
Looks at
Customer reviews from new and old customers are probably the best way to tell if training went well. They not only give a summary of the customer experience; if they’re good, they can also be used as an indirect marketing tool to bring in new customers.
Using a social listening tool, you can find buzzwords and trends in how your customers think about your product. This information can help you deal with everyday problems when you start working with a new customer.
