Use These 5 Customer Onboarding Best Practices
How does your company deal with customers post sale?
- Do they continue to receive their due value?
- Are they overlooked by staff?
- How is your customer retention?
We as consumers don't feel satisfied when in the process of paying for a service we notice a change of communication between a company and its customers. Why should your corporate customer be any different?
So your agreement with a customer right after a purchase is essential for the relationship you built to last in the long run.
Remember that the timing is delicate, your customer just bought your product and has not yet had an opportunity to form an opinion on it. However, a customer's continuity depends on how impressive you are.
Have you ever been to a restaurant where the service was "Wow!"
Were you impressed and delighted?
Wouldn't you be proud if your customers feel a sense of duty to you?
That's when customer onboarding comes in!
Customer onboarding is a process that seeks to engage and guide the buyer to the best possible initial result. Make every step of onboarding a client with your product or service a victory.
Do you plan to increase sales and decrease churn or leave things the way they are now? Maybe you're already satisfied with your results.
But if you think you have room to improve, then it's time to invest in the client's successful practice.
[bctt tweet = "There is only one boss, the customer, and he can lose everyone in the company, from the president, simply spending the money elsewhere. - Sam Walton "]
5 customer onboarding best practices
Before finding out our customer onboarding best practices summarized in 5 ways, it's important to understand a fundamental concept:
Your customer has purchased a product or service for the purpose of solving a problem or need that they have.
If your customers don't quickly receive the benefit from your product or service - which they believed when they purchased it - they'll be dissatisfied.
That's why customer onboarding is so important not B2B and, with more intensity, in companies that depend on recurring monthly resources, that is:
They sell by subscription or monthly fee.
Online courses, universities, gyms, phone services and, above all, SaaS companies are those that should invest in great customer onboarding.
1 - Know your user
Knowing the user is essential in all areas of an organization, but here, when we're talking about onboarding, it becomes MANDATORY.
Do you know your customer?
If you answered "No" or "Yes", you're wrong. "Black or white" answers don't make sense. You have a certain degree of client knowledge. It's never 0%, nor will it ever reach 100%.
But the more you know them, the better their experience with your product or service will be. And a good way to get more information about your users is to research them well.
Create a questionnaire in Google Forms or other specialized search tools and seek in-depth responses to a customer's journey to find the right product or service, discover their issues, and create a service for them.
Asking questions is an important step for an onboarding team to understand what probelms customers have, what they consider to be valuable, not attributes and characteristics: find the problem, then create a solution.
I'm sure you're at 100%, am I wrong?
So, answer a few questions to check this?
- What is the biggest difficulty that your company faces today?
- How have you been trying to solve this problem?
- How satisfied are you with an adopted solution, from 0 to 10?
- How does our solution contribute to a resolution and all the needs of your business?
- Do you believe that our solution delivers what was promised?
- From 0 to 10, what is the possibility of recommending our solution to a friend or acquaintance?
2 - Customize your onboarding
Each user has a different problem.
Can you imagine a hairdresser doing the same cut for all their clients?
No? (If you answered yes, send me the address of this hairdresser because that cut must be phenomenal!).
Imagine that John prefers the explanatory video on all the features, while we like assistance. You and your team must be prepared for the client's problems and success.
Later on we will talk about onboarding time.
3 - Make the user successful quickly
If your customer has purchased your product or service it's because they want great results as soon as possible. So get them up-to-speed quickly, so they can be successful as soon as possible. Show them that it's worth continuing their investment.
We will assume that you offer marketing automation software and that your customer has contracted your service in the hope of increasing sales.
To achieve this goal, the first thing to do is to generate leads, by helping them you're giving them their first achievement:
- Create a super simple and very fast tutorial to launch their first flow of sales. Congratulate them at every step! Rewards are essential to make the user motivated and engaged.
- Use some company mascot or the face of the company's owner in the tutorial, to customize and establish more personal communication. Make light jokes (without exaggeration)!
- Create other triggers to reactivate the user days and weeks after the first set-up, if they don't connect: "Create a new landing page", "Do A / B test", etc. teach them to carry out these steps by sending informative emails!
- Now your user is feeling confident with this first success, they know that they can count on your software and that you've fulfilled the promise they believed when they purchased the product/service.
4 - Don't give them a fish, teach them how to fish
Ok, you taught your customer very well and now they know everything about your product or service. In a short time they got their first success thanks to your help.
But did you teach them how to achieve that result, or did you give them this result?
You see, don't let your client depend on the onboarding team, they must have enough autonomy and knowledge to be able to go it alone. Your role is to help them succeed on their journey.
5 - Build your team well
For all previous items to be successful, everything will depend on the onboarding team.
Everything needs to be well planned and organized, have professionals at your side who take on the client's problems.
Ideally, the customer onboarding team should be unique to this task. But keep in mind that the best professionals who can help the customer, are those from Customer Success, no one knows their consumers better than them.
Sales professionals can blend in with CS, so you'll have experts in bringing and motivating customers on their journey through your product.
Why are customer onboarding best practices so important?
Onboarding is a continuous job that should never stop, the fruits of this strategy directly impact sales and customer retention.
What's better than that?
Keep in mind, that: onboarding is here to stay, it's up to your company to shape this new trend.
And remember that keeping a customer is much cheaper than gaining a new one!
