What Makes a Great Customer Onboarding Experience?
So your company just got a new customer? Congratulations!
What's the next step? How do you engage them? How do you retain the new customer? These are the kind of questions you may have, but efficient onboarding has answers to all the questions. Onboarding a new customer properly is the first step after someone signs up for your product or service., If done correctly, it will help assure your new customer that they made the right choice and help you retain them. This is why you should use a solution for digital adoption.
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the initial process that a new customer goes through when they first accept to work with a particular product or service from a company. The process involves signing up, product or service activation, and meaningful use. Note that the process of onboarding a customer may differ from one company to another depending on the product or service they offer. Effective onboarding also involves guiding them through your product or service. The guidance may include relevant tutorials, and milestone celebrations when your customer achieves a specific target using your product.
For new companies and businesses, effectively onboarding new customers may feel like a lot of work because of the responsibilities involved. However, some companies and businesses have opted to delegate onboarding their new customers to software like Usetiful to simplify the onboarding process. For example, Usetiful guides your new customer by providing interactive product tours through your product. The tour guides help your customer to quickly familiarize themselves with your product and how to use it.
What Makes a Great Customer Onboarding Experience?
How you onboard your new customers sets the tone for your long-term relationship with them and helps you retain your customers for an extended period. A great customer onboarding focuses more on your customer and how they interact with the product or service. Below are tips that will help you create a great customer onboarding experience for your new customer
1. Get to Know Your Customer
Make sure that you know your buyer persona in and out. Then, understand them well by collecting the necessary information from them. You can do this by adding a feedback loop into your user onboarding. Digital Adoption Platforms allow you to embed surveys directly into the onboarding flow. Such a platform will help you find out about the pain points, struggles, and what they are looking to achieve with your product. The information will later help you in continuously improving your product or service.
2. Show Value
A customer onboarding process is not complete without showing value for the product or service you offer to your customer. Let your customer know what they can expect from your product or service. Some services will offer a product tour feature that helps your customer better understand your product. Typically, the software does this with the use of contextual on-screen guidance.
3. Keep the Communication Flowing
Don't just stop there; make sure that you keep in touch with your new customer. Whether on email or any other communication platform, ensure that you keep sending guides, tutorials, information to keep the communication flowing. If this feels daunting, you can use software like Mailchimp to follow-up with inactive customers using emails.
4. Analyze Your Success
Allow your customer to keep sending you feedback on your services or products. Make sure that you know how an onboarding process worked for them and how they felt about it. The information will help you know where you need to improve for a better experience.
Importance of onboarding Customers
A successful customer onboarding helps your new customer familiarize themselves with your brand and what you have to offer. It also has a direct impact on your company's churn rate. If done well, you can improve your customer retaining capacity. Onboarding customers has a lot of benefits to both the customer and the company they choose. Below are more benefits of onboarding new customers into your company:
1. Save on Customer Acquisition Costs
Acquiring a new customer may cost you more than retaining an existing one. Moreover, the effort used to acquire a new customer is 5X more than the effort used to maintain a relationship with a current customer. A properly onboarded customer is likely to stay with you for long and continue using your products or services.
2. Helps You Manage Your Customer's Expectations
Your customers can sometimes be strange beings, all thanks to their expectations, and budgets may astound you. Don't blame yourself; customers have a right to know what exactly they will get from your company and whether it is within their budget. A great onboarding process educates them about what they will get and what they will not.
3. No Scope Creep
A scope creep is where a client orders a service but keeps on adding in more demands along the way. In most cases, the demands add up to your work with no additional potential revenue. Scope creep can be frustrating, and unfortunately, it can result in big misunderstandings with your customers. Onboarding your new customers well means that they will know what to demand and where they are limited. An effective onboarding process thus sets a good pace for both of you and eliminates scope creep.
4. Showcase Your Value
Onboarding a customer isn't just about avoiding future problems with them. It is also an excellent medium to showcase your service or product value to your new customer at a stage when they are most open. For example, onboarding gives you a chance to showcase the value of your products or services by offering a free trial. The free trial or free product acts as a tasty bite to the whole cake. At this point, you can show your new customer the value of what you are offering.
Final Word
Customer Onboarding is one of the most underrated tools in product marketing. Very few companies know how to properly onboard their customers. Also, very few know the benefits of properly onboarding new customers. However, more and more companies and small businesses are getting the hang of it. An affordable and effective customer onboarding platform such as Usetiful can help you to activate your users, help them reach their “aha” moment - and in the end, earn you referrals because customers are more likely to talk about your business to their friends.
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Diana Nadim
Diana Nadim is a guest writer for Millennial Moderator.
