5 Ways to Improve Your Agency Client Onboarding

Client onboarding is a crucial process that plays a key role in client retention. Simply put, if you want to make your clients stick around for a long time, you have to make sure they’re properly onboarded.

The onboarding process starts the moment your clients sign a contract to work with your agency. You’ll have a lot of things to do from there, so you want to make sure your onboarding process is already carefully laid out.

How to Improve Agency Client Onboarding

There are times, however, that your client onboarding fails or doesn’t work as intended. If that’s the case, then you want to consider doing these 5 methods that will help improve your agency’s onboarding process:

1. Send an Effective Welcome Email

You want to start off by sending your new clients an effective welcome email. Though it might sound simple, it’s actually a cornerstone of a healthy relationship between your agency and your client.

Ideally, you want to start by telling your client how excited you and your team are to be working with them. You should also provide them with all of the necessary information such as your agency’s policies, copies of contracts, contact details, etc.

However, you want to keep your email short. It should address the most important questions your clients might have – things like who they can talk to, where they can escalate the issues they might have, etc. It should also contain introductions of your team members whom they’ll be communicating with.

Although the tone of your email will depend on the nature of your agency, a good point is to make it sound natural yet professional at the same time.

Lastly, you want to make sure that your welcome email contains the next steps your clients should take. You don’t want to leave them in the dark no matter what.

2. Invite Your Clients to Your Process Management System

Another important factor for a solid relationship with your clients is constant communication. If your agency uses a tool for project management, you can send them an invite. This will allow you to show your clients your workflow and how you and your team handle their project.

It’s also a good idea to send your clients an email requesting a quick call, so you can tour them around your system. This is yet another subtle gesture that can further enhance your relationship with them.

In the event that your clients don’t prefer using your tool or if your agency simply doesn’t have one, you can instead explain to them how they’ll be able to receive updates about their project.

3. Offer Ongoing Services

Another thing you can do to improve your agency’s client onboarding process is to offer them ongoing services. It can be in the form of quick troubleshooting checklists, ongoing training, or even a monthly consultation.

Before you do, make sure to notify them about these during the onboarding process. This strategy can help improve your onboarding process and increase the chances of your clients coming back for more.

Most agencies believe that they just need to win over their clients once. However, the truth is that it’s a continuous process. Offering your clients ongoing services will encourage them to stick around since it can show that you’re a professional, and it also makes them feel valued.

4. Ask Your Clients Questions

As much as possible, you want to collect information about your clients by asking them questions. This can be made easier with the help of a client questionnaire. Basically, the questionnaire should contain all of the questions that will help move the onboarding process forward.

This questionnaire is intended to collect information that you weren’t able to obtain during the sales process. To do so, you can use tools like TypeForm or SurveyMonkey to make the process a lot easier.

Also, keep in mind that some clients prefer covering the questions on a questionnaire via calls. You can schedule a call for those who prefer, so you can walk them through the questions.

5. Assign the Best Team for the Project

Once you have all of the above set up, the next thing you want to do is to assign the project to your agency’s best team. Schedule a meeting with the team you want to assign the client to and make sure to provide them with all the information they need. These can include the following:

• Estimated project timeline
• Project summary
• Things required to make the project successful
• The research you have done on the client
• Things the team needs from the client to make the project successful

You should also share all previous communication you have with the client. This way, the assigned team will have more information on how they can handle that specific project.

After the meeting is done, you should then proceed to launch the project over your preferred project management system, if any. Don’t forget to invite your client to it.

Have You Tried Any of These So Far?

Client onboarding doesn’t stop after having the first meeting with a new client. It’s a continuous process that involves sending them a follow-up email or asking them about their experience when working with your agency. If they have some concerns, you’d want to address them as soon as possible.

If you haven’t had any luck with onboarding before, then including these strategies should help improve your agency’s process and allow you to increase client retention and drive more revenue.

Anyway, if you haven’t used a project management system yet, then now is the time to do so. One good example is Rindle which is designed to make the workflow of your project a lot easier. It comes with a handful of features that will help improve your onboarding process and even your entire project management system. You can check it out here for more details.