Process & Workflow
How to Improve Your Customer Onboarding Process
First impressions matter, especially when attracting new customers. In fact, it can have a major impact on how your clients perceive your brand and even affect how long they’ll choose to stay with you.
This is where customer onboarding comes in. Customer onboarding is the process of bringing new customers to your business and providing them with the valuable product or service that your brand promises.
A study conducted by WyzOwl revealed that roughly 55% of customers have returned a product they purchased simply because they don’t know how to use it properly. You don’t want that to happen, or at the very least, you’d want to reduce that percentage as much as possible.
To help you with that, we have prepared a handful of tips that will help you significantly improve your customer onboarding process.
- Don’t Go Overboard
Many companies, particularly startups, tend to overload their new customers with tons of prompts, info-texts, and other onboarding elements. Although this may seem harmless, you’re actually risking intimidating your new customers.
To set your customers up for a successful onboarding process, keep it as simple as possible. Provide clear-cut instructions for how to use a product. If you are providing a service, take the time to walk your customers through the process, or explain what they can expect to see and when.
Here are some ways to simplify key information:
- Provide an animation or graphic
- Provide a one-on-one demo
- Provide a roadmap or timeline
The goal here is to look at your customer onboarding process at a high level and find ways to simplify it as much as possible while still providing them with key information.
- Listen to Customer Feedback
If there’s one thing that can significantly affect your customer onboarding process, it’s listening to customer feedback. Build a process for tracking customer feedback, implement any changes necessary, and then measure the success of those changes. This is continuous improvement at work. And when implemented correctly, you’ll have an onboarding process that will always be ready to adapt to the ever-changing demands of your customers.
- Map Out Your Customer Journey
As mentioned in the previous point, you don’t want to onboard your customers without a clear path laid out for them. It’s like trying to plan a trip without having a map.
To avoid this, you have to map out your customer journey by dividing it into two different parts: the product (or service) journey and the engagement journey.
You can start by identifying high-value product or service touchpoints as the basis for your customer journey.
On the other hand, the touchpoints in the engagement journey vary depending on your customer segments. Since interactions will involve cost and value, you should allocate lower-value customer segments to a lower touch journey.
- Monitor Channels that Bring Impactful Engagement
As your business expands, the number of support channels you’ll have at your disposal will expand as well. Webinars, phone support, one-on-one coaching, chat support, email, messaging – all these require varying levels of effort, but all of them can provide a different return on investment.
According to an experiment conducted by Help Scout, 60% of people who signed up for free classes converted to paying customers. This finding derives from monitoring a subset of prospects that engagement with the following channels:
- Live chat – Roughly 70% of “support engaged” trial customers became paying customers.
- Email – 39% converted to paying customers.
- One-on-one coaching – 56% converted to paying customers.
You can also implement the same strategy by measuring various engaging points. These involved channels that converted prospects into paying customers, the duration they remained as customers, and their impact on your business.
As long as you know which channels bring the most impact regarding customer conversion and retention, you can then formulate strategies to not only achieve a high conversion rate but also maintain it.
Improve Your Onboarding with a Process Management Tool You Can Count On
Keep in mind that the customer onboarding process gives your new customers their first hands-on experience with your products. Do everything in your power to make the experience easy, smooth, and as positive as possible.
Once customers have completed the onboarding process, they should be able to grasp the basics of what your product or service is, what it does, and how it helps solve their challenges.
Hopefully, we’re able to present most of the key points that you need to address if you’re planning to improve your customer onboarding process. If you are looking for tools that can help you make your customer onboarding process more effective and efficient, check out Rindle and how it can add value to your existing workflow.