How to Improve the Customer Onboarding Process?

First impressions are powerful in business. They can easily deter an interested party or can create a strong bond that will last for years.

Having a great onboarding process goes beyond providing new customers with guidelines on how to use your product or service. It is a way to develop long-term relationships where customers feel valued, listened to, and part of a collaborative process.

If you are unsure whether or not you are delivering an optimal experience for your customers, help is at hand! Below we look in some detail at how to improve the customer onboarding process.

Customer Onboarding: Definition

Customer onboarding is the process of guiding new customers on how to get the most value from services or products. It is a way to meet and greet your customers and show them that their landing on your page was not a coincidence.

It usually includes tutorials, guidance, welcome emails, and any other helpful instructions that will enhance their experience and facilitate product usage. Its main role is to improve user experience and therefore, increase user engagement. This is how your business increases customer and brand loyalty and builds a web of brand advocates.

Designing an Onboarding Experience for Success

To create a successful campaign for customer onboarding improvements, you need to have a clear vision and plan. But how can you know exactly what your new customers want? By getting to know them better.

You can track their activities within the customer success platform and learn more about their preferences. No matter if you have ten or thousand customers, it is quite difficult to keep pace with each customer’s buying journey.

With Akita, you can do that easily. By segmenting your customers into cohorts based on their purchase habits, likes, and any other parameter you find pivotal, you can get metrics and data that show their performance. Akita allows you to combine multiple data like sales activities, support tickets, chat data, and many more to get a “helicopter view” of the customer. This is how you can always see the bigger picture, predict the bothersome churn, and grow a healthy customer base.

Besides using customer success software to collect new customer data, you should take time to communicate with customers. Having a responsive customer support team is great, but having an excellent support team that makes them feel at home goes a long way. Let’s not forget – good customer experience improves customer retention. Make sure to ask for feedback about their progress to learn if they might need some help. This is also a way to direct them to the next stage of your service or a new product.

By knowing what your client’s goal is regarding your service or a product, you can customize your approach at every step of the way. Create meaningful content, FAQs, or a customer community that fits the specific category.

Here you can read more about the requirements for a successful onboarding process.

How to Know Your Customer Onboarding Process Works?

If you truly wish to improve the customer onboarding process, arm yourself with patience and stay attentive. By tracking the metrics, you can modify the process along the way and avoid clients feeling stuck in it.

A well-constructed onboarding process plays a huge role in the overall customer experience, which can significantly improve the customer retention and brand loyalty. Therefore, it is worth all the time and energy you invest in it.

Customer Success platforms (CSPs) like Akita are designed to help you manage the customer onboarding process. 

If you are manually running the Onboarding process, a CSP can ensure you know what tasks have been completed and what is the next step. They will also help you understand which customers’ onboarding is running to plan and which customer’s onboarding has stalled, failed, or is at risk.

CSPs will also facilitate automated onboarding. Triggering playbooks based on changes in profile or behavior can message customers with the right guidance at the right time or set tasks for CSMs to intervene if required. If you’re interested in automated onboarding, discover details about templates and examples for the onboarding process.

Whether you are manually managing the process but need an understanding of what has been done and is still to be done, whose onboarding is proceeding to plan and where the potential risks lie OR you want to partly or fully automate the process, CSPs like Akita (below) can help.

How to Improve Customer Onboarding Process — Conclusion

Enhancing the customer onboarding process is a crucial step towards ensuring long-term success and user satisfaction. When you streamline workflows, provide clear guidance, and offer useful tutorials, you can facilitate the onboarding process for your customers and help them transition faster. To provide personalized experience for each customer where every step is adapted to their demands and preferences, try out Akita’s advanced segmentation tools and make the most of your comprehensive customer data.