Customer Onboarding
What is customer onboarding?
Customer onboarding is far more than just a time to hammer out logistics. Since you don’t always get a second chance to make a good first impression - what will your new customer think about your business after the onboarding process? Is your onboarding process helping or hurting your brand? We’ve mapped out the best ways to optimize onboarding for your learners and to strengthen your customer relationships.
As the process which introduces new users to your product, customer onboarding is a critical phase in developing and defining the relationship between your brand and your clients. It has the same importance as an initial face-to-face meeting with a customer so you want to do everything possible to make a positive first impression.
Typically, customer onboarding includes several different elements aimed at getting users acquainted with your product, its features and benefits. So naturally, customer education is often front and center including step-by-step tutorials on how to use the product and in-depth materials that cover best practices, product concepts and use cases.
In addition, you can consider leveraging the customer onboarding process as an opportunity to proactively reach out to your clients and make sure they’re not struggling with adoption and implementation. You can also check in with new users via email, phone, and video conferencing to ensure that their learners are on track and making progress in learning the product.
To encourage new users to remain engaged and continue progressing, the customer onboarding process can include celebrating their successes as they reach certain predefined points using your product.
Why customer onboarding is the critical step
Onboarding sets the foundation for creating enduring customer relationships, loyalty, and trust. Customer education and training must be part of your strategy for delivering an onboarding experience that clearly conveys your product’s benefits to your clients. It’s crucial that you utilize this time to teach them the ins and outs of your software so they can gain the most value out of it.
Guiding your customers to recognize the benefits of your product, pushes them towards achieving a tangible goal straight out of the gate. This achievement will illustrate to them that they made the right choice by purchasing your solution.
Onboarding training gives customers the tools they need to succeed in reaching their business goals, which in turn establishes a strong customer relationship from the beginning. It also provides a chance for you to show that your business is customer focused, preemptively anticipating their clients’ needs and responding to any challenges they may have around adoption.
“When people are taken care of…when they are really heard and understood and have their needs delivered, that is the beginning of cementing a long-term and potentially high-value relationship,” says customer experience expert Jeanne Bliss.
User onboarding is also imperative to customer retention which is critical for your bottom line, considering that most revenue comes from existing customers. Not to mention that happy customers whose loyalty you’ve earned through an incredible onboarding experience can become top referral sources. Add into the mix the fact that customer retention leads to increased revenue, and it’s clear that investing in amazing onboarding can help boost future profits.
Best practices for customer onboarding
Consider the following basic principles when creating your customer onboarding strategy:
Understand the customer
In order to craft an onboarding experience that resonates with your customers, you need to know where their priorities lie. Once you’ve determined what’s important to them, build your customer enablement strategy from there.
Show value
This is the time to demonstrate both your product’s benefits and your team’s value to your customers. Make sure they’re available to help your customers make the most of your product, as swiftly as possible.
Constant communication
Making it clear that you’re available to help and assist with any challenges or confusion is key to creating an unparalleled onboarding process. Consider reaching out to your customers regularly so they feel more comfortable to approach you whenever they have a question.
Customer-centric goals
Center your training around helping your clients reach the milestones that are important to them, guiding them towards what matters most for their organization’s unique needs.
Measure your success
Don’t be afraid to send post-onboarding surveys so they have an easy way to share valuable feedback about their onboarding experience. Use data and analytics to track the impact of your onboarding process on engagement and future purchases. A simple NPS (Net Promoter Score) could also teach you a lot about the customer experience.
This is where Strigo comes in!
Stellar onboarding ensures customer success and engagement, boosting both client satisfaction and your company’s bottom line. Strigo helps software/SaaS companies build and provide a superior process which ensures that users gain maximum value from their product.
Our powerful Product Education Platform delivers highly effective hands-on learning journeys at scale which streamlines the onboarding process and makes it adaptable to the customer’s needs.
The Strigo platform enable companies to provide:
- On-demand customer onboarding - Interactive self-paced learning sessions that drive learner engagement and ensure knowledge retention.
- Virtual instructor-led training (VILT) - Hands-on onboarding experiences that maximize customer engagement while empowering trainers.
- Virtual hands-on labs - Practical hands-on learning labs where customers can be onboarded on any software product in their own cloud-based environment.
Our platform supports your customer onboarding strategy by empowering both trainers and trainees, and providing all the tools needed to achieve optimal learner engagement. We have helped our customers ramp up their customer onboarding programs while significantly improving learner engagement and completion rates, leading to far better time-to-value, customer retention and account growth.