Customer Onboarding is a crucial activity for customer success teams. In fact, within Foundcoo’s 4-Step Customer Success (CS) Strategy, successful Customer Onboarding is the #1 factor in ensuring that customers achieve their desired outcomes. Yet, if you were to ask customer success managers or sales reps to define Customer Onboarding, you would likely receive a wide variety of inconsistent answers, even among those within the same organization. That’s why we’ve designed these easy to follow Customer Onboarding Process Guidelines to help you develop a world-class onboarding process.

Customer Experience encompasses every interaction the customer has with your organization throughout the customer lifecycle, whether they are in-person, over the phone, or online. At the center of good Customer Experience is a clear and compelling value proposition that is, a product or service that satisfies a customer's need or want, usually associated with a short or long-term goal; for example, a loan to buy a house. Delivering a positive customer experience generally requires coordination across different functions within an organization such as marketing, product development, customer care, operations, or retail branches.

A customer journey is an entire experience a customer has while communicating with a brand. It considers the complete interaction roadmap from brand discovery to purchasing and beyond. The focus isn’t on transactions, but rather how the customer feels after interactions with the brand. By improving the customer experience at each point in the journey, you focus your business on your customers. This builds a loyal fan base and keeps customers coming back time and again.

Marketing automation is essential for both ramping up on creating a memorable customer experience and maintaining that experience over time. Furthermore, marketing automation improves the sales funnel's efficiency; this results in increased conversions, happy customers, and, of course, increased revenue.

Customer retention is the collection of activities a business uses to increase the number of repeat customers and to increase the profitability of each existing customer. Customer retention strategies enable you to both provide and extract more value from your existing customer base. You want to ensure the customers you worked so hard to acquire stay with you, have a great customer experience, and continue to get value from your products.

While mobile advertising has historically been impactful, we must be conscious of its unique challenges: consumers turning to shopping on smaller screens means less real estate for advertising. Moreover, the propensity for scrolling on mobile devices means that attention spans are shorter than ever amongst a sea of similar advertisements.

Jim collins in his book, Good to Great, set out to discover what made some companies go from being good to great. He embarked on a five-year study of eleven companies whose stock returns had skyrocketed relative to their competitors. There were several important factors, but one of the most important was the type of leader who led the company into greatness.

Many consumers and companies are looking longingly to the start of the new year and for 2020 to be behind us. And although the year was a roller coaster, it provided learning opportunities and set the stage for 2021. As you set your strategy moving forward, remember these five trends for the future and consider what you can do to leverage them in your organization.

The effort to quantify CX is critically important and will only become more so. During the pandemic, interactions that were once in person became, by necessity, digital, with organizations accelerating technical transformations enterprise-wide. Every company now has to think about how to provide a stellar CX that makes use of new capabilities, like AI, real-time data, and cloud technologies, to provide a personal experience for each and every customer.