The Ultimate Customer Onboarding Process
Customer Onboarding is one of the more delicate components of marketing. This process can make or break a business. In addition to increasing the revenue, it also allows businesses to create relationships with their customers. Customer onboarding is a critical component of the customer experience to mark the end of the prospect relationship and the beginning of the customer relationship. Yet many companies have generic one-size-fits-all processes that are a time-suck for the customer and the company’s customer success team.
Have you ever started a new video game where you’re just dropped in the world?
You start clicking buttons to see what happens. Depending on the type of game, you know one button is going to be jump and a different one will be run or duck, but there’s always a bit of a learning curve to figure out exactly what’s what. In order to acclimate new users to the controls, there’s often a brief tutorial that explains how the controls work. The further you get in the game the more new skills you learn or unlock. For serious gamers, learning the controls may only take 30 seconds and they’re good to go; whereas, a new gamer may struggle with the motions and take a few game sessions to really become familiar with the controls.
That same scenario applies to new customers who are trying to learn a new SaaS product. Depending on how familiar users are with the software type and how the new product fits into their existing workflow, the onboarding process may be self-serve or it could require a few training sessions. The job of the Customer Success Manager (CSM) is to be that game tutorial and ensure that new customers have a smooth onboarding process, understand the value of the product, and are equipped with all the resources they need to succeed in the future. Easier said than done.
Foundcoo’s Customer Onboarding Process Guidelines will help you design a world-class onboarding process to ensure your client relationship gets off on the right foot.
Customer Onboarding Explanation
Customer Onboarding is the process of helping new users become acquainted and engaged with your product. The process involves a series of steps, resources, and active support to help customers incorporate your product into their workflow so that they can achieve “success”.
The reason there’s quotes around success is because each customer is going to have a different goal for your product. It’s not just letting new customers click buttons and hoping they figure it out, especially for SaaS products. People care more about achieving their desired outcomes than what general feature functionality you have. One of the main components of the onboarding process is actually understanding what success looks like for each new customer and then determining what resources they’re going to need to help them along their journey.
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 onboarding is the nurturing process that gets new users and customers acquainted and comfortable with your product. An exceptional customer onboarding program involves step-by-step tutorials, unlimited guidance and support, and milestone celebrations when a customer achieves success through your solution.”
What Is an Onboarding Process?
Think of customer onboarding as you would boarding a plane. Up until the moment you step off the jet bridge, you’re a ticket holder – once you cross that threshold, you’re a passenger. That’s a quite literal example of customer onboarding in a B2C (Business to Consumer) environment, but it’s really not all that different from onboarding in B2B.
Customer onboarding is the moment when your customer goes from a prospect to a customer, sales has done their job, the contract ink is dry, and now Customer Success takes over – but how?
Through a structured, yet-tailored process called onboarding. Onboarding marks the first post-sale interaction the customer has with your company and sets the tone for the relationship going forward.
Although customer onboarding processes vary widely based on the goals of the business and the goals of various customers, the ultimate goal is to ensure value on both sides. For the customer, they need to become experienced with your product or service as quickly as possible to start achieving the desired outcomes. For the company, they need to drive value throughout the customer lifecycle. This dual focus (customer and company value) is critical to the successful design of a world-class onboarding process.
Steps To Create a World-Class Onboarding Process
Customer onboarding can quickly become complicated, with so many stakeholders and variables to the experience, it’s vital to combine an outward-in and inward-out approach – never losing sight of the customer and what is important to their experience while also driving value for the business.
In order to tackle these complexities, we anchor on three core design principles:
1. Customer-Focus: It’s essential for your customer success team to know exactly how your customer will utilize your product or solution. The answer to this question should drive the creation of the onboarding process.
As an example, a CRM Customer Relationship Management Tool will be used very differently based on the client’s industry.
2. Clarity: The entire process should serve as a sort-of decision tree, with clear resolution paths for every potential scenario.
For instance, what is each team member who is introduced to the client responsible for? After onboarding, do they maintain those responsibilities, or is another team member responsible?
3. Standardization: Wherever possible standardization and automation should be incorporated into the process design for repeatable and high volume activities.
As an example, an onboarding email with a standardized template should automatically be generated for each client. In some circumstances, usage information, such as a customer utilizing a portal function, should trigger a suggestion for training materials.
Those core design principles serve as the foundation for Our Customer Onboarding Process Guidelines, which provide additional details on the following 10 high-level guidelines to consider when developing a customer onboarding process.
Customer Focus
Maintain Customer Focus: Ensure onboarding content/process is tailored for your customers use case
Clearly Define and Measure Success: Don’t fall into high-level metrics like project completion rate. Partner with your customer to define success throughout their customer lifecycle.
Create a Winning Team: Just as sales reps go after accounts with the highest value, your top talent should be supporting your top customers; both should align to your account segmentation.
Clarity
Outline Hand-offs: Within the process, there should be clear hand-offs from the pre-sales process/team and to the customer support team ongoing.
Establish an Onboarding Timeline: It’s important to have different timelines based on the complexity of the onboarding process. Create timelines around compelling events.
Implement a Feedback Loop: This isn’t just for product-based companies to return enhancements to developers. Capture and review your customer’s feedback on the onboarding process as well.
Standardization
Training Resource Library: Whenever possible, utilize recorded webinars or documented training materials for general how-tos for customers.
Map Resolution Paths: Treat every customer issue as an “If-Then” statement until it’s resolved, submitting a support request is the start of the resolution journey, not the end.
Standardize Wherever Possible: Standardizing templates and team structure can prevent the exception from becoming the rule, standardizing a great experience.
Automate Whenever Possible: Technology should be used to support the customer onboarding process, not replace it.
The path to creating a world-class onboarding process is iterative, and for many companies requires learning from the mistakes of the past. Each of these guidelines are just that, guidelines that should be tailored for your company.
The Impacts of a World-Class Onboarding Process
The benefits of implementing a world-class onboarding process are well worth it:
Increased customer lifetime value
Decreased churn rate
Higher retention rate
Higher net promoter and customer satisfaction scores
Every touch point a customer has with your product is an opportunity to improve their experience and impression of your company. Take the time to properly align sales, marketing, and support teams around customer information (pains, needs, common questions) so that your Customer Success team can create a more comprehensive onboarding process. The more tailored the onboarding, the more valued customers feel and the more likely they are to successfully achieve their goals using your product. When this happens, you’re in a great position to have built a collaborative relationship with customers to drive their future success.
If you’re still not sure what would be best for you, let our experts facilitate the discussion and kick start your customer success journey. Contact Us → to schedule time with one of our experts.
