For businesses, establishing rapport with customers is a key factor towards success. It is essential to make sure that the customers’ needs are met and that each comment or suggestion is heard. These customer success onboarding practices can help you understand and take your onboarding process to the next level.
Ensuring that your customers understand your product can also equate to larger sales. After all, no one will buy a product that the people doesn’t believe in or think they don’t need, however good it might be. If they like your items, on the other hand, they will buy them frequently and even become devoted customers.
This is the reason why customer onboarding is important. Customer onboarding is undoubtedly the most crucial stage of the sales process. It determines whether a customer stays with your product for the long haul or leaves after a few months.
What Is Customer Onboarding?
Customer Onboarding basically takes you through the entire process, from signing-up to product registration, as well as your first consumption or application of the product. Customer onboarding seeks to provide quality services to the customers during their first usage.
It makes the customers’ lives more convenient with the many benefits it provides. Not only does it provide an easy access to the info and data they need to use their products, but it also enables them to navigate through the process more smoothly and forms reliance in your company.
Customer onboarding can also be used in any business that wants to increase the lifetime value (LTV) of their customers since it focuses on improving customer service and making connections. For recurrent sales, this includes products offered and e-commerce.
Solid customer onboarding connects the customer to your branding. It gives useful information and encourages consumer participation to guarantee that their transaction is a success.
In B2B SaaS, it’s all about integrating your solution into their daily routine. You don’t want people to utilize your product only just once and abandon it.
Importance of Customer Onboarding
The goal of the customer onboarding process is to provide the customers with exactly what they ordered within the terms and conditions. Thus, when customer onboarding is great, it will result in further advantages, such as:
Returning customers
Satisfied consumers are far more likely to buy again than disgruntled customers. Even then, they can become loyal customers. Loyal customers are like gems because they are the ones who help keep your sales on a certain level.
Natural marketing
When several customers are satisfied with your product, they will literally talk about it with their friends. This is called word-of-mouth marketing. Thus, you won’t need to use ads or any form of marketing tools for promotion.
Shorter Time Value
For recurring revenue businesses, saving time is critical since they must connect with customers and validate their worth regularly.
Decreased Churn Rate
You can control the churn when you are able to identify which customers love your products. By actively engaging with your customers, you are able to prevent churn or decrease their rate.
Examples of Successful Customer Onboarding Practices
You can say that the customer onboarding practices are successful when the customers are more than satisfied. Here are some examples of successful customer onboarding practices and some sources.
- Setting expectations
By displaying where your users are in the process and how much work still remains, you are providing convenience to your customers on how they can start easily, thanks to the attributed progress effect.
One example of a website using this practice is Etsy. When a user creates an account on Etsy, a status bar shows them what they can expect to do throughout the registration process.
- Analyzing the Situation
The most common onboarding problem is expecting consumers to accomplish too much right away. Make each step in the process as short and easy as possible to avoid onboarding confusion.
Dropbox is an application that allows users to upload only one single file after another instead of prompting users to select and upload several files all at the same time.
The remaining steps are also equally specific. Instead of reminding people that they can share files, Dropbox, for example, provides you a small task which is to share only one file.
- Limiting Important Information
There are many websites or applications that ask too much information from users even if they are not relevant. If it does not provide value to you or your customers, consider not asking the info.
Travelzoo is an application that publishes travels, entertainment packages, and local deals. Through this app, you can book your flights and hotels easily, as well as locate nearby restaurants and many more. Thus, it only asks you for two important details – your email address and zip code.
- Building Relationships
To really acquire success, it is important that you understand what success means to your customers. Asking the consumer is the most ideal method to understand this.
That’s exactly what they do at Groove with every new user’s initial onboarding email. Examples include “I wanted a help desk to assist us to prevent missing service emails,” “we needed something to help us address clients’ concerns quicker.”
For many customers, the meaning of success is contained in many of these comments. Once the app knows that, it’s much easier to see what the product needs to do in the initial phases.
Conclusion
Many of the companies mentioned above may have different methods of attaining success in their onboarding practices. However they are, it is important that they constantly find ways to test and improve them.
Through this article, you can be guided in figuring out what works best for your customers and how you can keep them coming back to your products and services.