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When a customer buys your product or subscribes to your service, you need to impress them—fast. Customers form opinions based on their first experiences with a product, so if they get a bad first impression, it can be difficult to change their minds.
Customer onboarding is the period after a purchase when your customer is getting to know your product or service. It’s a critical time that can either cement loyalty or lead to customer churn. The good news is that onboarding in the digital era has become easier; interactions happen faster, communication is streamlined, and customer success software can notify you of important events. Here’s a customer onboarding checklist that includes the various ways you can leverage the connectivity, correspondence, and automation options the information age has to offer.
A Customer Onboarding Checklist to Raise Retention and Lower Churn
The goal of onboarding is to give each customer a positive experience with your product and your brand from the very start. While this task involves a lot of moving parts, there are many ways to make this task feasible. Let’s go over a few ways to make innovations in the digital era of communication work for you.
✅ Follow a Roadmap Established by Customer Success Software
Quality customer success software makes it easy to break the onboarding process down into manageable steps, putting you on the path to success. Robust customer success software can help you:
- Measure business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Meet implementation timelines, ensuring customers move smoothly through each stage of onboarding.
- Provide a means for customers to give feedback.
- Divide customers into easily trackable segments, such as new customers pending onboarding, currently onboarded, or recently graduated from onboarding.
- Implement industry best practices that improve the quality of customer engagements and shorten learning and training periods.
- Document every customer interaction and automate tasks.
- Automate a variety of campaigns.
The best customer success software will provide a clear roadmap of the elements you need to keep in mind during onboarding. As a result, the entire process will be smoother and more streamlined.
✅ Respond to Customers and Communicate on Their Terms
During onboarding, your customer will not yet be able to use the product or service by themselves, so they may contact your company frequently. Keep in mind that the digital age has opened a wide variety of communication channels. Let your customer choose which one they want to use to talk to you, whether it’s through social media, email or the good old fashioned phone.
If a customer reviews your company on Google Reviews, Yelp, or some other ratings app, you may want to also consider that as a contact and respond. Once a member of your organization has brought a negative review to your attention, you can use customer success software to set up tasks and remind team members to reach out to that customer. Such proactive efforts will demonstrate that your company is paying attention to your customers and cares about how the onboarding process is going.
✅ Don’t Overload Customers With Information
Customers have a lot of information to absorb during onboarding, and it’s most effective to present learning opportunities in small bites. Do not give customers information they will need to read and digest without any help from you. Always offer support and remember to keep all guides and instructions simple. After all, what may seem obvious to you could be quite confusing for a new customer.
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Customer success software makes it easy to offer tutorials or tips through automated emails. Better yet, when a customer triggers an event that may indicate they are confused, such as visiting the FAQ section on your product’s website, customer success software can generate a response or notify your customer success team. This way, you can catch confused customers before they get frustrated and leave.
✅ Define Goals and Measure Success with KPIs
It’s important that you let your customers know what services you will provide and how you will measure success during onboarding. You can measure your results with KPIs and use that information to make future onboarding processes better. Customer success software makes it easier to spot trends or adoption bottlenecks by making comparisons across time and customer accounts.
During this time, you will also want to establish long-term goals for the campaign. This way, the customer can trust that you will continue to measure key metrics and actions into the adoption phase.
✅ Acknowledge Any Pain Points
If a customer reports having trouble with your product or subscription, listen with open ears. Learn the details of the problem your client is dealing with so you can understand how to rectify it. If necessary, escalate the issue with the goal of resolving the problem within 30 days.
A customer who is experiencing issues is at risk for churn, and it’s important to tackle any areas of confusion as soon as possible. So, find out more about the problem in order to improve the onboarding process or the product/service itself. What was the customer unhappy with? Was it the product’s learning curve, its interface or mode of deployment, or perhaps the customer service? Acknowledging a customer’s pain points—and then taking action to resolve the issue—goes a long way toward showing how much you value a customer.
Successful Onboarding in the Digital Era
Implementing these customer onboarding tips will help you establish stronger customer relationships from the very beginning. It will be easier to educate customers on how to use all of your product’s features, so they will move into adoption having a clear understanding of the value your company provides. And your interactions with customers will be more personalized, professional, and effective.
The digital era offers improved communication and better resources for managing customers, so leverage the tools available to gain a competitive edge in today’s customer-centered economy. When you make a positive first impression with your customers, you will get to enjoy the most important benefit of successful onboarding: lowered churn and increased customer loyalty.