Improving the Customer Onboarding Experience
Providing a good onboarding experience is more than just showing customers how to use your products or services once and leaving them to it. It is an important element of the customer experience, having a major impact on first impressions and ease of use.
Research indicates that 73% of consumers point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, meaning getting the initial experience right can help improve your bottom line in the long run.
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer onboarding (or user onboarding) is the process that new customers/users go through to get set up and start using your products or services. It’s the nurturing process that gets people acquainted and comfortable with your product. It’s often used in reference to software products and can be done manually or automatically.
Customer onboarding is important as most revenue comes from existing customers, meaning a good experience can increase customer retention and lower your acquisition costs.
Discussed below are some of the main ways your organisation can improve the onboarding experience for customers.
Start ASAP
Starting the onboarding process as soon as possible is a great way of keeping the product in customers’ minds.
In situations where a product or service trial is possible, the onboarding process can even begin prior to becoming a paying customer. If the user is familiar with the basics of the product before committing to spending, they’re more likely to convert.
Whatever strategy you can implement to make the onboarding process as seamless and fast as possible will allow customers to find success with the product.
Personalise the Process
You should always include a personal touch when onboarding a new customer. Use any information a prospect provides you to inform and personalise the onboarding experience. Your customers have different needs and uses for your products and services, meaning the onboarding experience can’t be homogenous and generic.
Showcase the features you think the customer will use the most, provide one-to-one account meetings and regularly check up with customised surveys and web forms learn more about your customers.
The more you tailor your process to customers’ needs, the easier it will be to keep loyal customers.
Offer Regular Onboarding Material
Your customers may struggle with some features of your products or services in the early stages of adoption. It’s important to keep in touch with new users by providing them useful material informing them of tips on how to get the most value from your platform. This material can be provided through PowerPoints, PDF guides, written FAQs and videos.
Not all users like to be held by the hand when starting to use a new platform. Providing a robust, searchable self-service hub with all of this important onboarding material made available to all users at any time will greatly reduce the number of customer service enquiries, while also removing pain points.
Ask for Feedback
Ensure to consistently collect feedback from your customers regarding how they felt about their experience during the onboarding process. Collecting this data will help inform those making customer experience decisions improve the process for future users.
Similarly, your organisation should also utilise analytics tools to track your customers usage of platforms. All of this data will show where your customers’ pain points are and where work needs to be done to get over these hurdles.
An exceptional customer onboarding program ultimately involves providing tutorials, helpful guidance and support, while also celebrating when a customer achieves success milestones using your product or service.
Is your organisation considering upgrading or altering its customer onboarding experience in 2023? Be sure to get in contact with us today on +353 1 8041298!
