A positive onboarding experience validates that your customers have made the right choice in choosing you. It also benefits you in retaining them rather than losing them to other companies.
If you look at why customer churn is such a key problem for companies, you can find the two following reasons for that:
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Your customers can’t understand your product (which happens most of the time, even before buying)
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They don’t see any value in your product to continue further with you in the future
Customer onboarding can deal with both issues.
One positive aspect of customer churn is that your customers are already liking you. Hence, they bought your product. It’s your responsibility to carry on like this.
You can accomplish this by ensuring your customer experience is on par with your sales strategy and delivering on the commitments you have made in your marketing advertisements.
Eventually, you must establish a smooth customer experience from the very first point of interaction through the post-buying phase.
What Is User or Customer Onboarding?
All efforts concerned with introducing a customer to your product or service offering and drawing them to become a member of your website or app are part and parcel of the customer onboarding. Customer onboarding is more than just casually tossing ads and sign-up forms to your customers and expecting they will find out the usefulness of your product or service.
It is an efficient and meticulously scheduled strategy to help a customer out with any skepticism and provide a pleasant sign-up and checkout procedure. Customer onboarding is concerned with teaching as opposed to telling. If you cannot do so, your customer will feel negative about your company and will be very doubtful about subsequent products or services buying.
This onboarding is functioning well for two reasons:
- It recognizes that onboarding covers the entire user’s lifecycle. It begins even before a user signs up and continues beyond the point where they convert to a premium account.
- It recognizes that customer onboarding is more than just teaching directions for using your product. To make users happy, you should also show them why they must use it and extend the guidance they need to find its worth.
Applying these fundamentals effectively requires much bigger than just a great UX or product tour. You must know your users and encourage them to take further action using onboarding best practices.
Why Is Customer Onboarding Such a Big Deal?
The onboarding process has long-term advantages for your clients and your firm. Onboarding makes customers’ lives more comfortable. The data and training they need to use your products should be easily available. This allows them to go through the process effortlessly and build trust in your business.
How you engage with your new customers will give an example of your future relationship with them. It also strengthens customer lifetime value (LTV), lowers churn, and converts new users into insane devotees.
For you to see the value, here are some facts that justify the relevance of onboarding.
- Much of the revenue comes from current consumers.
- Satisfied clients can turn into your primary referral sources.
- Customer loyalty can cut acquisition expenses and boost earnings.
Simply put, customer onboarding is critical to customer retention and the company’s growth.
Advantages of Outstanding Customer Onboarding
Effective customer onboarding can become do or die for your business. As per TechCrunch, people have abandoned one in four mobile apps after only one use. If people cannot figure out your product or app UI and instead pester them with many features from the very beginning or have no clue how to use the product, they will disappear. Unsatisfactory customer onboarding of new users will result in plenty of churns, causing your marketing efforts to go in vain.
Powerful customer onboarding can bring:
Disclaimer: all customer onboarding tools are unique and accordingly affect SaaS businesses in several ways. The following part is a list of natural advantages you can expect to encounter.
- Better activation rate
- Keep more customers
- Upgrade feature adoption
- Cut down on support ticket volume
- Cut development costs
Customer Onboarding Best Practices
Best practices for customer onboarding will help you build a solid onboarding experience. The following areas will demand data from every point of contact with your clients.
1. Know Your Customer
You must know your buyer personas thoroughly, which will innately explain knowing your customer. Set a goal to discover each unique difficulty, pain point, and problem your customer experiences, besides their best possible solutions and results. This knowledge will enable you to change their onboarding experience and ambitions.
2. Establish Clear Expectations
Before buying your service or product, your customer must know what they will get. Your value proposition must provide qualifying points for using the product. This approach must transfer into the onboarding procedure as you repeat the value that your product contributes to your customers and equip them for probable difficulties or tricky situations. In this fashion, when they are at a dead-end, they’ll be more ready for it and not abandon it soon.
3. Show Value
Before your new customer loses their head about your product, you must again underline the value it will deliver for their rare issue. Let your customers know in-depth cases of how your product will focus on their customers’ needs. You should use a customized approach here. A commencement call, expert guidance, or documentation would be useful here.
4. Have a Consistent Talk with Your Customer
After your first welcome announcement, continue to leverage the email facility during the onboarding process to match any in-app tutorials and manuals. Email is your customer’s most visited communication channel. Once your product turns into essentials, you can expect them to sign in by themselves to see in-app notifications.
5. Set up Customer-Centric Goals
Your customer targets and measures will be exclusive to their conditions. Give them some time to understand their objectives, then encourage them to discover quantifiable milestones to get there with a point of reference.
6. Work Hard to Impress
Every conversation aims to produce a similar positive experience that makes your customers become a member of your product. Go all out and give an outstanding performance that your customers will sing the praises of your product and share with others.
7. Measure Your Progress
Onboarding helps your clients and your company. Collect client feedback, find diverging points, and record essential metrics to notice what’s performing well and what is not performing.
Valuable Customer Onboarding Advice
Apart from best practices, there are a couple of things that will be useful in making the onboarding process a positive experience for your customers.
- Make it a customized experience
- Share information gradually and selectively without bombarding them with tons of notifications about your new product
- Always make yourself available to your customers. If you can, have dedicated customer service. It will also allow you to see where your process failed to pay off
Top 3 Customer Onboarding Software
Starts at $99/month
This onboarding software involves negligible coding to install. Rather, the app runs off a Google Chrome extension that allows you to build complete tutorials and manuals immediately.
Features:
- Feature adoption is at the top of the list of preferences when introducing a new product
- It employs guided discovery to walk customers through the new feature in a couple of minutes instead of leaving them to understand the situation by themselves
- After using it for a while, this software can trigger a surge in customer loyalty and weaken the churning speed
Starts at $159/month
This software supports SaaS and tech corporations in building user onboarding procedures, customer contentment checks, and new feature notifications inside the product without knowing how to code.
Features:
- Feedback is an integral part of user onboarding
- This software makes the feedback quite simple by incorporating NPS & surveys straight into its software.
- Open-ended questions, multiple-choice alternatives, and Likert scales are all accessible in the AppCues feedback feature
Starts at $99/month
This will help users navigate your software by creating guided tours, tooltips, and advertisements. These elements establish repetitive click-through manuals that train individuals to launch your software and acquaint themselves with its features.
Features:
- This software remains an economical alternative for companies
- There is no additional cost for extra seats
- Anyone who admits new consumers can enter this platform
Customer Onboarding Helps You Grow Better
Customer onboarding never starts when someone buys your product. It begins when the prospect comes in touch with your brand. Each meeting is an option to pick up knowledge that will help you set up a positive onboarding experience. So, it’s necessary to establish a smooth experience between every interaction point.
Try to align yourself with your marketing, purchases, and service units that always put the customer at the heart of your actions.
