Customer Onboarding: What You Need To Know

Customer onboarding encompasses a process that users go through when they embark on their journey as customers of your service or product. The quality of this process plays a significant role in defining the ongoing relationship your customer has with your business. In other words: It’s crucial.

Remember the last time you strived to incubate a new approach or habit in life.

Perhaps you decided to learn how to swim and enrolled yourself in a swimming course. You experienced the thrill of practicing for a week, and then life happened. You had to do an extra shift. Probably, it exhausted you to the extent that you skipped your practice session, and the rest is history.

If you can relate to any aspect of this scenario, chances are you’re a human. Building new habits is no easy feat.

The thing is, incorporating a system in an organization, which promises delightful experiences to customers, is no different than learning how to swim. When a person signup for a free trial, they’re expected to develop the habit of using that product consistently.

Now, that we know developing habits is arduous, your job as a business venture is to provide incessant support to a new user or an existing user. The role of customer onboarding comes into play here. Let’s find out.

Customer Onboarding Furnishes Customer Engagement 

For many, onboarding is just teaching new users which buttons to click or how to use your applications. But, that’s not it. Customer onboarding is essentially an elaborate mechanism that decides whether the customer will get satisfied or disappointed. Best onboarding strategy takes customer goals into account, and you can easily build a strong relationship with your customers. Further, it increases customer retention rate and brand loyalty.

A good onboarding system:

• Provides customers with a roadmap and process
• Covers every touchpoint, from the first contact to purchase
• Adapts to the changing business goals
• Makes interactions less stressful

Since onboarding allows users build a new habit, chances of facing roadblocks cannot be eliminated. To counteract this, you have to deploy an integration software that accelerates onboarding by up to 80% and fosters transparency as well as communication across the business ecosystem.

To onboard customers effectively, you must first pay heed to certain aspects.

Need

Onboarding plays a vital role in streamlining customer journey. It warms customers to your brand. This often happens with the aid of free trials. However, you need to ensure that the process takes place in a smaller duration as delays can add up to the costs. Not to mention, long onboarding cycles can develop frustration in consumers, resulting in revenue loss. Hence, the approach should be such that onboarding cycles reduce substantially.

Tenure 

Onboarding strategies must support a user throughout while they get comfortable with the tool or service. However, your primary focus of planning will be around the free trial. Though it is important for you to identify how long an onboarding process should last, you need to limit how much information you’ll cover. No doubt, it’s tempting to show every user all features of the product, relevance is definitely more powerful than quantity. 

Technology

To maximize onboarding results, you must deploy a proper technological solution. One such solution is self-service integration. The speed and quality of the solution will be the deciding factor. Fact is, how well you integrate your systems or applications will regulate the quality of onboarding experience of the user. Features like application connector, monitoring dashboard, shared templates, end-to-end encrypted environment, etc. of self-service data integration allow you to onboard customers faster, thus increasing revenue and reducing churn. 

By improving the onboarding regime, you can:

• Reduce the number of users dropping off during the first trial
• Identify signals in analytics if any that causes frustration in users around a particular step
• Improve retention as a whole and not segment-wise 
• Enhance the quality of experience with the help of feedback 

If you find that your onboarding strategy is not up to par, don’t try to make the changes in haste. Remember, Rome was not built in a day. So, take it slow.