14 Best Customer Onboarding Practices
The most effective customer onboarding strategies help retain new customers. People come on board because they appreciate your product or service. You want them to feel nurtured and to stay. Good onboarding practices help customers feel good about your product, so they don’t want to live without it. Good onboarding builds trust in your brand. This process should be a seamless and natural part of good customer service, and a good call center can help you achieve your retention goals.
We’ve provided 14 of the best customer onboarding practices and how to implement them.
1. Create a Strategy.
What is your company’s goal? Create a plan to get there, but be open to adjusting that plan once you learn more about your customers. You also want to tie the objective to your service or customer base. Your plan should encourage customers to use your product or service more than once within the first week. Establish a pattern for how they can do this and make your product or service indispensable. Getting to know your customers during this strategy phase will also give you the information you need to combine these objectives seamlessly. Customers will feel important and pampered.
2. Develop Multi-Channels for the Onboarding Journey.
Developing multi-channels for onboarding will help you cater to your individual clients. You know your customers, so determine what they’ll need for each subsequent step. Will they start by reading an email introduction and then go to a video tutorial? Or will they watch a webinar and then shift to in-app tools? What do you want them to know right away? What should be covered down the road in a few weeks or months? Different channels will create the best user onboarding experience.
3. Send a Welcoming Automated Email.
Congratulate customers for making this investment and then thank them for choosing your business to provide it. People have lots of options, so tell them how happy you are they chose you.
4. Say Hello With a Friendly Message When They Log in for the First Time.
Send a friendly greeting asking them to set up their account and include a video to guide them through the process. If they don’t get set up for two days, trigger an automatic email or text encouraging them to do so.
5. Get Them Set Up and Ready to Go.
A simple tutorial or interactive setup (sometimes called feature callouts) can take your customers through the process, especially if there are many different steps. Any tutorial you use should be under 5 minutes and optional.
6. Imagine You’re in Your Customer’s Place.
What would you need? Provide helpful information In empty states on their portal so they understand the features and why each is important. Try to anticipate what they’ll need to enhance or improve their purchase.
7. Guide Your Customers Around the Service or Product.
You can do this with banners that periodically offer tips about important features. If they need detailed information, provide an option to read more.
8. Offer Teaching Moments.
The best customer onboarding practices will ultimately educate them. How do they use your product or service? What’s the added value? The best way for customers to learn is through demos and interactive walkthroughs.
9. Provide Answers.
Simple ways to assist customers with their specific questions can include a periodically updated FAQ tab on your website. Or you can provide live chats for a more personalized touch. You can also offer technical support. Help customers save time instead of having to search all over your website for guidance.
10. Check In With Them Periodically.
New customers should feel like you care about their experience with your brand. Check in with regular calls or emails. Make sure things are going smoothly and find out how you can help them get more value from your business.
11. Celebrate Everything.
After you create customer-centric milestones, be sure to promote them. Get folks excited about the steps they’re taking toward these milestones with a notification, text, or quick email. Trigger an automatic celebratory notification once they hit a milestone.
12. Give Them a Checklist.
Create an automatic list of onboarding tasks. Make sure the system checks off each task as they’re completed.
13. Include a Welcome Packet.
This can include an introduction, intake form, resource sheet, and timeline for the first few months or the first quarter.
14. Provide Follow-up Training Documents.
Not everybody comprehends the information right away. Providing any needed training information afterward is helpful for those who may have missed something. Include in this information a long-term contact at your company who will be their point of reference when something comes up.
To provide the best customer onboarding experience, it helps to:
- Know your customer.
- Educate them so they know what to expect.
- Show them the value you provide.
- Stay in touch.
- Help them set clear goals for what they want.
- Continue creating positive experiences for them.
- Gather feedback regularly.
Other helpful tips:
- Personalize the onboarding experience so customers feel unique rather than like another face in the crowd.
- Keep information clear and easy to understand.
- Stay attentive to a customer’s needs with experienced professionals available to help.
- Measure your company’s effectiveness to see where you’re doing well and where you need improvement.
Ideally, the best customer onboarding practices begin when someone is first introduced to your company. Every interaction after that is an opportunity to make a great impression. These moments bring your marketing, sales, and customer service departments together with the customer at the all-important call center.
Remember that most of your revenue will come from current customers. If they’re happy, they’ll tell their friends, leading to more business. Retaining your customers will cost you less than having to acquire new ones. ROI Call Center Solutions can help you do this effectively and at a great price. Get in touch today.
