The Advanced Guide to Customer Onboarding

The customer/user experience is essential a to a successful business, so it’s imperative that you use everything in your arsenal to understand what your customer needs, wants, and how to simplify their journey to buying (and more buying). According to theHarvard Business Review, the average American business loses 50 percent of its customers every five years. The reason: Two-thirds of respondents said they received inadequate customer care. In the same study, 91 percent of small businesses said that they do nothing to retain their existing clients. That’s not the way to win in competitive times. Our experts gave us their tried and true best practices tips to help you start or refine your own customer onboarding process.

Customer Onboarding Best Practices From The Experts

Source Capital Funding’s Ferrandi said, “We take great pride in customer service and believe in being open, direct and transparent with all of our clients. Solid communication is paramount to a successful transaction.” He offered a wealth of suggestions he’s used for onboarding that he’s learned in the last twelve years:

• Use your first meeting to create a custom checklist“每一个客户端和dustry is different and it is important to create a checklist for each new client after an initial exploratory meeting. Consider this meeting as a massive Q&A where the extent of the client’s knowledge on your system is revealed. Sometimes your clients will have a strong understanding of how your system works and sometimes they will have very little experience. Do not waste time working on a checklist until after you carry out this exploratory meeting.”
• Take it personally“It’s the simple things you find out interacting with customers during the ongoing process that can make all the difference to their success and yours. A great real-life example is a project we had with a client working on a property in Palm Springs. Our initial onboarding meeting let us know that the client needed our services in less than a week. Because of this meeting, we were able to expedite the entire onboarding process and put together a full checklist and schedule of our clients' needs. We were able to work around our clients schedule and get the project completed on time. Without this initial onboarding meeting, we would not have been able to acquire all of the necessary information and stakeholders' schedules so quickly.”
• Be honest“The biggest item people forget to put on their checklists is the process of overcoming roadblocks or issues with the service or product. There is always a point person to reach out to, but too often people forget to explain how these pain-points can be relieved because they do not want to admit that mistakes sometimes occur. Being honest and open is the best way to start any business relationship.”
• Avoid overload“The most important strategy is to avoid providing your client with information that they are responsible for reading and understanding without your help. Too often do we see extremely detailed and well put together process documentation that goes to waste because a client does not read it and comes to a meeting asking how to accomplish certain things. We love process documentation at Source Capital Funding, but be sure to include it as part of the in-meeting onboarding process or as a web-based tutorial system. Present everything ahead of time and then give a detailed report that the client can refer to if he or she has any questions.”
• Make it easy and casual“One of the best ways to ensure a smooth onboarding process is to invite the client for a lunch meeting and go over any necessary documents in-person. Providing food is a great way to make the client feel like he or she is not wasting time in the middle of the work day and also allows for more stakeholders to be present without the meeting feeling too formal. Be sure to have a set agenda for the meeting with a clear leader or else the lunch portion of the meeting may overshadow the onboarding process.”
• Be available when it makes sense for customers“Much like professors have ‘office hours’ for their students, a great onboarding tactic is to provide available times that your client can call on you with any questions or concerns. Not only does this eliminate the waiting period between emails, it also shows the client how dedicated you are to their needs. Your team should be available to respond to emails and calls as needed. This tip is also an excellent way for teams with several clients to organize client time. Furthermore, if your process has a lot of paperwork or materials that the client needs to read, these office hours will reduce the need for long in-person meetings.”

Successful Startup 101’s Naylor had two valuable best practice suggestions for startups that she thinks are fundamental to smooth onboarding:

• Keep it short and simple“It’s important that my onboarding checklist includes everything I need to ensure a fruitful working relationship, but that it is also brief enough that the process won’t stretch my client’s patience.”
• Feel the churn“Churn occurs when you lose customers or clients because they are dissatisfied with your products or services. So it’s really important that you first understand the major causes of churn (wrong features, not enough features, high prices, difficulty in using product or service, lack of value), and build safeguards into your onboarding strategy to reduce churn.”

Good Thinking Agency’s Pivoine shared her own customer onboarding checklist/questionnaire that she uses in her PR/marketing practice start-up meetings, including follow-up actions:

Checklist: Customer Onboarding Checklist for Professional Services Consultants

Underutilized Customer Onboarding Best Practices and Strategies
Customer Onboarding Welcome Email Template
One of the ways most companies stay in touch with customers is via email. Here’s a template that can work for most products and services to welcome newly onboarded customers:

问候:
Make it casual and personalize with the first name.

Paragraph 1:
Welcome and thank the customer for joining you.
Describe your company, your mission, and how you help the customer succeed.

Paragraph 2:
Describe what the customer should do next to set them up for success.
Provide a useful tip.
Link them to a landing/getting started page with a CTA/download.

Paragraph 3:
Offer to answer questions or provide help.
Provide a link or explain the best method to do so.

Closing:
Make it friendly, brief, and personal.
Add contact or team name

Once you’ve gotten off to a good start, keep the communication going by getting feedback to help you improve your relationships and onboarding process.