What Is Customer Onboarding?
Customer onboarding refers to a new user’s experience and learning curve to understand the product or service they bought. Companies and brands should make customer onboarding the first step in the post-transaction journey. During this time, you have an opportunity to define a new customer’s relationship with your brand.
Team members who are responsible for onboarding new customers can incorporate in-depth product tours and tutorials that highlight product features, workflows and use cases. The goal of these interactions is to reaffirm the value of your product or service and show customers how to fully utilize your offering. Successful onboarding ensures customers are eager to use what they purchased and feel confident in navigating your product or service.
Why Is Customer Onboarding Important?
Customer onboarding is critical because it sets new users up for success. It ensures first-time customers can navigate your product or service confidently so that they’re equipped to get the most value from your offering. Giving a poor first impression during this touch point can leave customers wondering if they made the right choice in purchasing your product or service. These negative feelings can result in losing customers.
Effective onboarding, on the other hand, builds trust and promotes loyalty. Helping your customers orient to your product or service can show that its function and workflow will genuinely relieve the pain points that initially attracted them to your offering. Your team’s ability to provide a positive onboarding experience is the first step to ensuring customer success, positive word-of-mouth and long-term loyalty.
What Are the Benefits of Customer Onboarding?
There are many benefits of an effective customer onboarding program. A major advantage is that it helps customers understand how to use your product or service to ensure they see its value. When customers perceive value and benefit from their purchase, they’re more likely to stay with your brand. In turn, increasing your customer retention can save you money. After all, it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, according to Harvard Business Review.
Customers who see the value in your product or service during onboarding may also want to upgrade in the future or spend more with your business. Research suggests that businesses have a 60% to 70% chance of successfully selling to a current customer while facing only a 5% to 20% chance of selling to a new prospect. So, ensuring customer satisfaction with your product or service can lead to upsell opportunities.
Additionally, good onboarding can increase customer loyalty by immediately showing new users that your product or service truly adds value. When customers see that a product works as intended, your business is more likely to be trusted and to enjoy higher engagement. Without proper onboarding, a customer may regret their purchase or struggle to utilize your offering. This creates tension and distrust, with 31% of customers saying they switch brands if they’re lied to about product performance.
Customer Onboarding Process
To be most effective, onboarding should be tailored to the unique interests and needs of each customer. For example, the most important product feature to one customer may be less essential to the next. That means your team should tailor the onboarding experience to include what each user will find the most valuable. This helps customers get the most out of your offering and stick around long-term.
While a customized approach is ideal, your onboarding program should be built from a standard framework for success. It’s best to have step-by-step instructions for team members to use to guide the onboarding journey. Utilizing an onboarding platform may also be helpful if you have the resources for it — but it’s not necessary to ensure customer satisfaction during this touch point.
Below is a framework we recommend implementing to give your onboarding program a successful foundation. With each step, you can add personalization or incorporate features unique to your product or service.
1. Signup
The sign-up process is the first phase of any onboarding experience. This stage should be easy and seamless to give new customers the best first impression. You can do this by keeping the sign-up process as brief as possible.
Initially, only gather information from a customer that’s critical to helping new users. That may include their name, email address, password and payment information. For online-based services, the customer should have quick access to their client dashboard.
Allowing new customers to sign up using platforms like Facebook, Google or Slack can also simplify this stage of their journey. Often, these sites offer integrations to help new users access another product or service with one click.
2. Welcome Email
Jumpstart your relationship with new customers by sending a personalized welcome email. In this first customer email, there are two objectives: Greeting them and offering help. First, thank customers for buying your product or service and congratulate them on their decision. The second goal is to suggest setting up a call or reviewing onboarding resources to learn more.
You can use a template to help create your welcome email. Some are available for free online. Just make sure you don’t forget to personalize welcome emails to highlight new customers’ names and the exact offerings they purchased.
3. Product Setup and Customization
To ensure your new customer receives as much value as possible, consider holding a kick-off call with every first-time user. This is especially helpful if there are multiple members of the customer’s team planning to use your product or service. Your representatives should use the conversation to listen to customers’ needs and personalize onboarding or training features accordingly.
These product set-up calls or meetings help your customers quickly and effectively customize their experience with your offering. While this step can be time-consuming, it’s an investment in your customer’s overall experience, which can promote long-term business.
4. Walkthrough/Demo
A walkthrough or demonstration led by your experts facilitates a new customer’s working knowledge of your product or service.
These tutorials should be interactive and allow customers to use your product in real time so that they learn by doing, not just listening. A walkthrough or demo session should include all top features, workflow recommendations or functions and any technology that supports user automation.
Your team may need to schedule multiple walkthroughs with first-time users, depending on the complexity of your product or service. Ensuring new customers experience quick wins during the learning process can increase their confidence and excitement. Examples of quick wins are properly setting up a workflow, correctly assigning a task or successfully creating a report.
5. Resources
The next major step is to provide resources that offer tips and updates to help users continually learn how to get the most value from your offering. These resources should exist in a knowledge base or learning center that’s accessible to your customers. That way, users can easily find information and learn in their free time.
Your knowledge base, however, shouldn’t be the only outlet new customers can utilize for assistance. It’s equally critical to share your support team’s contact information with first-time users. Provide the phone number, email and live chat option as well as the days and times your customer support team is available.
6. Followup
Include in your customer onboarding program follow-up conversations that occur either weekly or biweekly. The goal of this step is to ensure customers are confidently using your offering and have everything required to get the maximum value.
These check-ins may reveal questions or requests for you to optimize your product or service to better assist a user’s needs. Do your best to address customer concerns. Once a customer can comfortably navigate your product or service, you can decrease the frequency of your check-ins.
Best Practices for Customer Onboarding
As you implement customer onboarding, building your framework off many of the best practices will help you communicate consistently and make adjustments based on feedback. We’ve compiled below five essential tips and best practices to help you and your team be successful throughout the customer onboarding process.
- Understand customer needs: Each customer’s challenges and goals will differ, so it’s essential to enter the onboarding process with a willingness to listen to each user’s needs. This will help your team personalize the onboarding experience and spend time highlighting the features that matter most to each individual.
- Set expectations ahead of time: Give your new customers an onboarding checklist showing how your process will set them up for success. Providing clear expectations upfront will demonstrate your team is organized and capable of delivering individualized help as new users get started.
- Communicate consistently: The onboarding process should include regular communication between your team and new users. Ongoing conversations will allow your team to answer customers’ questions, optimize your product or service and address any issues. If possible, arrange for a team lead or staff member to act as a consistent single point of contact for each customer.
- Measure success: Analyzing the performance of your onboarding program will help you improve. There are various metrics you can use to measure what’s working and what’s not. One metric is called “time-to-value.” It’s the amount of time it takes for a new customer to feel their purchase has yielded them value. Other metrics include rate of upgrades, customer engagement and customer lifetime value.
- Follow up after onboarding: It’s important to regularly check in with new customers to ensure they’re getting the most out of your product or service. Consistent follow-up communication provides opportunities for your team to address concerns so that customers remain satisfied.
Customer Onboarding Examples
Some companies excel at creating great onboarding experiences, and you can use their approach to develop your own customer communications. Below are two examples of businesses that prioritize customer onboarding and get positive results from investing in effective onboarding steps.
Slack
Slack is a well-known communication tool for teams and online communities. One reason it’s so popular is because it has an effective onboarding experience. Signup is simple with users needing only an email address or choosing to link a Google or Apple account. With your first log-in, you’ll have immediate access to the Slack browser-based platform, mobile app or desktop version. Through its onboarding tutorial process, Slack introduces new users to basic product features.
The company also provides live, animated links to walk you through the platform and its different functions. Additionally, Slack has a customer support team and a knowledge base where customers will find answers to common questions. Users also receive notifications whenever Slack launches new features.
Duolingo
Duolingo is a language-learning app. Its onboarding process starts with a few questions to tailor the platform to your needs. Answering the questions unlocks access to your first lesson, where Duolingo will assess your skills to customize future learning activities.
The company will ask you to sign up for its platform once the first lesson ends. After you join the app, you’ll receive emails with tips to help you learn your chosen language. Duolingo will also provide notifications to keep you on track and engaged.
The Bottom Line
As your customer’s first impression of your product or service, effective onboarding is critical to ensure user satisfaction. A good onboarding strategy will increase customer retention, leading to cost savings, business growth and brand loyalty.
When a customer is happy with their purchase, they’re more likely to stay with your business long-term. This saves you money as you can lower acquisition costs if your customer churn is minimal. Customer onboarding also helps users quickly make the most of your product or service, which could result in the user leaving a good review or telling others about their positive experience.
For businesses deploying a new customer onboarding experience, setting a framework and teaching your team about best practices will help ensure success. This might include both technical training and building your team’s communication skills. The work may seem challenging — but it’s worth it in the end.
Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Onboarding
What are the stages of customer onboarding?
The common stages in a customer onboarding program run from the initial purchase to a new user feeling confident and comfortable with your product or service. The stages are: customer signup; welcome communications such as an email; product setup; product demos led by or developed by your team; sharing accessible learning resources; and, follow-up emails or conversations.
How do you measure customer onboarding success?
You can measure the success of your customer onboarding strategy by tracking the following metrics: time-to-value, customer engagement, customer lifetime value and rate of upgrades
What is the goal of customer onboarding?
The goal of customer onboarding is to help new users understand how to navigate your product or service to get the most value from your offering.