Did you know a complicated customer success onboarding processes can result in about 74% of customers switching to competitors?
That's a staggering number and one that no business owner wants. Achieving customer success starts with grasping the value of your product and enlightening the prospects on its benefits. It goes beyond the conventional customer service process. You must approach the client's needs and proactively ensure their successful onboarding. Such a successful onboarding program differentiates between a long-term client and a quick customer churn. Onboarding offers the customer success (CSM) team a unique opportunity to nurture and meet a new customer's immediate demands. Therefore, customer success managers are to promote best practices and employ well-structured procedures to make onboarding as simple as possible for all parties involved for customer success teams to flourish.
Keep reading this guide to understand:
- Customer success onboarding best practices
- Designing your customer success onboarding framework
- The customer onboarding process
- Measuring success with key customer success onboarding metrics
- Customer success onboarding best practices
For customer success teams to be successful, an onboarding plan must be coordinated around two distinct objectives:
- Recognizing the customer's expectations: when potential consumers approach you with interest in your product, you need to understand the kind of use cases and needs they have. How can you use your product to assist people in resolving their issues? Which characteristics are the best answers to those issues? What could you do to assist?
- Simplified onboarding: Your objective should also be to assist new consumers in truly experiencing the benefits of your service. Consider customer onboarding a nurturing process to acquaint clients with your product/service and make them feel at ease.
The benefits of customer success onboarding
Given that your existing customers will provide most of your revenue, and happy customers will become your most valuable referral sources, it's simple to see the significance of customer success onboarding. According to research by Zendesk, 52% of consumers discontinue using brands because they feel neglected.
Poor customer success onboarding increases the risk of:
- Losing 75% of your new users within the first week.
- A 40–60% drop in free trial users who use your product just once and never again.
- A high turnover rate, with over 5% of SaaS enterprises reporting a churn rate.
The onboarding component of customer success is crucial because it will ultimately determine the tone of your connection with your new clients. By doing this, you can effectively reduce customer turnover and boost profitability. But how can customer onboarding be done correctly?
We advise you to:
- Invest time learning about the various consumer profiles and the most typical use cases.
- Get to know how other high-performing companies handle customer success onboarding.
- Create effective onboarding procedures for customer success.
So, what's the best customer success onboarding formula?
- The customer is enlightened on the benefits the product offers.
- Solutions are proffered to possible future challenges.
- There are innovations in providing better service to the customer.
- The customers feel prioritized.
- Ensuring quick and quality customer onboarding.
- Establishing personalized customer relationships.
- Identifying upcoming sales opportunities.
- Proactively dealing with challenges.
Here's a few tips for PLG (product-led growth) companies:
1. Access to the user interface is offered to customers without requiring email confirmation, resulting in reduced friction and a quicker time to value.
2. A persona questionnaire is used to help the user understand the consumer and their use case.
3. A resource and learning tab is offered to assist users in adjusting to the user interface.
4. The user interface is straightforward and user-friendly.
Here's a few tips for SLG (sales-led growth) companies:
1. Identify and specify the needs and expectations of the client.
2. Recognize critical use cases - Salesforce adheres to a Special Use Case checklist that directs customer success reps in determining the client's goals.
3. Configure the product with the specific requirements of the buyer in mind.
4. Select the metrics for continuing performance.
5. Help the client have their "aha" moment.
Designing your customer success onboarding framework
The main goal of customer success onboarding is to lower the turnover rate to increase profitability. You may be bringing in high-quality leads, but if your clients are departing like flies, it's like attempting to fill a leaking bucket. In addition to the best practices already outlined, you must establish a strong customer success onboarding structure. A great customer success framework should be created around the 6 stages of the customer life cycle.
#1: Brand awareness
Excellent campaign strategies with targeted ads can help stand out and give a welcoming first impression of your brand. Based on a study by Gartner, about 57% of prospects already decided to purchase before contacting the seller. That explains the power of well-crafted ads. Properly promoting your unique selling point can help trigger the right buying audience. It must be engaging and offer personalized solutions.
#2: Acquisition
Successful completion of a new sale requires consistency in the sales & marketing process. Stay committed to earlier promises and have a solid plan regarding the responsibilities of sales team members.
Bringing in an experienced operations member can help with elaborate product/service descriptions. An excellent sales team is one that effectively manages all customer queries.
#3: Customer onboarding
Let's introduce the customer success manager. It all starts with a frictionless sales to success handoff. A CSM must completely cover all facets of the customer success onboarding approach, as follows:
- Finance: The billing and payment processes must go as smoothly as possible.
- Training: Ensure that all user guides, tutorials, or orientation materials are available and simple enough for a new customer to understand.
- Engineering: you might need a professional to integrate your product with the client's internal systems.
- IT: If you need to set up the customer in your systems, do so carefully.
#4: Value realization
A customer success manager's responsibility is to ensure that the business develops as initially intended by enabling the customer to benefit from the provided good or service. It is your responsibility as a CSM to comprehend the needs of the client and demonstrate and assess the ability of your product or service to satisfy those needs. It is necessary to continuously analyze customer happiness, company KPIs, quarterly review meetings, and underused product features to increase customer engagement. Gaining new clients, also known as customer adoption, is the goal during this phase. Customer adoption naturally leads to customer retention. Bonus: make sure your CSMs have the right number of accounts.
#5: Loyalty
Once you are certain that your product or service will meet the demands of your customers' businesses, you may use several strategies to capitalize on their loyalty. Customer success managers should create brand evangelist tactics by requesting testimonials, anecdotes, recommendations, or consumer reviews.
#6: Expansion
There is never a better time for a customer success manager to upsell or cross-sell a particular product/service if all prior contacts with customers have been positive. Earlier stage encounters can direct the upselling/cross-selling process. When promoting new offers to customers, the customer success team should be able to show how the new product/service values have been improved.
The procedure for onboarding customers
The customer onboarding process is a step-by-step manual that acquaints a specific consumer with your product or service so they can make the most of what you have to offer(s). We may focus on what constitutes a successful customer onboarding process by using the six principles of customer success onboarding provided above as structural assistance. The customer success best practices outlined at the start of this essay will also be acknowledged. It's crucial to understand that the customer onboarding process depends on the individual demands of each user before beginning.
The goals of customer success onboarding are the ones listed below, as stated at the beginning of this article:
- Your objective for customer success: for your clients to get their intended results from their contacts with your business. Customer success refers to the ability of your customers to use your product or service to complete their tasks.
- Your objective of customer onboarding: to assist new customers in discovering the true worth of your offering. Consider customer onboarding a nurturing process to acquaint and reassure clients with your product.
Both of these goals must be accomplished through your customer onboarding process. Giving your consumers the tools they need to sign up independently will empower them. This indicates that specific features are needed in your process to help clients from setup to achieving their first win. So let's get started with the process right away.
Step #1: Send a welcome email. Your first communications with new clients should be encouraging. Congratulate them on their new purchase, express your excitement about having them join your team, and for choosing your company.
Step #2: Greeting message. In contrast to the customary welcome email, a greeting message is an in-app welcome message that users receive when logging in. These messages urge the user to create an account by making the first move. Asking your user to do just one thing is the best action. You could include a video as a tutorial and invite them to set up their account or enable email notifications, for instance.
Step #3: Product setup. You should walk new clients through a step-by-step procedure to help them get started with your product or service.
Step #4: Interactive walkthrough. The crucial aspect of the customer success onboarding experience is getting the customers enlightened on the value your product offers.
- Stop Tasks: see that every product/service step is covered. No important task should be omitted.
- Dynamic Due Dates: set expiry dates for certain tasks and arrange the tasks in order of preferred completion. Let the customer success team be up-to-date on schedules.
- Conditional Logic: prepare well-documented steps to solve customers' challenges.
- Role Assignments: simplify the distribution between the CS team and the customer. Every team member must be properly informed of assigned tasks ahead. The customers should also not be left out in the product/service arrangements.
- Approvals: A team should be in charge of making appropriate decisions or vital go-ahead calls.
- Task Assignments: openly assign tasks to team members and follow up on their progress.
Step #5: Knowledge base. The best answer for commonly asked questions is a knowledge base or resource area that enables people to solve their issues quickly and independently. To assist consumers in resolving issues without having to search your website for an answer, you may also think about implementing a chatbox for websites.
Step #6: Routine check-ins. Check-ins are less of a step and more of a great practice. You want your new clients to believe you are interested in their development. You must comprehend where they are having trouble to figure out how to help them benefit more from your offering.
Step #7: Mini celebrations. To get customers excited about getting closer to their goals, customer success managers need to set customer-centric milestones and celebrate minor victories with them.
Send an email of congratulations, a brief call, or in-app notifications to do this. Customers will be more committed to using your solution if they see that you care about their success.
The above customer onboarding strategies reveal how each process differs depending on the specific onboarding goals. However, they all follow the principles. You can edit any of them to suit your business needs.
Finally, let's discuss essential metrics that determine your customer onboarding results.
#1: Product adoption: Are your customers fully utilizing all your product/service features? Do they need more training on the benefits? The goal is to ensure customers use all useful features.
#2: Time is spent on the product: How much does the customer use your product? For instance, a customer that hasn't logged in to your SaaS product for about 10 days is likely experiencing issues or not getting value enough value. You must get in touch and help enjoy the full benefits.
#3: Values delivered: When the order is completed, what eventually matters is whether or not the customer gains satisfaction.
#4: The number of active users: Aside from selling to multiple customers, you must do necessary follow-ups on the current number of active users. You'll get desired onboarding results when you follow the right processes.
How has your customer onboarding experience always been? Any challenges faced when trying to implement a successful onboarding? We look forward to hearing from you!
