Customer Onboarding: Best Practices And Guidelines To Follow

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Customer onboarding is a service or activity that helps a new customer get acquainted with your product. It is about guiding your client on how to get the best out of the product or service they have bought from you. It’s about listening to their concerns and answering their queries. 

When a customer buys a product from you, it already believes in your product. But a little hand-holding at the beginning can help your business achieve a lot in the long run. The importance of onboarding is as follows:

  • Your revenue comes from existing customers.
  • Customer retention, which helps in lowering acquisition costs and increases value.  
  • Given proper onboarding service, helps in customer satisfaction. These customers in turn are your biggest referral source. 

Why Is Customer Onboarding Important?

Customers need to get used to your product or service. They need to incorporate your product into their day-to-day life. In a survey, it is found out that a company loses up to seventy-five percent of their new customers, and about sixty percent of trial prospects never come back for a purchase. To help and guide your customers through the initial process of purchase, you must deeply engage with your customers and product. The customer onboarding process has a direct impact on your churn rate. A good onboarding process will help you with;

  • Keeping customers with you for the long run. A good customer onboarding process will help retain your customer for the long run.
  • Improvising trial conversions. If you can demonstrate the real value of your product, your customer if in the trial period will surely convert to a paid one. Your demonstration plays a very important role here.
  • Your customers will come back for more. Happy customers will come back for you more and shall convert you into loyal customers. Acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than retaining an already on-board customer. 
  • It is of utmost importance to have a centralized and single platform for on boarding customers. It will help maintain a standard and shall also help in maintaining your product quality. 

How To Onboard A New Customer?

Know them well: Start with getting to know the requirements of your client. Get to know the buyer persona, demographics, challenges, and pain points. Ask them to fill up a brief questionnaire to obtain the data. Focus on the outcomes your audience is looking for, and offer them the best solution.

Set realistic expectations: Never promise more than what you can deliver. Inform them of the time taken to complete the following task beforehand. Layout the qualifying factors and be specific about the service you can provide them. 

Value them: Since the product has been sold, make sure your offer training or documentation. Have a personalized touch, send those guides, tutorials, or other relevant information so that they can connect with you. Let them know you value them and are there for assistance. 

Customer-centric: Make sure that the solution you offer them is revolving around the need of the customer. Fill that questionnaire up and tailor the product tour as per their requirement or needs.

Measure Success: Customer support supervises the customer and helps in resolving any issues faced by the customer. They are here to find any weakness in your product feature and guide the customers. Identify friction points, measure customer satisfaction and track key metrics. See the results and as per that modify your customer onboarding process.