Steps Toward the Right Customer Onboarding Process

A good onboarding experience helps you in retaining customers. Customer onboarding helps customers understand your product and obtain value from it. You can keep your customers by ensuring their experience using your services or products is as good as the sales process and fulfills the promises made in your marketing. Continue reading to learn more about design and launching a successful customer onboarding process.

Customer Onboarding Process

Let’s dig deep into the details of the customer onboarding process:

1. Create a customer onboarding strategy

The first step in creating a customer onboarding strategy is to design the infrastructure for your project. It includes setting goals for your onboarding experience and building a team to accomplish these goals.

2. Establish goals and align with strategic needs

Your onboarding goals include teaching customers to use your product, giving them confidence in your organization, and guiding them to their first win.

3. Build a team

Your team should consist of SMEs, Instructional designers, and Project managers.

SMEs are professionals on topics that you want to cover in your program. It may be a customer success team member, operations manager, and customer champion for your product.

Instructional Designers collaborate with SEMS to design content according to their expertise.

Project Managers overview the entire project and ensure the task is accomplished according to the budget plan and deadlines.

4. Map the customer onboarding process

The next step is to design the entire onboarding journey. Keeping your goals top of mind during mapping will help you create a customer journey that is logical, intuitive, and confidence-building. Following are the steps to map out the onboarding journey

●   Sign-up

Remove as many hurdles as possible to help a new customer to sign up for your platform quickly. Remember to ask for only a little information right off at the start.

●   Welcome email

Once a customer creates an account on your platform, Start communicating with customers by sending them a welcome email. Tell them where they can turn for customer support in the email and then direct them to the next step.

●   Account setup

Try to make the account setup process simple. If you need more information, let the customers know it is optional and remind them to return to it later.

●   Product demonstration

In this, you need to deliver information about the basics of your product. It is the most vital step in the customer onboarding process. You can demonstrate your product differently by creating a series of step-by-step training videos and a product tour.

You can also embed training courses. Make this demonstration much more interactive. Keep it simple and let your audience get their hands on the wheel.

●   Map customer onboarding process to milestones

It includes giving your customers a quick tutorial about related product features or sending them follow-up emails about upcoming offers and products. You can reduce “calls per event” and customer churn by planning for future milestones.

5. Create learning material for customer onboarding

It is time to design and develop courses and content for your onboarding program. Instructional designers and SEMs work together to create an outline of lessons and material most important to the customers. You also need to organize the curriculum logically with the help of SEMs.

6. Apply an LMS

At this step, you need to involve a graphic designer or instructional designer to convert course content into graphics and other interactive elements using various tools. Upload your course into a Learning Management System.

7. Test and Pre-launch

Double-check every element of your onboarding program before launching. Also, check technical glitches, grammar, format, and overall quality of your learning content. Test your onboarding program by gathering beta testers, which can be your employees or long-time customers.

Use their feedback in shaping improvements to your program. The last step is to pre-launch to gather interest in the onboarding program before it even begins. Build an eager audience by helping them understand how your onboarding program will help them.

8. Launch the onboarding program

Now the time comes to launch your new customer onboarding program. Regularly check in with customers to determine their pain points and optimize your schedule for a better customer experience.

The customer onboarding process lays the foundations for your relationship with customers. Excellent customer onboarding helps with customer activation and customer retention. The ultimate objective of the onboarding process is to set up long-term customers with your product. It also keeps your customers engaged and improves trial conversions.