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Guide to Customer Onboarding Strategy for Amazing Brand Experience

    Guide to Customer Onboarding Strategy for Amazing Brand Experience

    ⏱ Reading Time: 7 minutes
    As a business owner, there’s a chance you’ve lost a new customer at the onset of patronizing your business. And don’t worry – this is normal.

    It is a bit discouraging though, when you take into concern the amount of work you invest to get each and every customer. Luckily, there is a set of procedures which can ensure that your customers don’t get lost along the way.

    Although there are other factors that can lead to this, the top reasons for customer churn are lack of understanding of your product and lack of value. And the cause can be attributed to a lack of proper communication about your product, hence the need for a working customer onboarding strategy. The good news is, for you to get these customers in the first instance, you already have a good product and these customers already like it. However, it doesn’t end there, it is your job to make sure it stays that way.

    🚀Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First?🚀

    The best way to do this is by making sure that the experience they get while using your service or product remains the same with what they got at the point of sales making sure that their expectations and the promises made during your marketing are met. They need to see these services or products make a difference in their lives. Therefore, there’s a great need for you to review your customer onboarding process flow. In this guide, we’ll be revealing some proven customer onboarding strategies that will help you retain your customers with the amazing brand experience.

    What Is Customer Onboarding?
    Customer onboarding process flow starts from the first contact with a customer until the customer is able to make full use of the product on their own. It is the process of getting new customers acquainted with your services or product. It involves step-by-step instructions or tutorials, support, and guidance aimed at helping the customer understand how to make use of all the features of your product. With this knowledge, they would be able to make the most use of the product gaining the full value of their money.

    In a nutshell, customer onboarding is your chance to achieve customer success, giving them an excellent first-time experience by making sure that your product is easy, understandable and simple to use with plenty of support where needed.

    Onboarding Strategies for Amazing Brand Experience
    To reduce customer churn and create an overwhelming brand experience when a customer purchases your product or services, here are some customer onboarding strategies you can involve in your onboarding flow to create a great first-time impression on them.

    Define Your Goals
    One of the most important things to do if you aim to achieve customer success with your customer onboarding is to set and define your goals. What are your expectations? What are you aiming for? If you are able to pen answers to these down, you should be able to measure them by setting up the right key performance indicators (KPIs). These performance indicators will help you in the process to determine if you’ve achieved success on each of the outlined objectives thereby telling you how effective your onboarding program is.

    Key performance indicators
    Picture 1. Key performance indicators

    Read: 13 Unique Sales KPIs that Boost Business Growth.

    Get Your Team Onboard
    When you have a plan, make sure everyone else is on it too. Get your customer success team together and let them know what your plans are and how to help customers get the best of it. Put in place processes by organizing kick-off call to outline your goals, expectations, scope and key milestones for each timeline. Let your team be fully apprised of what they need to teach your new customers. To make sure everyone on your team is the same page with your onboarding process, organize a training session for your team especially if what they need to help customers with requires some technical steps.

    Read: Top 10 Customer Service Agent Training Courses.

    Create Product Adoption Programs
    The goal of every customer onboarding process is to get customers to fully adopt the product. You can achieve this by engaging your customers with a nurturance campaign. This involves providing them with messages that offer helpful information about the product on a regular basis. This information can be FAQs, tutorials, or guides suggesting ways to make the most of the product. The easiest way to achieve this is by making use of customer success software to send customer behavior triggered messages. Providing your customers with this type of information will help you build a relationship with them letting them know you’re always there to help.

    Adoption programs examples
    Picture 2. Adoption program examples

    Keep an Eye on Your Customer
    Best onboarding programs thrive on data. Gather data concerning your customers’ progress during the onboarding process so you can discover areas that trouble the customer and remedy it. Try using software with visibility and data collection capability from every customer interaction with analysis to the bottlenecks. Create a usage report that will show the segments of your product adopted by various customers. With this customer onboarding strategy, you will be able to proactively help your customers scale through roadblocks that would’ve stopped them from adopting your product without reaching out for help.

    Measure Your Results
    At the end of the onboarding process measure your results. Find out;

    how long it took each customer to fully onboard,
    the features that troubled them the most,
    how often they used your product as well as the feature they used most.
    Compile the data to these findings and use it to evaluate how effective your onboarding program is. Use it to refine your strategy and best practices to speed up future onboarding programs with greater quality across all engagements.

    Keep in Touch With Your Customers
    Constant communication or engagement with your customers even after they’ve finished the onboarding process is another strategy to enhance your onboarding programs and create an amazing brand experience for them. Keep connected with your customers even after their first 90 days with your product. Check in to see how they are doing, making sure they still value your product. Listen to them, find out where they air their views on social media to get feedback about your product. You can also send a direct satisfaction survey to them on a regular basis. Employ the use of customer engagement platforms and adequate software for automated processes/messages from your customer success team to check up on them maintaining their satisfaction levels.

    Customer satisfaction survey
    Picture 3. Customer satisfaction survey

    Customer Onboarding Checklist
    To make customer onboarding easier for you especially when you have hundreds of customers to onboard, create a streamlined process with these items on your checklist.

     

    An automated welcome email triggered by a new user sign up
    A scheduled follow-up email that invites the new user to login to the software after two days of inactivity.
    A greeting message that shows up on the first login with a call to action to the first step.
    Set of feature callout designs that pops up when a user logs in for the first time.
    Content for all empty states.
    Frequently updated knowledge base containing answers to FAQs.
    Scheduled tasks for check-in emails or calls with your new customer.
    A celebratory notification triggered when a customer achieves a milestone.
    Customer Onboarding Examples
    I’m sure by now you fully grasp the idea of successful strategies for amazing customer onboarding experience. Here are a few examples of brands you can understudy their customer onboarding strategy for inspiration.

    Customer onboarding examples
    Picture 4. Customer onboarding examples

    1. Slack
    Slack sees to it that new customers know exactly how to use their software by providing live animated links that show the customer how to complete each task.

    2. Dropbox
    Dropbox uses a few initial questions to understand how the customer intends to use their tool. This is followed by a process of personalizing the tool to the customer’s preferences to make the most of it from the first day.

    3. Duolingo
    Duolingo uses animation to walk customers through their tools. They do this by providing a step-by-step onboarding process to avoid overwhelming their new customers with a long to-do list.

    In conclusion, good customer onboarding strategies should be easy to implement and can create an amazing brand experience for your customers making their first 90 days of using your product rewarding. The best onboarding programs thrive on proactive measures and a customer-centered approach. Therefore, to get your new customers onboard offering them the right support they need to make the most use of your product adopting it quickly, you have to act fast.

    Ready for Onboarding?
    Don’t wait till these customers unsubscribe to your product before taking action. Let your customer success team keep up to date with these customers, get data and find out how much value they’re getting from the product as well as the troubles they might be experiencing. Use these collected data to constantly refine your onboarding strategies for optimum results and amazing brand experience.

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