8 Ways to Streamline Your Customer Onboarding Strategy

Picture this. Your online learning business has just secured a new customer – and you’re over the moon. But before you take the entire sales team out for a celebratory lunch, you need to ask yourself: what about customer onboarding?

The success of a relationship between you and your customers doesn’t simply end when they purchase from you. If anything, that’s just the beginning – and that’s why you need a solid, foolproof customer onboarding strategy.

With this, you’ll be able to guide your newly acquired customer from purchase to effective use of the product or service they bought. While creating a customer onboarding strategy may feel like a daunting process, there are plenty of ways to ensure it’s as streamlined as possible.

Keep reading this guide to find out how to simplify your customer onboarding strategy in eight easy steps.

Importance of a streamlined customer onboarding strategy

Before we move on to the meat of our article, it’s worth discussing why a streamlined customer onboarding strategy is so crucial. The reasons are many, and they include:

• Meeting your customers’ expectations: Whether you’re selling contact center quality assurance software or high-performing sportswear, it’s likely that your customers have chosen to buy from you because they trust you will deliver on their expectations of good quality, reliability, and expertise. With a customer onboarding strategy in place, you’ll be able to showcase just that.
• Ensuring fast, easy, and user-friendly adoption: For your customers to be happy with your product or service, they’ll need to be able to start using it proficiently – and reaping the benefits – ASAP. A streamlined customer onboarding strategy can help you with that, as we’ll see shortly.
• Promoting customer retention: A tried-and-tested customer onboarding strategy can be used time and again with any new customer who chooses to do business with you. This allows you to always provide customers with exactly what they need, when they need it, which in turn helps you boost satisfaction and retention in the long run.

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Now that we have clarified why having a customer onboarding strategy is so vital for your business, let’s uncover eight of the best ways to streamline this process.

Clarify the objectives of the onboarding process

Unsurprisingly, like with every other business-related process, an effective customer onboarding strategy should always begin with the clear identification of goals. What do you want to achieve through this strategy? Do you want to target all your customers, or only specific segments? How and when are you planning to track progress?

To answer these, and many more, questions, we recommend following the famous SMART framework for goal setting. This means selecting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Map out your process to identify pain points

Before you move on to creating the building blocks of your strategy, it’s important to map out the entire process. This will give you a visual, easy-to-understand representation of the project workflow while also helping you to identify any potential friction or pain points.

For example, let’s imagine that you sell software to help improve communication in the hospitality industry. While mapping out the process of building your customer onboarding strategy, you notice that a possible hurdle could be the fact that customers may not be familiar with certain technical terms.

Neglecting this aspect could mean that they might no longer want to use your product, or that they might issue complaints. You take note of this and ensure that your onboarding strategy features a well-structured section in your resource hub that’s entirely dedicated to technical terminology.

Utilize automation tools to handle repetitive tasks

Do you remember when implementing the latest call center technology made a huge, positive impact on how your call center teams performed? This is because the right digital tools and platforms can be instrumental in automating certain parts of processes and operations, allowing professionals to do their job faster and better.

In the context of customer onboarding, you’ll want to make sure that some elements of the process are automated, so you can offer a consistent experience and boost your customer’s satisfaction.

You could consider, for example, implementing automated software for customer interactions, content publication, and feedback requests – but the options at your disposal are many, many more.

Personalize communications based on preferences

Every single one of your customers has their own specific needs, wants, and expectations when it comes to your product or service. Ignoring this by not tailoring the onboarding experience to their particular circumstances would be incredibly unhelpful.

A more seasoned user, for example, won’t likely need a huge list of guides and features but would probably prefer to see videos of your product or service in action. Conversely, complete newbies will need a lot more guidance.

The solution? Personalization. You can achieve this right at the beginning of your process, by setting up a welcome survey and asking customers what their goals and expectations are. Then, simply direct each customer to the flow that’s most suited to them.

Provide customers with self-service options

While some people prefer to speak directly with customer support teams, others – especially those who are more tech-savvy – may feel confident enough to handle certain parts of the onboarding themselves, and this is something you must consider.

Offering a self-service option can be a helpful way to meet customers’ expectations, empowering them to take matters into their own hands and solve issues quickly and easily. To this effect, you could create a resource center or another type of knowledge base, that you manage and update regularly to ensure everything is current and correct.

You could even use a bespoke website for this – just remember to choose your domain name from a trusted provider like OnlyDomains.

Create interactive guides and tutorials 

On the topic of knowledge hubs and resource centers, an effective customer onboarding strategy should always include the creation of guides and tutorials – even better if they’re user-friendly and interactive.

Knowledge sharing, in fact, is not only paramount among employees – it’s one of the pillars of great and long-lasting customer relationships, too. Consider adding the following formats to your hub:

• Videos
• Blogs and articles
• Technical documentation
• Case studies
• FAQs

Offer support throughout the onboarding process

Both during and after onboarding, you’ll want to give your customers the reassurance that you’re always there for them when they need it. Whether it’s a request for assistance or an unexpected problem cropping up at some point in their onboarding journey, you’ll need to enable continuous support from your end.

These are some ideas you could incorporate:

• Offering the help of a friendly, fully trained customer support team
• Allocating an account manager to your B2B customers
• Building, updating, and maintaining a knowledge base with FAQs, videos, guides, and tutorials
• Creating a community-led forum
• Regularly communicating product updates, including changes and new features, and providing training for them.

Track key metrics to identify areas for improvement

Just as your call center monitoring software was paramount in allowing you to address and rectify issues and inefficiencies, you’ll want to use similar tools to track specific metrics and KPIs that enable you to keep improving your customer onboarding strategy.

There is no limit to the metrics you can track, but these are some of the core ones that will allow you to track your progress over time and keep refining your overall onboarding efforts:

• Customer onboarding completion, to better understand if the onboarding process as a whole was effective
• User engagement score, to help you gauge whether engagement remained consistent or if there are points in the journey where it dwindled
• Customer satisfaction score, to allow your customers to voice their feedback, helping you to better understand if/what you should have done better.

Final thoughts

Selling a product or service to a new customer is only the beginning of a much longer and more structured journey that will, hopefully, see that person stick around with you for the long haul. One of the keys to achieving this? A solid and streamlined customer onboarding strategy.

By implementing a customer onboarding strategy, you’ll be able to meet your customers’ expectations, help them get proficient with your product or service, and keep them coming back to you for more.

Remember to monitor and measure your strategy’s performance regularly, too. From collecting customer feedback to calculating engagement and completion rates, the metrics you set will be instrumental in guiding your strategy going forward.