Plan > Customer Onboarding
Why
This is the process of helping new customers get started and stay engaged. It’s a series of steps and resources that help to incorporate a product into the user’s routine easily.
Customers expect world-class onboarding experience from products and services they use today. All your marketing and sales work has a little use if your customer onboarding journey is not smooth and pleasurable. In today’s competitive market place your competitor is probably one click away and one mistake in onboarding may lead to loosing that customer.
How
Usually the onboarding process starts once the sales process is over and the activities differ based on the type of product. Mainly there are 2 product onboarding process types:
- SaaS self-onboarding (B2C, Utility products)
- Handhold onboarding (B2B, Enterprise products)
It’s important that the user journey of customer onboarding is documented and validated across different modules of the product (demo, trials, website, data import, licensing, payment, etc.) as well as across different departments (marketing, sales, support, etc.).
Type of activities
Based on the type of onboarding your product requires, the activities may differ. Some of the common activities are listed below:
- Welcome artifacts (emails, videos, brochures)
- Meetings and tours (for handhold onboarding only)
- Product registration (Forms, SSO)
- Tutorials (Videos, in product tours, step-by-step guides, tips)
- Quick setup (default settings)
- Data import (Basic data, seamless migration, integrations)
- Send consistent reminders and motivators
- Feedback collection (follow up calls, emails, surveys, stickiness data)
- Continuous reviews of the collected data to improve the process
The goal of the activities is to support the customer to have their ‘first win’ (‘aha’ moment) fast by using the product. The experience must be pleasurable and personalized for the user to build loyalty towards the product.
Some business models will make use of partners and implementation consultants in the onboarding process. It’s important such third parties are aware of the standards and recommended processes when involved in the workflow to keep uniformity of the experience.
How to measure success?
There are objective and subjective means to measure the quality and success of your customer onboarding process.
- Subjective data collected through surveys, interviews, and feedback.
- Objective data collected through monitoring and measuring. For example:
- How often customers come back?
- How long do they stay?
- How many features they explore?
- How many wins they get by using the features?