Customer Onboarding Best Practices: The Definitive Guide

As a customer, have you ever been frustrated by an organization’s onboarding process? Maybe you’re thinking of a time when you weren’t given clear guidance after purchasing a product. Maybe that company that took forever to get you into the system you spent a quarter of your budget on comes to mind.

Regardless, at least one memory popped into your head – and it wasn’t a good one.

This guide explores the best ways to ensure your organization doesn’t pop into your customers’ heads when asked that very question.

Personalize Your Onboarding Experience

The era of one-size-fits-all customer onboarding is over. You prefer an experience tailored to your specific needs. Well, so do your customers.

According to Salesforce, 52% say they’d switch brands if personalized communication efforts aren’t made. On the other hand, 9 in 10 customers are willing to spend more with organizations that personalize their experiences.

So, the question is: How can you personalize your onboarding practice successfully?

To start, develop a process for collecting data as soon as the initial signup. For B2B companies, this may include customer industry information, company size, role responsibilities, and specific use cases. If you work for a B2C company, it may include demographics, preferences, goals, and usage patterns. You can use all of this data throughout not only the onboarding process but the entire customer journey, ensuring personalized experiences and reducing churn as a result.

The key is to make sure the data you’re collecting is correct and complete. Consider leveraging a customer onboarding automation solution that incorporates data validation mechanisms. The top solutions can identify any gaps in the data your customers provide and improve accuracy, so you can seamlessly personalize their onboarding experiences.

Simplify Your Customer Onboarding Process

Reducing complexity is one of the most important customer onboarding best practices. A complicated process plummets customer enthusiasm faster than anything else while a streamlined one results in 50% higher retention rates, which is why your team should prioritize removing every unnecessary step that stands between your customers and their success.

How do you achieve this simplicity?

First thing’s first – audit your current onboarding process and identify points of friction. Common areas of frustration include:

• Sign-up Process: A complex and/or long sign-up process can be incredibly overwhelming for customers. Because it sets the tone for the entire onboarding process, it’s critical to simplify it as much as possible.
• Communication: Poor communication is an all-too-common customer onboarding challenge. Many organizations struggle to provide clear, timely communication about not only the solution being delivered but the onboarding process itself. As a result, new customers feel lost and unsupported. Worst of all, they don’t get the value they were promised from your company.
• Feature Discovery: When new customers aren’t informed of all the features of the product they purchased as well as how to take advantage of those features, they end up underutilizing the solution. This results in dissatisfaction.

Once you’ve taken note of the points of friction in your process, brainstorm ways to eliminate them. Oftentimes, this involves ensuring members of your support staff are well trained and are able to follow-up with customers quickly. It can also involve using customer onboarding automation technology that allows your staff to find and access the information they need to provide top-tier support efficiently.

Create Seamless Multi-Channel Experiences

As a customer, how do you prefer to communicate with companies? Via email? Mobile app? Phone?

Now, consider your coworkers’, friends’, and family members’ preferences. Their favored channels are likely all different, but the experience should be cohesive and streamlined across them.

How can you create a cohesive, streamlined, multi-channel onboarding experience?

Begin by noting the support channels you make available and then mapping your onboarding journey across all the touchpoints. Consider the ways in which you can ensure seamless transitions between the various channels and establish methods for synchronizing data across them.

Many organizations turn to customer onboarding automation to achieve data synchronization. Top solutions consolidate all incoming information – from customer intake forms to contracts to credit card payments to non-disclosure agreements – in one platform. That way, your staff can easily locate customers’ files regardless of the channel they were obtained by.

It ensures that a member of your team communicating with a customer via email has the same information and can, therefore, provide a similar experience as another member of your team speaking with the same customer a week later via phone.

Adopt Customer Onboarding Automation

Automation makes an appearance in most of the customer onboarding best practices in this article. There’s a good reason for that: when leveraged properly, automation drastically improves customer satisfaction and retention, data quality and decision-making, and productivity and efficiency. It can centralize customer information and handle repetitive tasks like routing documents, giving your team back time for high-value interactions.

What should you automate in your customer onboarding process?

The most impactful automation opportunities lie in document processing and data management. Afterall, as we learned in the previously covered customer onboarding best practices, effective data collection, management, and accessibility are crucial to streamlining the process.

When you automate customer onboarding with a modern solution, you can eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth emails, lost documents, and customer frustration all while reducing time to revenue.

It’s best to inquire about systems that can centralize your incoming documents in whatever form they may come in. With advanced recognition technologies, top solutions can instantaneously classify your customer documents, extract the data, validate it, and route it to the appropriate system and/or employees.

When comparing automation solutions, keep in mind that the best vendors for your organization will have experience working with companies in your industry. They’ll be familiar with the types of documents you require from customers and will have the unique tools necessary for processing them effectively.

This was a key criterion for a tax relief company as they evaluated customer onboarding automation partners. The organization needed a partner with the ability to recognize different IRS forms as well as supporting financial files common in tax relief cases. Had they not found such a partner, they may not have achieved ideal results:

• Reduced storage & labor requirements
• Decreased operating costs
• Improved scalability
• Reallocated staff from document processing to higher value tasks
• Optimized time to resolution
• Enhanced customer satisfaction

Measure, Analyze & Continuously Improve Your Process

It’s impossible to improve what you don’t measure. That said, establishing clear metrics and feedback loops is an essential customer onboarding best practice.

What metrics should you track?

Some of the most important ones include:

• Time to first value: Understand how quickly your customers start gaining value from their purchase.
• Activation rate: Track the percentage of new customers who complete key onboarding milestones.
• Net promoter score: Find out not only how effective your process is at cultivating loyalty and advocacy but also where improvements are needed throughout it.
• Feature adoption rates: Discover how often your customers take advantage of features and identify the features that are often underutilized.

By tracking this information, you’ll maintain up-to-date data that can help you not only update your onboarding process but make the right updates.

In addition to metric tracking, feedback loops are key to continuous improvement. Don’t be afraid to ask your customers what they think of your customer onboarding process, but make sure you’re well equipped to properly handle any negative feedback. When you express dissatisfaction with a product, you expect changes to be made. Your customers will expect the same.

Get Started Today: Optimize Your Customer Onboarding Process

Your customer onboarding process is about more than just getting your customers set up. It’s about creating the foundation for lasting client relationships and long-term success. By implementing these five best practices, you can transform your process into one that drives customer satisfaction as well as advocacy, resulting in new business.

At MetaSource, we help organizations in a variety of industries do just that. Our customer onboarding automation solution was built to help you reduce time to revenue and increase customer retention. Interested in learning more about it? Schedule a demo with one of our experts.

Unsure if your customer onboarding process needs an upgrade? Check out our guide. It’ll help you determine whether your current process is up to par or not.