A positive onboarding experience results in the highest rate of customer retention, says HubSpot. It’s a way to make a great first impression and tell your prospects that they have made the right choice.
Today, when most of the customer churn primarily results from poor onboarding experience, hassle-free onboarding is crucial. Moreover, it creates an impression that your prospect has made the right choice.
There’s no doubt that you have designed a winning CRM tool, but you need to help your customer get started successfully. Here’s what a successful customer onboarding looks like. Learn the steps and best practices from the experts.
Ideally, customer onboarding is more of a subtle nurturing process for new users/customers who have recently purchased your product. An exceptional onboarding experience starts with helping your new customers get started and familiar with your product.
What it includes
Having a sound strategy in place helps streamline the onboarding process. Otherwise, you might run a risk of disjointed and ineffective onboarding. As you build the strategy, align your objective with your product and customer base.
Make sure that your customer onboarding strategy is in line with the following three key retention strategies
take advantage of the customer’s business information that you have gathered during the sales process at the initial stages of onboarding.
Keep in mind that when you make your customers understand how your product helps them at every touchpoint, retention possibility increases significantly. The more you treat your customer interactions as a holistic experience, the better.
Customer onboarding involves several steps to help new users get acquainted with the system. Smart CRM systems like ConvergeHub are highly customizable that can tailor the process flow as per the user’s requirements.
At this stage, your main objective is to educate and empower your customers with all the resources and materials. Once they are ready, help them set it up. Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide to the onboarding process.
It all starts with a welcome email. Make sure the communication messaging is a positive one. First, congratulate them for making a new purchase. Express your gratitude for they chose your products over others. Let them know how happy you are to have them onboard.
#Template Welcome mail
Congratulations! Welcome to ConvergeHub.
We can’t Thank you enough for choosing us. But, we are even more excited to have you onboard. Gear up to reach your goals with us.
We can’t wait to help you get started. Let’s walk towards your goal.
[Sign In Now]
To Your Business Goals,
Christina at ConvergeHub
2. Greeting Message
A greeting message is different from a welcome email. It’s about congratulating your users on their first login and encouraging them to set up the account. It’s one of the best practices of customer onboarding to help users complete the next steps seamlessly. Through this email, you can ask your customers to change their password or turn on email notifications. Or, you can attach a video with this email as a guide.
3. Product Set Up/Kick-off call
Provide your users with a guided tutorial or a setup wizard, which they can follow as a guide while setting up. Most of the companies also set up a kick-off call with the customers to guide them throughout the process. Sometimes multiple steps are involved in the process and a call helps streamline things. Guided setup is one of the important steps of customer onboarding as it goes a long way to winning customers’ trust.
4. Empty Fields
When your customer logs in for the first time, there will be many empty fields. Help your customers fill those fields with actionable content. Demonstrate the value of each field and encourage them to use this on a regular basis.
At ConvergeHub, you can schedule meetings with your team and also work with autoresponders that help you build email sequences and send out with just a click.
5. Highlight Key Features
It’s important to highlight the key features of your product to new customers. Use tip banners to introduce them to the key features of your product.
6. Interactive Walk-Through
This is a key aspect of your customer onboarding process. It’s crucial to make your customers learn how to fetch the value from your product. Opt for an interactive walk-through and encourage your customers to use the product all by themselves and get familiar. In this stage, your users will complete the tasks one by one under your supervision. In case, the user is unable to do it, you need to show them how to accomplish the next one. It’s important to create contextual tips so that you can guide the users to complete a task.
7. Knowledge Base
Every CRM tool comes with a resource section or knowledge base. Alongside, there is an FAQ section as well, which the users can use to get quick answers to their questions. Many CRM tools come with chatbot support. It’s a great way to provide personalized support to new users, even when human support is unavailable. Chatbots are so programmed that it helps solve your users’ problems without having them search your website for an answer.
8. Routine Check-Ins
Make sure that you run routine check-ins from your end to make sure that your users are not stuck anywhere. Keep an eye on the product usage and this will make your customers feel that they are in safe hands.
9. Celebrate your Customer’s Success Journey
Your CRM tool must have customer-centric milestones. Celebrate those with your new customers as they complete each milestone. There must be in-app notifications or congratulations emails using which you can keep your customers excited. The more you invest yourself in your customer’s success, the more will be your customer retention rate.
10. Send out follow-up emails & keep your customers engaged
Keeping your customers engaged is one of the key stages of the onboarding process. Often users do not use the newly purchased CRM tool right after it is set up. Send out follow-up emails, and offer tips and pointers as well as resources to help your customers stay engaged.
Keep the sign-up short & simple: A lengthy and complex process frustrates your users and affects your retention rate. Instead, ask for the essential information only at this stage and ask for more when needed.
Connect the sign-up with a familiar service: Allow them to sign up using Google, Slack or social media. It helps in friction-free sign up and that too in a single click.
Don’t make your customers guess during the first log-in: During the first login, make sure that you guide your users to the next step and help them use the product at its best. Your customers should not keep guessing what comes next.
Automate the process as much as possible: Automate key processes at every level, so that there is an increased level of efficiency and less manual intervention. If your customers need to fill all fields manually, it’s not a good investment.
Make integration optional: Not all your users require to set up integrations, invite colleagues, or import data from other tools. So the integration part can’t be left optional.
Provide support as and when needed: Provide support to your customers as and when needed, so that users are not stuck at any level. Processes like data imports, integrations, and more needed support from time to time. Many companies have a dedicated onboarding team who helps the users get started and do data integration.
Let your customers seek human support when needed: Sometimes, the problem is more complex, and the users need human assistance rather than chatbot assistance. Provide it whenever required.
At ConvergeHub, we believe customer onboarding is the first and crucial step that lies at the head of every customer lifecycle journey. But, it creates the very first impression on your customers that defines the success journey. Remember, successful onboarding is not only about customer activation but also about retention. Gartner says that good onboarding increases the retention rate by 70%, which ideally becomes a steady revenue source for you.
The primary goal of any customer onboarding is to help your customers get started. But, that’s not all. You need to keep your customers engaged and connect with them at every stage. When you are selling your products, you are setting up your customers for long-term success. And, you need to give the same feeling to your customers from the very beginning. The best KPI of a successful customer onboarding is whether your customers are signing in the days, weeks, and months after you set up. The more they use your tool, the more successful you are.
Wrapping Up
CRM tools can go a long way to determining the success of your marketing efforts. No wonder, why most of the B2B enterprises as well as the SMEs are investing in it. As long as it’s perfectly used, a CRM tool can significantly increase the efficiency level of the Sales and Customer Service Departments.
So, what are you waiting for? Don’t risk the disruption of your business growth! Instead, try our ConvergeHub onboarding today!
Customer onboarding is a crucial first step in ensuring success and retention. Key elements include a warm welcome, guided setup, highlighting key features, interactive walkthroughs, and ongoing support. The goal is to help customers get started and stay engaged for long-term success.