Onboarding
What is customer onboarding?
Customer onboarding involves guiding your customers to recognize the value of your product. This process takes place at two critical junctures in the customer journey: upon initial sign-up and when they achieve their first successful experience with your product.
What are the objectives of the onboarding?
Value Realization:
The primary goal is to help customers quickly understand and experience the value your product or service provides. This involves ensuring that users can achieve their desired outcomes or solve their problems as soon as possible after onboarding.
User Engagement:
Successful onboarding aims to engage users actively with your product. This includes encouraging them to explore features, participate in key actions, and become familiar with the product's capabilities. Engaged users are more likely to continue using the product and find long-term value in it.
Retention and Loyalty:
Customer onboarding plays a crucial role in establishing a positive first impression and building a foundation for a long-term relationship. By providing a smooth onboarding experience, you increase the likelihood of customer retention and loyalty. Satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to continue using your product and may even become advocates, recommending it to others.
Tell us more about your Onboarding process?
Why is customer onboarding important?
Customer onboarding is a strategic process that directly influences customer satisfaction, retention, and the overall success of a business. It is an investment in building strong, lasting relationships with customers from the very beginning of their journey.
Below are the top 7 causes of Customer Churn (or customer attrition) (Zonka & Skilljar)
The customer onboarding process: examples and best practices
customer onboarding is a strategic process that directly influences customer satisfaction, retention, and the overall success of a business. It is an investment in building strong, lasting relationships with customers from the very beginning of their journey.
How does poor onboarding affect the overall outcome?
Inadequate onboarding can significantly impact the overall outcome by leading to several negative consequences
Decreased Customer Retention: Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. (Harvard Business Review)
Lower Customer Satisfaction: 62% of customers stopped doing business due to poor customer service including onboarding processes. (A study by Zendesk)
Longer Time-to-Value: 28% of customers indicated inefficient onboarding processes can extend time-to-value period. (Skilljar)
Underutilization of Features: 80% of software features are rarely or never used. Poor onboarding can contribute to feature underutilization. (Pendo)
Some great stories!
Salesforce
Hemorrhaging churn.
In 2005, Salesforce had a monthly churn rate of 8%. They were losing close to 75% of their customers each year.
Salesforce could not persuade their signups to stay with them. This became a death spiral situation for the customer relationship management service. Soon, they would run out of new customers to entice. At the time, Salesforce had a stellar reputation in the market. So what caused the massive churn rates?
In 2005, Salesforce had a monthly churn rate of 8% in 2005
New onboarding
Optimized its customer onboarding processes.
They began to “help the customer succeed” by correctly introducing them to the Salesforce platform.
New Onboarding strategy
While it had taken Salesforce five years to gain 250,000 subscribers, they added 250,000 more within a year of changing their onboarding tactic. 70% of clients say that learning how to use a service or product is key to winning them over to your business. Effective onboarding is pivotal, fostering a smooth transition, aligning expectations, and promoting engagement.
subscribers added within a year
Customers say onboarding is critical
