It’s easy when you are creating your customer’s onboarding program to let it be dictated by the process. After all, there are plenty of little ‘to-dos’ that you want to check off during your client’s new onboarding program and they are all important to getting a client up to speed. But if you let your onboarding become dictated by the details and lose sight of the bigger picture of how client onboarding is going to impact the happiness of your client, then you could be setting yourself up for failure.
Here are three tips to keep in mind when creating a customer onboarding experience:
Start with goals, not checklists
It’s easy to jump straight into all the to-do’s that you have you to check off and creating your 30 day plan for client onboarding. Instead of doing that, consider first what goals you want to achieve with your client onboarding. These goals should not focus around to-dos, but desired outcomes.
An example for us here is that a goal we have is to have our program owner understand how to use the Lessonly application inside and out. That goal comprises several individual tasks we want to achieve (having our program owners take training lessons, completing an intro call that they can ask any questions they may have, etc.), but having the higher level goal allows us to look at the big picture instead of being stuck in the weeds.
Make it measurable, but don’t just rely on data
Creating a client onboarding experience that you can’t measure will lead to onboarding that attempts to get better through guessing rather than knowing. There are a bunch of metrics you can track (days to onboard a new client, days to achieving key milestones, number of customer interactions during onboarding, etc.) that should be pretty accessible to get, so its more about figuring out the ones that matter most for your business and line up with your goals. You’ll want to track these metrics over time so that you can see if they are getting better or worse, and if any changes you are making are having a positive impact.
One quick note here: getting data on your client onboarding program is important, but don’t rely just on that. Getting qualitative feedback from your customers can uncover holes in your program and help guide you to make better decisions that data points may not be able to uncover.
Don’t forget to delight
This should be one of your goals of bringing on a new client, but I wanted to add extra emphasis to it. Your client onboarding experience is your customers first ‘real’ experience with your product and the brand that supports it. There are a ton of great ways to delight your customers, so it’s going to depend more on the type of brand you have and what you want to convey. Ultimately though, every step of the way (either through training, sending emails, meetings, or anything else) should convey the personality of your brand and reaffirm your new customer that they just made a great decision.
