With the rise of subscription-based business-to-business products and services, providers no longer just win a sale. They win a client. Hopefully, this is the start of a long and mutually rewarding relationship.
How long that relationship lasts and how rewarding it is depends largely on how well the customer is onboarded. As the saying goes: You only get one chance to make a good first impression. This is also the best chance you will have to help the customer get the full value of the contract. How the customer feels about your solution and your company will be hugely influenced by how they feel about the onboarding process.
Fortunately, all this is easy to get right. The customer wants you to succeed because they believe you’re going to help them. They believe your company can do this better than all their alternatives; they chose you for that reason. You have everything going your way.
Here’s how to take it across the finish line:
What is Customer Onboarding and Why it Matters
- Customer onboarding, defined: Customer onboarding is the process of configuring a customer’s account to receive recurring delivery of a product or service. This involves everything from arranging the billing to activating the product or service to ensuring the customer enjoys uninterrupted delivery moving forward. Successful onboarding enables all this through systematic steps, both internally and in your engagement with the customer.
- Benefits of effective customer onboarding: A well-structured onboarding process enables customers to gain all the benefits they’re seeking from your solution while lowering the cost of delivering and maintaining it. Successful onboarding teaches the customer how to benefit from the solution with little or no assistance, keeps the solution operating as expected with minimal support, and prepares the client to deal with any disruptions as quickly and efficiently as possible.
This yields greater operational efficiencies for the provider, with corresponding lower costs that translate into more profit. Well-publicized customer satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth around successful onboarding projects can also lower the cost of sales and grow a provider’s business.
H2: The Customer Onboarding Process: Key Steps
Different products or services require different onboarding principles. The more technical the offering, the more detailed and precise the onboarding process needs to be. A more personal or consultative relationship calls for a more high-touch process.
Regardless of what the final solution looks like, the process generally falls into four broad stages:
Pre-boarding: This starts during the sales process, when expectations are set for the benefits the solution will deliver and how they will be delivered. Whatever discovery was involved during the sales process needs to be communicated to the onboarding team during pre-boarding.
The onboarding team expands on this by identifying all customer personnel who will use the solution or assist in the onboarding, a detailed study of all relevant parts of the customer’s business environment, and setting appropriate expectations for the process itself. This should be as thorough as possible in preparation for the next step.
Implementation: This is what many people think of when they talk about onboarding. It invariably involves setting up billing and establishing the necessary communications between the provider and customer. It might also include delivery and configuration of physical products, activation and configuration of software, and perhaps instituting an ordering process if the solution includes variables that need to be specified each delivery cycle, like delivery of supplies or order pick-ups.
Training and support: Even the simplest product or service requires some training to use properly. And, at some point, every solution needs support from the provider. Proper onboarding ensures the customer knows how to quickly get the support they need with as little back and forth as possible.
Having executed every step of the process, you can deliver a hearty welcome to your new customers with an eye to the future.
Ongoing communication and follow-up: Even after the customer is up and running, questions are likely to arise. There may be new features to explain, changes to the contract terms, or other adjustments throughout the life of the relationship. In this way, onboarding is a continuous process.
H2: 8 Best Practices for Onboarding New Customers
How skillfully you execute each of the steps above will determine the success of the customer onboarding process. Here are some tips to get the best results:
- Invest in a dedicated team of customer success specialists to guide customers through the onboarding process and provide ongoing support. Too often, companies use operating staff with relevant product knowledge to onboard new customers. Those people may not have the larger perspective to put tasks in the context of the customer’s organization or needs. More technical staff may not have the necessary communication skills to assist clients. If you can’t recruit the people you need, consider outsourcing portions of the onboarding function.
- Make certain the onboarding team has all the information shared during the sales process. Salespeople usually focus on the buyer, while onboarding is mostly about the user. This can lead to a disconnect. By keeping Sales involved at the start of onboarding and having a careful debrief during the transition, a solution provider demonstrates the polish of their organization with a focus on the customer.
- Do a complete discovery before you begin implementation. Identify everyone on the customer’s account who will engage with the solution or who has expectations of how it will impact their jobs. Depending on the solution, you may need to adjust the onboarding process to cater to more customer systems, roles, or requirements than you expected or than is typical. Your goal is to make sure you are fully honoring your agreements and that everyone on the customer’s side feels served.
- Set clear expectations. Just as the customer has expectations for the final implementation, you have expectations for the process to get them there. Build on your basic order of operations to include any special requirements of the job and their purpose in the process. Take the customer through your plan and make sure they are prepared to do their part.
- Personalize the onboarding experience. While it’s important to have carefully prepared materials and processes to onboard customers, those should leave room for the customer success team to cater to the roles and learning styles of the customer’s team members.
- Seek constant feedback during onboarding to ensure the customer’s people are comfortable with the progress. Customers don’t know what they don’t know. Part of the onboarding team’s job is to draw out any confusion or gap in the customer’s understanding to be addressed before it keeps them from achieving the maximum utility of the solution.
- Gather feedback from onboarded customers at the end of the process, through surveys or one-on-one interviews, to identify areas for improvement and to enhance the experience.
- Build a knowledge base with helpful articles, FAQs, and tutorials to empower customers to find answers to their questions independently. Use the feedback process above to identify topics for further explanation or common challenges that are best addressed when users are hands-on with the solution.
The common thread through all these best practices is a customer-centric approach. By focusing on the customer’s needs from the start, you are less likely to face remedial work later. You will also be setting up the relationship for any growth opportunities down the road, as your company brings new solutions to market or as your customer grows and needs more of your services.
Find the Talent You Need to Elevate Customer Onboarding
Successful customer onboarding is a skill all its own, and it benefits from dedicated attention. The best practices detailed here require an investment of time and attention. And that includes the right talent.
There is a cost-effective way to add more people for this critical task. Solvo business process outsourcing provides nearshore talent, trained up to your specific requirements, and supervised as an extension of your core team. They can help with the discovery process, preparation of training materials, IT and technical implementation tasks, project management of the process, collection and maintenance of FAQs, and more.
If you don’t have the talent you need for a stellar customer onboarding process, contact Solvo today.