You only get one chance to onboard a customer and introduce them to your business. A smooth onboarding process will help you maximize the lifetime value of that customer. A poor process could lead to high churn rates.

The Importance of Smooth Customer Onboarding

Every business has a customer onboarding process. (Which is basically a fancy term for the nurturing process that acquaints new users/customers with your products and inserts them into your company's ecosystem.) It's either the intentional result of a strategic plan, or it happens by default. 

If your customer onboarding process is happening by default, it's most likely filled with friction and hiccups. How you address this process will impact your business on multiple levels. Benefits of improving your onboarding process include:

• Reduces friction. You want the onboarding process to be smooth and seamless. Any point of friction opens you up to the possibility that a customer will leave or become dissatisfied. A well-developed process removes these points of friction and increases satisfaction.

• Improves engagement. An intelligently architected onboarding process prioritizes the customer and engages them on their terms. This makes them feel more important and creates more opportunities for high-level engagement.

• Creates healthy first impressions. You only get one chance to create a first impression. A smooth customer onboarding process increases the likelihood that it's a positive impression. 

4 Tips to Improve Your Customer Onboarding Process

You're not going to develop the perfect customer onboarding process the first time around. The key is to create a process, implement it, and then see what happens. From there, you can remove the aspects that don't work and zero in on the ones that do. Here are a few tips:

1. Set Proper Goals

You can't develop an effective onboarding process without some precise goals on what you want to accomplish. So it's wise to begin with the end in mind.

Setting specific metrics and thresholds on what you want to accomplish is the best way to direct your energy and effort. For example, maybe you want customer retention rates to hover around 75 percent, or churn rates to be no higher than 3 percent. (Those are just examples - you'll have to decide on realistic numbers for your business.) Specificity is king!

2. Try Customer Journey Mapping

One of the best options is to try customer journey mapping, which is basically the process of creating visual representations of your customers' processes, perceptions, and needs as they relate to your organization, products, and services. It allows you to assess insights, impact, issues, opportunities, and innovation. 

According to Qualtrics, "There are several ingredients that make up the anatomy of a customer journey, all of which should be looked at carefully so that you can find out where the customer journey runs smoothly and meet customer needs at that moment in time - and where the experience does not, and needs improvement."

Take your time when mapping out the customer journey. The more detailed you are in this phase, the better your results will be over the long-term.

3. Ensure a Smooth Handoff

One of the biggest keys to smooth customer onboarding is a seamless exchange from sales to customer success. In other words, there should be minimal friction between when a prospect becomes a paying customer. It should feel less like a major graduation and more like another step in the right direction.

Don't expect a smooth transition to happen on its own. You need a unified communications platform like Nextiva to easily transfer calls to the right person regardless of where they are. Your sales team needs to be trained and/or incentivized on how to hand off customers to the customer success team. And the customer success team needs to be equipped to make the indoctrination process as natural as possible. Clear communication channels between these two areas of your business is vital.

4. Track the Right Metrics

In order to improve your company's customer onboarding process, you have to gather and analyze the right data. 

HubSpot, which arguably has one of the top onboarding processes in any industry, identifies three stages of retention after the conversion of a new customer. They break down retention into short-term retention, mid-term retention, and long-term retention. This helps them analyze customers with greater focus, thereby improving the insights they gather.

Propel Your Business

In a world where first impressions are everything, a good customer onboarding process could be enough to separate your business from the competition. Work on streamlining your approach now so that you can reap the rewards for years to come.