Attracting customers is important, but retaining them, even more so.

What exactly is customer onboarding?

Customer onboarding is the process by which prospects or new customers are made aware of a product or service and are duly engaged to ensure conversions and customer loyalty. To thrive in a competitive world, businesses must consider adopting a strong framework for customer onboarding. Addressing customer queries on how they can get the best use out of the product or service is a vital part of this process. Delivering personalized insights to customers, celebrating their achievements, and focusing on special rewards programs are also equally important towards improving customer experience.

Why is customer onboarding so important?

In any scenario, an unsuccessful onboarding process would lead to dissatisfaction and rapid churn. The uncertainty of our current world fuels churn. Failure to onboard customers effectively may ultimately result in a company being ousted by its competitors. Did you know? A 1 percent difference in churn can have a 12 percent impact on company valuation in 5 years. Retaining customers is no less important than attracting them.

Five highly effective customer onboarding best practices.

According to a Gartner report, 80% of the revenue generated by businesses depends on 20% of their customers. A negative customer experience will only drive promoters away. To ensure effective results, the following customer onboarding tips may be adopted:

• Understand customers and their needs: Companies need to understand what their target customers need and what challenges they are confronted with. They can use this knowledge to come up with relevant and up-to-date solutions. It is far easier for companies when they start out by explaining to customers how their products or services can solve their problems. Customer-oriented onboarding strategies, like periodic customer surveys, can also prove helpful to keep the knowledge bank updated.
• Set clear-cut expectations: Customers should clearly understand what to expect from a particular product or service. They must be able to identify the benefits they stand to gain. Businesses need to come up with a strategy to communicate to customers how their product or service can be used to get the desired results. A good customer onboarding practice will demonstrate this value-add and show customers how a product or service can enrich their life.
• Simplicity is key: Businesses must exercise simplicity in everything they do. A first-time user of an app, for instance, should be able to sign up and login effortlessly. Product tours and demos, the right documentation, and instant assistance can help. It helps to keep explanations short and easy to comprehend. When customers are burdened with too much information, it tends to go overboard. Gradual introduction to the benefits, advantages, or features of products or services could be the way to go.
• A warm welcome counts: First impressions can often be indelible. To this end, a welcome note or message can often make customers feel valued. After all, communication is the key to building strong ties. Besides, when a company keeps communicating with its customers even after the completion of the sales process, it goes to boosts customer confidence. Newsletters and video messages can be used in the course of subsequent follow-ups.
• Open dialogue: Efficient customer support is the cornerstone to an effective customer onboarding system. Keep your customer support on standby – always. 24x7 availability and the ability to respond to positive or negative feedback instantly and in a genuine manner will determine the extent of faith customers will place in a company’s products and services.

Bonus tips

Continue to assess and upgrade: Customer needs are changing continuously. Along the road to delivering their products and services, companies need to identify if customers’ needs have changed. This is a crucial step – as it opens up avenues to upgrade your products or services and ensure customers remain satisfied.

Understand competitor strategies: With new and innovative players penetrating the market every minute, understanding your competitors will help to keep your products and services relevant and interesting to users. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of their nearest competitors will help companies tremendously, in terms of pushing them to continuously revamp their strategies and continue to raise the bar.

Following these tips and best practices could strengthen the bonds between customers and the companies, thereby paving the way to better customer retention. Beyond these, using some of the more effective applications available today, companies can make customer onboarding a highly rewarding exercise. With the help of proper practices, strategies, and software, customer onboarding can be a transformative experience that leads to long and profitable customer relationships. At Dropthought we believe that to build a sustainable relationship with a customer, we must value their feedback. We believe in building a situation-based and feedback-centric client engagement plan that will not only help businesses to leverage the data collected abundantly but also if done right this can turn into a long-lasting opportunity to keep your customers intact and keep the revenue bar up and running.

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