Editorial
The Gist
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Onboarding drives retention. Customers who receive strong onboarding stay engaged, see value faster and become long-term advocates.
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Personalization is key. A tailored onboarding plan based on customer needs improves satisfaction, adoption and ROI.
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Track and optimize. Measuring success through customer journey mapping, support reduction and retention rates guarantees continuous improvement.
Anyone can purchase a new application or service and immediately start putting it to use, but can a customer really get the most value out of a new product without expert training and guidance?
In short, no. The customer can spend hours exploring, troubleshooting and learning about a product from their own trial and error. Or worse, they can log in for a couple of minutes and then never return. The only way a customer will understand the complete value of a product and become a long-term advocate is through an onboarding plan that is designed specifically for their needs and circumstances.
Great onboarding drives important metrics like satisfaction, product adoption and engagement, with customer education playing a critical part of any effective program. Customers who know more about your product or service will see the value of your business faster, which helps achieve measurable results that yield a positive ROI faster.
Table of Contents
- How to Develop an Onboarding Program
- Monitoring Program Effectiveness
- Measuring Onboarding Program Success
How to Develop an Onboarding Program
Research shows that 86% of people say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them after they’ve bought. How do you create this experience?
This first step in creating the program is to ask yourself “why” and “what” questions. Why does the customer need onboarding? Why is that customer choosing our services over a competitor? What tools are we providing customers at the moment? What teams (i.e., customer success, sales or marketing) are involved in the customer education process? What resources are being offered for customer education (i.e., webinars, knowledge base, etc.)?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can truly observe your customers and gauge areas for improvement. This can be done by interviewing customers, reviewing customer support interactions and sifting through customer data to see common patterns for churn.
Once you’ve observed these pain points, your team should set goals, like reducing time to value or increase product adoption. Use what you already know about the customer to set actionable learning objectives that are supplemented with these measurable goals that make it easy to see the impact.
Organizations may also begin to reevaluate which teams are involved in the customer onboarding process. Customer success teams, support teams and even design teams can be tapped in to develop a more enriching onboarding plan. By creating a diverse group of onboarding team members and setting tasks for them based on goals, the result is a robust, personalized onboarding program that provides customers with the necessary tools and support to succeed.
Related Article: Navigating the Onboarding Journey: A New CMO's Approach
Monitoring Program Effectiveness
The process of onboarding can be made easier with stringent methods of tracking and optimizing the customer journey. Organizations can do this by mapping customer progress and detect areas for improvement to meet customer needs.
Data from customer journey mapping can be used to develop educational resources like tutorials, guides and other documents that customers can reference to use your product or service effectively. Providing these materials in a variety of learning styles and formats ranging from videos, FAQs or demonstrations keep customers engaged.
Measuring Onboarding Program Success
To assess the effectiveness of your customer onboarding program, track these key metrics to ensure customers are receiving value and staying engaged long-term.
| Metric | What It Measures | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding Time | The time it takes for customers to realize value from your product. | Shorter onboarding time means faster ROI and higher customer satisfaction. |
| Support Reduction | Decrease in support tickets and one-on-one meeting requests post-onboarding. | Indicates effective training and reduced customer dependency on support. |
| Customer Retention | The percentage of customers who remain after initial onboarding. | High retention signals satisfaction with onboarding and perceived product value. |
| Net Promoter Score (NPS) | A measure of customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend. | Improvement in NPS can reflect a better onboarding and user experience. |
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Onboarding is complex but can be simplified through analysis and adjustment of the process. Planning ahead by assessing the customer blueprint is critical to the success of your learning strategy, and adjusting during the process will help you fine-tune the onboarding process.
By developing a customer onboarding process that is strategic, you’re setting your organization and customers up for success.
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