The faster a customer understands your solution, the more quickly you can satisfy their needs
Picture this: You've just closed a sale, and you’re reaching out to shake the hand of your new customer. In that moment, you may as well be shaking hands hello. Why? Because this moment is only the beginning of your relationship with this customer. You'll need an onboarding process to help nurture and grow that relationship, and customer onboarding software can help.
The best customer onboarding software will have a range of features that make things fast and easy for you and your customers. Here are some particularly important features to look for.
Want to connect new customers to first value faster and more reliably? Check out our guide, The Complete Guide to Customer Onboarding.
Key features for customer onboarding solutions
Intuitive user interface
The first thing to look for in any piece of software (but especially customer onboarding software) is an intuitive interface. If a customer opens your platform and sees an impenetrable mess of buttons, it may take them longer to learn. They may get frustrated during the process. And that frustration can easily transfer to lost business. They likely choose your solution because it seemed like the right one for them. A dense and complex interface may have them second-guessing that decision.
Meanwhile, if your customer onboarding platform has a simple, easy-to-understand interface, it can make a positive first impression on the customer. They’ll intuitively understand how to use it. Their competency will grow over time. And their timeline for mastery will be much much shorter. That leads to a smoother, faster, and more enjoyable onboarding experience.
In-app tutorials and knowledge stores
Educating customers on the service you provide is critical for sales. According to Salesforce, 70% of customers believe that understanding how a product works plays an important role in their decision to buy it. But the challenge of educating your customers doesn’t go away after you’ve closed the deal.
No matter how intuitive your customer onboarding solution is, customers will still have questions. Interactive tutorials in the application can trim learning curves without overwhelming customers. Tutorials can also point toward a knowledge repository that covers common questions. When your customers run into those issues, they can find the answer at their leisure. They’ll only need your input after they’ve exhausted these resources. That saves both parties time and energy.
Deep analytics and reporting
In onboarding as in many things, data is your friend. An onboarding solution that collects information about how your customers use it can help you refine the process over time. For example, you may see that customers are spending more time than you expect with one part of the process. There may be certain functions or terms they tend to look up more than others. They may even be failing to complete certain sections of the tutorial.
This is where engagement and conversion data come in handy. By diagnosing these issues, you can rework difficult sections. That can lead to better customer experiences.
But this data isn’t useful unless it can be easily accessed, organized, and parsed. Deep and customizable reporting can highlight key data. That makes diagnosing issues straightforward and accelerates improvements.
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Responsive customer support
Understanding how to use your customer onboarding software should be simple for your customers. The better your team understands your software, the more they can fine-tune it for customers. Plus, when customer questions arise, they can answer quickly. That keeps the process smooth.
But what happens if a customer runs into an issue your team can’t solve? Or if your employees need help designing the perfect onboarding process? This is where customer support for your solution comes in. Smart and speedy support staff can solve these problems before they get out of hand. So can community forums overseen by developers. These platforms allow users to crowdsource solutions while they wait for official fixes.
Versatile automations
Nearly every customer you work with may go through the same onboarding process. All that repetition provides opportunities for automations to speed things along. For example, your customer onboarding software can send every new customer an email welcoming them to the process. It can monitor their progress and nudge them about key steps they still need to complete. And it can notify stakeholders as customers move through onboarding, to maintain maximum visibility. Automating these and other actions can help avoid communication gaps.
Scalability
As your business grows, your stable of customers will grow alongside it. Your onboarding solution should make it easy to keep track of where each customer is in their journey. It should also have capacity for the volume of customers you onboard. That can mean storage space for their usage data. It can also mean easy navigation from customer to customer.
Customizable dashboards can make managing many customers easier. They allow your staff to set their own priorities around what data they watch and for which customers. They also empower workers to use the view that works best for them.
Flexible integrations
Your customer onboarding solution is just one strand in the wider tapestry of the customer relationship. That’s why it’s critical your chosen program can work with the other tools you use to manage that relationship.
Consider your customer relationship management (CRM) software, payment processing systems, project management tools, and communication channels. If your customer onboarding software can integrate with those tools, you can reap several benefits. Your employees can get the data they need faster. Customers can reach you faster and more directly. These advantages can combine to improve the speed and quality of your service. That means happier customers.
It’s also important your customer onboarding process accounts for any paper workflows. For example, Swedish Medical Center needed to digitize a constant flow of patient records. They turned to a high-powered scanner that uploaded directly to their electronic medical records system. That same approach can work for paper forms feeding into your CRM.
Did You Know?:The fi-8170 combines sound and image detection to prevent paper jams and keep scans running smoothly. Click here to learn more.
Our recommendation: fi-8170
Those in the market for customer onboarding software have no shortage of options. We take great pride in having spent the last 50+ years researching, designing, and developing some of the most advanced and powerful electronics in the world, including our professional grade fi and SP series of scanners.
Built to purpose for the most demanding document handling jobs, fi and SP scanners are capable of processing tens of thousands of pages per day at the highest levels of accuracy. Their intuitive integration capabilities with all existing work suites minimize time-to-value for businesses looking to invest in tools that will pay dividends for years to come.
With its innovative feeding technologies and proprietary Clear Image Capture technology, the fi-8170 keeps paper from slowing the onboarding process. Plus, PaperStream software included with the purchase makes it easy to index documents and scan text using optical character recognition (OCR). Click here to learn more or shop the rest of our production scanner line.
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