The complete guide to customer onboarding

Customer onboarding is the process of introducing customers to a product or service and nurturing them in its use. It’s what happens after the sale is made to ease adoption and help customers gain value from the product. Successful onboarding should both educate the onboarding customer and gather information.

Why customer onboarding is important:

• An industry survey shows a connection between successful new customer onboarding and long-term customer satisfaction.
• 70% of customers say service agents who are aware of sales interactions are very important to keeping their business.
• 84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.

Creating a successful onboarding strategy

Choose the right model:

• Self-serve: Users will complete the process largely on their own.
• Low-touch: This combines a self-serve approach with a low level of guided onboarding.
• High-touch: Onboarding from a dedicated customer manager or representative.

Craft the initial walkthrough: This is a new customer’s first experience with your product, so it’s important that this step demonstrates the product in a practical way. This step is what most people envision when they think of onboarding, and it is a critical phase of the process. It is especially useful with SaaS customer onboarding.

Collect feedback: This phase of onboarding allows you to gather information about the customer, how they use the product, and their onboarding experience. It’s a useful way to identify product inefficiencies, incorrect product use, or gaps in your features or services. You can then use the resulting information to improve your products and onboarding process.

Read more about customer onboarding in What Is Customer Onboarding?

Your customer onboarding process is your chance to make a great first impression and begin the journey of customer retention. Regardless of what you sell, there are a few steps you can take to ensure a smooth and stress-free onboarding experience.

How to think about the customer onboarding process:

• There is no “one size fits all.”
• Onboarding processes vary by industry, platform, and use cases.
• The steps may vary, but the general principles don’t.

3 stages of the customer onboarding process:

1. Help customers sign up: If your service requires customers to create an account, this step should be as quick and as painless as you can make it. Ask for as few details as possible to streamline this step. It’s also helpful to give onboarding customers feedback on acceptable password length and makeup before they select their password, instead of with an error message.
2. Send a welcome email: This email generally serves two functions. First, it should confirm for the customer that their account has been created and serve as a reference to that fact later on. Second, this email should set the tone for your future relationship. It can be perfunctory, but consider adding some flavor to personalize the interaction.
3. Encourage the initial login: Once your customer has created an account, you may want them to log in and begin using your service as quickly as possible. You can encourage this login either by sending a login link with the welcome email or by redirecting customers to a login page on your website after they have created their account.

For more steps to creating a customer onboarding process, read How to Develop a Customer Onboarding Process.

What are customer onboarding best practices?

Customer onboarding best practices are tips and techniques for ensuring your customers are onboarded successfully and don’t churn. As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a great first impression. Onboarding sets the tone for your entire relationship with your customer. Successful onboarding can lead to good long-term retention. Unsuccessful onboarding can lose business. These tips and examples will help you build your process.

Keep it simple:

• Ask for only the information you absolutely need.
• Make it clear that additional resources are available, if they are, but make a customer’s engagement with them optional.
• The key is to reduce friction as much as possible to make onboarding smooth and painless.

3 additional onboarding tips to consider:

• Be engaged: Communicate to your customers that you are listening to their concerns and feedback. This will go a long way toward cementing the relationship and starting it off on the right foot. Genuinely listen to feedback and personalize your communications with your customer.
• Process requests quickly: People value their time as much (sometimes more) than their money. Two-thirds of consumers value speed as much as price, and more than half have hired the first business to respond to their inquiries. In other words, customers are impatient. Treat each transaction like a priority and process them quickly to meet customer expectations.
• Protect customer data: It is critical to protect a customer’s sensitive data and safeguard it from loss or theft. Look for security processes that will integrate well with your existing IT infrastructure, like document scanners.

For more tips and examples, read Customer Onboarding Strategy: Examples and Best Practices.

What are customer onboarding tools?

Customer onboarding tools are methods and products that can help you successfully onboard customers. You’re not alone when it comes to customer onboarding. There are tools available to help you create and implement your onboarding strategy. Whether you need help automating emails, creating a guided experience, or optimizing your entire onboarding process, these tools can help you get started creating a lasting good impression for your brand.

Best guided experience with Salesforce

• Salesforce features powerful and highly configurable CRM and sales automation suite.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help send emails, measure engagement, personalize messaging, and track customer loyalty.
• Journey Builder can help marketers create automated on-ramps that lead to concrete results.

3 more useful onboarding tools:

• PipelineDeals: A customer management platform that helps businesses discover, nurture, and close sales leads and includes automated email capabilities.
• HubSpot: A popular marketing platform that combines customer relationship management, content management, marketing, sales, and customer service.
• Mailchimp: An email marketing and automation suite that’s designed to help you improve your open and click-through rates. It comes with pre-built templates and personalization tools.

For more tools and tips, read 5 Customer Onboarding Tools Your Team Needs to Support New Clients.