Building an Effective New Customer Onboarding Process for Your Business

The thorough familiarization of the buyer with the product is called client onboarding. This procedure involves a detailed study of the product with all its positive and negative qualities. The client must understand how to use this resource and how it is helpful. In addition, the concept of “onboarding” includes creating long-term productive communication with the user. Using this method, we make the client more interested in the product and show him all its significant advantages.

The main objectives of onboarding include:

• determining the prospects of product application;
• shifting the customer’s attention to the product immediately upon visiting the web resource;
• offering assistance and solving a painful issues;
• identifying the benefits of the product specifically for the customer.

With the rational use of customer onboarding, potential buyers can quickly become your target audience. This will lead to an increased number of successful transactions and, as a result, growth in your company’s profits.

Due to the plethora of advertising information and the variety of products on the market, customers stop noticing the products they sell. Therefore, business participants engaged in selling products and wanting to make the marketing process more effective must resort to additional ways of attracting attention to their offers.

Tasks of Client Onboarding

The process under consideration accomplishes two main tasks:

1. Emphasizes the buyer’s attention on the main advantages of the offered products and encourages him to make a purchase.
2. Encourages repeat product or service purchases after the first transaction with the selling company.

The difference between onboarding clients before and after the first implementation is sometimes not visible due to the lack of a transparent payment process. For example, if you go to a bank to apply for a loan or open an account.

If a potential customer has serious problems during the product research phase, he will probably prefer to buy it elsewhere. More than 70% of customers leave websites that lack detailed, understandable information about the product items offered and do not indicate the purpose of the product application. Therefore, providing detailed, helpful information about the product is essential to onboarding.

What are the Well-known Varieties of the Customer Onboarding Process?

If we talk about onboarding software products, it is worth noting that many users reject a particular software after registration. This pattern is typical for SaaS solutions. If more than a week has passed after the client has created an account in the service, it is hardly worth waiting for his return. This behavior of users has many good reasons.

The main motives for abandoning products after registration are the following:

• the client did not understand how to use the system;
• the user found the functionality of the program too complicated and, therefore, left for competitors;
• the product was characterized by an inconvenient interface or a repulsive design;
• there are other similar programs that are more popular on the market and of better quality.

By onboarding new clients effectively, companies are utilizing such procedures more and more often in order to compete for their customers. New service users need assistance in learning and working with the proposed software package. Not only informational materials but also well-established communication channels are suitable for a quick solution to this problem.

It is possible to inform users of a particular product using different onboarding methods. The most popular today are:

• Email newsletters. These are individual advertising messages or groups of similar ads that tell in detail about the offers of a company that sells products or services. Such an email may come straight after creating an account on the seller’s website. It may contain information about the features of a particular product and its application. The main purpose of such emails is to stimulate the customer’s interest in the product and encourage them to buy it. Useful messages for buyers have a powerful impact on the market, increasing website traffic and sales of advertised companies.
• Pop-up tips – content that contains useful information about the product. Such messages appear in self-opening windows. They help users to master useful functionality and learn more about the available features.
• Context menus. Open by hovering the cursor over a link or a title. They allow you to consolidate your knowledge and get additional information.
• Training windows. They are implemented mainly in programs for smartphones and other similar devices. After creating a user profile, a pop-up window will offer the owner of the gadget valuable information about the product they are using. If the customer does not need detailed guidance, he or she can quickly close any of the pop-up windows by pressing the corresponding function keys.
• Videos. Providing information in video format is especially popular among the target audience today. The video should be unique and of particular interest to buyers of a product or service. Its main goal is to provide as much useful information as possible about the product, as well as its advantages and disadvantages. It is also useful to familiarize the buyer with the main functions of the product. If the target audience likes the resource after watching the video, it means that one of the main goals of onboarding has been achieved.
• Chats and messengers. Communication with the company that owns the resource is important for the user experience. The most convenient way to organize such communication is through a special chat or a feedback chatbot.
• Knowledge base. It is a popular business solution that is widely used for onboarding. It means publishing the most important information about a product, its characteristics and advantages on a special page of a web resource. Such content should include a certain section of user questions and be accompanied by visual illustrations.

The product manual also serves as a key source of insight on what is customer onboarding. It will be much more convenient for the user to familiarize himself with it instead of immediately contacting a support representative.

Creating Onboarding for Customers

Onboarding planning should be accompanied by research on the potential audience of customers to determine their desires and aspirations. This will help them make their choice later. High-quality onboarding should evoke only positive emotions in the buyer.

To create the right strategy for the client onboarding process, you need to:

1. Carefully plan the Customer Journey Map, where you can specify expectations for the prospective customer and how to establish a productive relationship with them.
2. Gain more information about users through surveys or other data collection methods. You need to know what the target audience does in their lives. Such information will help you divide buyers into separate groups according to their preferences and solve the task of onboarding for the segments.
3. Choose the most effective onboarding methods based on customer preferences.
4. Do not overload users with unnecessary content. Product information should be not only helpful but also succinct.

Giving the customer information about the product, you should be ready to complete the process anytime. In addition, you should evaluate the productivity of your work at all intermediate stages of onboarding.

Benefits of Engaging New Customers

Integrating new customers of goods or services into your organization’s business processes has some undeniable advantages. The main pros of such activities are:

• improving the first impression of the company, which is the result of successful onboarding;
• increased number of loyal customers who see that the company listens to their opinions and preferences;
• more effective interaction with customers based on their pre-explored desires and aspirations;
• encouraging repeat transactions – onboarding strategy promotes customers to continually use the product offered or buy from the company;
• improving brand recognition and popularity as a result of the attention of participants in the new customer onboarding process to even the most minor details;
• improving communication with customers by studying their feedback on the product and offering special surveys.

Onboarding of new customers should be considered an important task today. Identifying consumer preferences allows you to build mutually beneficial cooperation with them and increase the efficiency of sales of your product.

Reasons for Unsuccessful Onboarding

The impact of customer onboarding depends on many elements. However, this process may not accomplish the end goals for these reasons:

1. Overloading the client with too much text. It’s better to use visuals like images with brief labels instead.
2. Not accurately identifying client preferences and needs. Additional interviews and improved data collection methods can help solve this issue.
3. Attempting onboarding when it’s not necessary. For a very standardized, simple product, walking clients through detailed onboarding can frustrate them.

Once you wrap up the initial client onboarding activities, take some time to send newly onboarded clients a nice welcome message. This motivational outreach reinforces the partnership.

How can Cloudfresh Help You?

Do you still have questions about how to implement new customer onboarding? Then, contact Cloudfresh experts with any questions. As a leading Zendesk Premier and Implementation Partner, we specialize in empowering businesses to elevate their customer service management through tailored Zendesk solutions.

Our Zendesk professional services include:

• Implementation.
• Audit and consulting.
• Integrations development.
• Essentials setup.
• Training and demo sessions.
• AI-powered customer support and chatbot solutions.

Our team is ready to help you with the functionality you need to realize customer onboarding, which includes various communication channels, phone systems, CRM platforms, databases, etc. Contact us today.