Onboarding is a critical part of any successful sales process. When a customer buys a product or service from you, they are merely validating the need for your offering. Onboarding helps them understand how that need can be met through your product and goes a long way in making sure that the customer enjoys a strong relationship with your business.
Businesses often consider onboarding to be a post-sale demo where a business representative takes the customer through the various features and modules of your product. This often overwhelms the customer and can lead to buyer’s remorse. Here are some points to keep in mind while building an onboarding process for customer.
Understand customer’s status-quo: The objective of a sales demo is to show how powerful your product can be. But once a sale has been made, the job of a business representative is to help the customer migrate their business processes from status-quo to the new process. For this reason, it has to be personalized. The right way to onboard a new customer is to not move them from their process to yours, but instead understand their current operational process and see how your product can make it more efficient. This is the path of least resistance and highest customer satisfaction.
Make the transition fluid: The trouble with a one-time onboarding meeting is that it may often not answer the questions that the customer may have on an ongoing basis. So it is always a good idea to replace a one-time onboarding call with a fluid process where a dedicated account manager offers hand-holding to the customer through the transition process. Another benefit of such a process is that it is not a monologue and helps your business gain valuable insights about your product from a customer’s perspective that can be used as feedback in shaping the future development of your product.
Onboard ancillary processes: Adopting a new product or service can often change many other ancillary processes within an organization. For instance, a company that migrates from using a manual appointment register to an online tool will often need to deploy a mechanism to train their clients to book their appointments online instead of over a phone call. According to a blog post on WorkflowMax, an integrated workflow management and invoicing tool, proper onboarding should also include training for how the customer shall be billed and prepare them for the migration since these have an impact on customer satisfaction.
Onboarding follow-up is not customer support: It is important to understand the vital difference between an onboarding support request and a generic customer support call. The first few days or weeks of a customer’s relationship with you is very vital in shaping their opinion about your business. By routing onboarding help requests through standard support, you may grossly miss the SLAs expected of you from the customer. There are two ways to go about it. The first is providing them with a dedicated account manager who they can get in touch with for ongoing onboarding requests. If you are a small company that cannot afford dedicated account managers, the alternative is to provide them with free priority support for the first quarter. This ensures that any help requests from the customer that stems from troubles with onboarding can be answered on priority basis thus helping them shape a favourable opinion about your company or product.
