Today, customer onboarding has become an integral part of any business, being fundamental for brand excellence and increased retention. In our competitive, highly customer-centric culture, smart customer onboarding can definitely give modern businesses the edge they need to reduce customer churn and achieve the best profitability ratio and customer retention possible.

Regardless of your industry, products offered, or brand perspectives, you need to implement a smart customer onboarding process in order to ensure your customers stay happy and engaged. As a rule of thumb, the experience your clients have at the early stages of their subscription journey is the one responsible for setting the tone for long-term business relationships.

Why is Onboarding Essential in 2021?

According to the latest studies, over 64% of customers (nearly two-thirds) agree that onboarding and the level of support they get from a company is crucial in their journey. Thus, without proper onboarding, you might lose around two-thirds of your customers.

No matter how perfect your services, products, or features you’re offering, it is key to familiarize your customers with them in order to thrive in your market. The first step is to make sure they can easily access your services and can test them for themselves. The SaaS process involves using roadmaps, procedures, tutorials, documentation, videos, surveys, or apps to allow your clients to familiarize themselves with your product.

‘Onboarding’ is truly a buzzword nowadays. This term comes with a couple of solutions that we must take into consideration. For starters, it refers to customer enrollment and account opening. A ‘new to bank origination’ journey can also involve mortgage onboarding, personal loan solutions, or even quote and bind solutions in the insurance industry.

Onboarding can be related to retail banking, wealth management, private pensions, and investment banking. So, when we say onboarding, we refer to a wide range of solutions that we can provide to financial institution clients. The main challenge is the limited product offering “one size fits all”. Marketing campaigns are product-centric, not customer-centric. Forms are generic and not personalized. As a result of poor customer experience (CX), roughly half of the traditional onboarding journeys are abandoned. Traditional onboarding processes are no longer fit for purpose.

In the banking industry, smart customer onboarding might mean starting using a modern app or a digital onboarding platform that allows you to create personalized onboarding and origination streams. However, onboarding is not only mandatory in the banking industry. If you’re running a digital agency or a retail store, you can use digital onboarding to automate tasks and give your team plenty of time to focus on more important tasks.

Top Customer Onboarding Strategies you want to use in 2021

Below, we want to dive straight into some of the best practices for smart customer onboarding.

Practice #1: Get on the Same Page with your Customers

It’s crucial to establish the parameters for success before setting up the onboarding process. This means that you need to tell your clients what services you are going to provide and how you are going to accomplish that. By getting on the same page with your customers, you ensure that both of your goals are aligned. When you’re in sync with your clients, your rate of success will rise dramatically.

Practice #2: Leverage Free trials

Free trials are mandatory for any type of industry and niche, including B2B services. If you’re selling software, you want to give your customers the option to “test-drive” your products for a few days or weeks before taking a final decision. This free trial can make or break your customer onboarding process – if your product is extraordinary, you’ll convert that small loss of 7,14 or 30 days into months or years of subscription.

Practice #3: Set the Right Expectations

This best practice goes hand in hand with the first one. You don’t want to say that your software will fix all of your clients’ issues, but instead tell them exactly what they’ll accomplish after the onboarding. Onboarding is not sales and should not be considered really high up in the conversion funnel, but should be more of a tool to test the waters and initiate a connection with your audience.

Practice #4: Make the Most out of Follow-Ups

It’s important to ensure that you don’t stop the moment your clients complete the onboarding process. Instead of letting them try to figure out how to make the most out of your product, connect with them periodically to find out what are those aspects that can be improved about your app. Some clients who have mastered the basics might want to go for a premium or advanced subscription. By staying connected with them and guiding them along the way, you’re sending a clear message that your premium feature is worth investing in.

Practice #5: Measure your Progress

Another best practice for smart customer onboarding is to keep measuring the onboarding process using the right metrics. Because you cannot improve what you cannot measure, it’s paramount to look at the frequency of user logins, usage of features, customer feedback, and time per session. Measure your progress, especially if you don’t want to shoot in the dark, but are willing to go above and beyond in order to grow your business.

Practice #6: Use Multiple Teams and Onboarding Workflows

If you want to get the most out of your digital onboarding tool, it’s important to be smart and diversify your efforts. For that, you need to use a multitude of onboarding processes and tools. While some reps can be dedicated to the onboarding processes of new clients, others can focus on promoting add-ons and upgrades for existing customers.

At this point, it’s crucial to remember that repeat customers are generally more valuable than new ones. The reason for that is that these clients can purchase extra services at no acquisition cost. In a B2B setting, that’s even more valuable, because an upsell can worth thousands of dollars or more. Also, remember that these people already trust your brand, so make sure you use a dedicated workflow along with a team that caters to their needs.

Become Smarter with Bespoke Customer Onboarding

Onboarding has become incredibly important today and will continue to become a key process for any business willing to grow, expand and boost its awareness. Create a great customer onboarding framework using a dedicated tool and start transforming your business for the better and making it stand out from the competition.