What happens when a user signs up for a product or service?
A lot many businesses are of the impression that the moment the customers sign up is when they have won over the customer. However, conventional wisdom suggests the contrary. Did you know that 55% of customers return a product because they don’t understand how to use it?
This only goes to show the importance of onboarding customers for your SaaS product. The onboarding process helps you show the potential value of your product to customers and restrict the avoidable churn. In fact, the onboarding process is so important for customers that as many as 63% of customers consider it when making a purchasing decision. In this post, we’ll look at six ways why customer onboarding is important and how businesses can set themselves up for onboarding success.
1. Align the Onboarding Experience With Sales
Every phenomenal customer onboarding experience begins with sales. The sales team is the first line of contact with prospective clients and often sets the expectations in the customer’s minds. As such, a misalignment in expectations can lead to the customer expectations going awry, thereby derailing the onboarding experience.
To make sure that there is no disconnect between customer expectations and user experience, it is important that businesses spend more time refining and polishing their pre-sale content, talking to prospective buyers, and training sales teams on what the onboarding program should look like. An empirical way to define such expectations is to build web pages and tools that explain it. Businesses should consider keeping their resources visual to avoid any misinterpretations.
Apart from this, great emphasis must be placed on talking to potential buyers regularly. With the help of customer support tools such as live chat software, chatbot you can offer a great onboarding experience to the customers by instantly providing support to them. By providing live chat training, you can expose your sales reps to the work that your onboarding team carries out and ensure that customer-facing agents are fully aware of the product or service’s features to promise you consistent leads. This practice also helps you build credibility and makes them aware of your services slowly, thus setting the right expectations.
2. Optimize for Time
As soon as the customer makes a purchase, it is essential to capitalize on their excitement over their decision to keep motivation from dwindling and continuing the momentum after the sale has been completed. This could lead them to consider other products or services, or even worse, express buyer’s remorse and question their decision.
To prevent this from happening, businesses would do well to mine data and identify the number of customers that sign up every month or quarter to predict the time required to welcome new customers. And wherever possible, try prioritizing new customers by default since you still haven’t built an endearing relationship with them. Along with this, try to automate repetitive processes and use the time gained to optimize the customer’s lifecycle.
3. Conduct Thorough Research
Once you have optimized for time, consider researching competitor products to see the whole picture of their onboarding flow, and identify the things that work and don’t work for you. Try to build these in your onboarding flow to build trust readily and create an unforgettable first impression.
Apart from conducting research on competitor products, it’s advisable to spend as much r even more time researching the customer base of both your products, define the things that make your competitor’s product tick for their user base, and come up with measures to promote your own product that much better. Furthermore, researching the company, the industry, and the relevant team helps you understand their needs better and refine hone your product pitch to show that you understand their business and how your product can help them.
4. Provide Value Quickly
In the subscription economy of today, businesses often discuss the aha moment as the one where the customer is fully engaged. Therefore, the onus is on businesses to always their users there as soon as possible.
The “aha” moment is the time when a user internalizes the value your product provides. It’s the moment when they’re ready to buy or deepen their relationship with the product.
– Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder, and CEO, Chameleon
The aha moment is when you provide value to your customers and tell them what your product is about. Doing a good job with it by providing instant value in no more than five minutes can help increase the customer lifetime value by as much as 50%.
While sometimes it may not be possible to show the full value of your product, you can still look for opportunities to provide “micro-value” to customers as soon as possible to show the customers the nature of your offering. By providing a clear illustration of what makes your product unique, you can then lead the buyer journey accordingly to arrive at the full aha moment and put the customer at ease.
5. Introduce One Feature at a Time
While onboarding customers through the help of emails, try not to introduce more than one overarching feature at a time. The reason why this is important is that clients are often looking for that one UVP that will appeal the product to them. As such, introducing any other features might make them confused about your offering and cause them to jump ship.
Create your emails to help the customers make up their mind and not promote doubt. These emails should make the customer explain the full value of your product through the help of various features being introduced one after the other, thus also providing you with a way to stay in touch with your customer and furthering your relationship with them.
6. Experiment, Test, Optimize
The concept of A/B testing assumes an important role in customer onboarding. The onboarding experience isn’t and shouldn’t be a make-it-and-forget-it approach. The onboarding strategy requires remodeling it every now and then to keep up with new trends and ensure that it always has one foot in the door of the customer. You can conduct continuous user testing or A/B tests to this end of multiple UI elements. This will help you find the segments that different kinds of audiences are most engaged by and communicate product value in the best way possible with your customers.
Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate and out of the box thinking woman having vast exposure in Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results is her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn