Customer Onboarding’ is an umbrella term that is frequently used to describe the entire process that customers go through when they start their journey of using your service or product. The onboarding experience of the customer will define the ongoing relationship you have with your customer.
What is Onboarding Drop off ?
You may have had a situation where you wanted to learn a new habit. Maybe you wanted to learn a new programming language; you must have enrolled in a course, learned it for a week, and then probably got busy with life or just couldn’t continue learning. This period is called the onboarding drop-off period and needs to avoid. Most of us face this, sometimes more so if your product is solving a complex problem and requires some education and learning at the customer’s end
So what can you do to avoid onboarding drop-offs, of course, there is an entire onboarding framework that has to be put together but that aside very specifically you must know some of the things that have really found to be very effective to avoid onboarding drop-offs.
To know more about customer onboarding, check the Customer Onboarding framework.
Where in the onboarding process are we loosing the most users ?
According to a popular research study, most of the SaaS firms lose 75% of their new users within the first week. The Gartner Group studied that 80% of the company’s future income can come from 20% of the existing customers. However, it’s unfortunate that B2B companies put only 20% of their marketing efforts toward customer retention.
How to avoid onboarding drop-offs ?
Steps to prevent Onboarding drop-offs –
Set Specific Timelines
The first way is calling out a plan for onboarding. Of Course, the plan is going to be specific but with timelines and getting that sign-off from the business buyer of your product and calling out in that plan, the effort is what will be required from the customer side.
They need to spend that amount of effort and time and hence they should be reserving that slot and calling out timelines just not in terms of two weeks but rather calling it out on start date and end date. This sort of gives them exactly what to expect, what timelines to expect, and a lot of times when you know you are going to put that proposal in front of them what you’d see that they’ll come back to you saying, “oh you know let’s start off this onboarding couple of weeks later rather than kicking it off right away.”
Pro tip: Check out the Customer Onboarding Framework to get an action plan for designing your B2B SaaS Onboarding process.
Appoint Single Point of Contact (SPOC)
To make sure that the onboarding plan really gets followed you need SPOCS for each of those pieces and although the word SPOC has a single point of contact you might have a business SPOC, you might have a technical SPOC, an administrative SPOC, or Data Ops SPOC depending on the nature of your product.
Those could be some of those key champions that you will develop over time which will essentially enable all the ingredients to make sure that your customers do not drop off during the onboarding. Necessary things like setting the right expectations, putting in the plan, getting the sign of setting the timelines and knowing exactly who to reach out to, and getting that agreement right up front before you kick off onboarding itself.
Suggested Read: The ultimate guide to customer onboarding
If you’re looking for a customer success software that could help you stream line your onboarding process, book a demo now!
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
