It was haywire when the entire world had to get used to pandemic impacts. Although it wasn’t pleasant in any way, organizations had to shift to the remote criteria. It was a whole new experience for everyone, as nobody knew how it would be, but surprisingly there seems to be bright opportunities in remote operations. And, of course, in remote customer onboarding!
Read on to know how remote customer onboarding can do so many things that you never thought could have been possible!
Mr. Puneet Kataria shares his experience and observation on how customer success teams can be agile in the Customer Success Vodcast hosted by tl;dv! So this article is in context with the viewpoints shared in the podcast. You can listen to the full vodcast here. 👉 tl;dv x CustomerSuccessBox Vodcast.
What’s the key to value?
Every customer success team during the onboarding, buzz around the term “Early value”, the question is how does it all start and even delivered?
Learn this out, there are two things to it!
Value promise: The proposition made by the sales and marketing team as a promise.
Value delivered: The promise over time is seen in action and reality is when you call it delivered.
If you are wondering, how do you know if the value is delivered then ask yourself a question, “How seamlessly has your product been deployed in their day-to-day business?”
And this leads you to a place, whether the customer onboarding was done right? Exactly, that is the duration when the value has to be delivered.
The agenda of some of the companies might be to successfully deliver a value repeatedly and some go on thinking, how about increasing the CLTV or customer retention or even product adoption? All at the stake of a constant and consistent stream of value!
Adding to the key elements of value, are onboarding, product iterations, new features enablement, and closed feedback systems aid them to extract the right value.
Suggested Read: How to deliver customer success remotely?
Remote customer onboarding tips!!
“Effort to value” – it’s the metric that defines the minimum effort taken by the customers to enjoy the value delivered. Thus ensuring to take tiny bits of the mental energy of the customer’s mind to enjoy what we promised, not only reduces the “time to value” but also causes retention.
Do you see where this is going? Two targets struck from one arrow! Click here to check out the Customer Onboarding guide!
3 crucial stages of remote customer onboarding
Focus on specific use cases
When asked to the customers it is obvious to expect vivid use cases of different degrees. Your point is to identify the vital ones to bring them early value.
Know, “Why they brought your product in the first place”. Secondly, “What do they want to achieve in the coming three months?” Gets you to the specifics right there!
Though it is all discussed during the time of acquisition, it is better to always confirm and allow them the time to express the degree of their needs.
Pro tip: How to conduct Remote QBR
It’s time for “Effort to value”
As discussed earlier, within the limit of your technology that is solving problems, needs a minimum effort from the customers.
The hack to this is not to use an exclusive customer success tool but rather to use the existing tools in the customer’s tech stack. That’s for a simple fact, “It is difficult to nail the technology they newly brought in, and you don’t want to add one more.”
How this works is, “You don’t want to be off track but rather be in the momentum” Especially when you are training the customers for adoption and you are focussing on retention!
For illustration almost everybody uses Whatsapp, but the amazing part is Whatsapp also gives out business plans for business communication. Thus making it better for our purpose. This means you don’t have to use another tool to get them to be in your process.
Quantifying success goals
This goes with milestones and not the direct hits. So, tracking the product adoption is the must thing to see where they are!
But well, it is also vital to define, “What is a customer?” It’s up to you as to how you define them, be it on action or payments, you have to define them to get your hands dirty on the insightful data.
Remote customer onboarding touch!
Puneet says, I know the firms were used to handshakes and enjoyed in-person meetings but suddenly when things had to shift to remote, how do you think onboarding went?
Puneet referred to the SaaS animal framework, he says, while rats and rabbits in the lower tier were engaged with remote touch regardless of the shift, perhaps the actual difference is in how deer with $5,000 to anywhere between $50,000 ACV were dealt.
With traditional onboarding meetings, one had to make a quick mapping to decide, who will they continue to deliver success and whom to drop.
Bombshell: You don’t have to make that call in a remote customer onboarding!
Scale and shine
Yes, contrary to personal handshake onboarding, remote customer onboarding could scale in terms of the number of customers without sacrificing quality.
Whether it is low or medium tiers, all are scaled! That’s the benefit of Google meetings over in-person meetings. And the astonishing part is just like online learning, the recording sessions with the customers are repeatable and self-serviceable. When in uncertainty they can always rewind the onboarding recording sessions in the process which in turn is levitating product adoption!
A greater coverage
The question to your logical brain is, “How many successful meetings would you be able to schedule in a day: in-person meetings?” 8 or 9 being peaked, is 5 a successful run of meetings?
Now, do you understand that remote is scalable? Then add one more touchpoint in the process: “Remote touch”. It depends on how you deploy it! It can either be high, medium, or low touch, and importantly is scalable!
“If you want to get more coverage, the remote is your only choice” – Puneet
Check out the Customer Onboarding Framework for B2B SaaS.
How to scale remote customer onboarding?
Earlier you were seeking customer success heroes, now study the tactics of those heroes and deploy them in the playbooks and share the same with all the teams across!
Cuts down the need for many heroes and it is scalable and shareable to anybody now regardless of where you are at one point in time, yields a result of you being in multiple points at the same time.
How did profits persist in the remote scenarios?
In the limelight of low bandwidth and a hit in spending, there was no choice for new acquisitions and they leveraged customer retention to stay persistent.
While struggling and hustling, with a forced world order to adopt a remote scenario, didn’t arise a temporary solution but rather an opportunity. The productivity is in the teams’ work and not the number of hours spent!
Key takeaways!
- Bring on remote touch, pick any customers and take them upwards to $10,000.
- Work on developing the playbooks and not customer heroes with the remote processes.
- Take away the notion of scalable meetings = poor quality, rather adopt the systems that your customers are already leveraging to make the right hits.
- Stay true to your promises of value in the website to have delivered through the lifetime of their subscription!
Did you know that we all are subscribers rather than owners now? You subscribe to the product that makes you love it until they continue to deliver a stream of value throughout the subscription. Just like how you subscribe to a channel on YouTube!
To put it in quotes, the CEO of CustomerSuccessBox – Puneet Kataria, puts it elegantly!
“I don’t use the word buying anymore because we are not. Nobody is owning anything anymore. We live in a subscription economy. So we are subscribing. As a subscriber, I want to be absolutely loving your product throughout the lifecycle of my subscription”.
~ Puneet Kataria
