The growing attention to digital transformation has caused the paradigm shift to give out the best customer experience in the digital platform. Otherwise, one is most likely to lose to the fiercer competition, as everybody is buckling up to increase their marketing spend with an agenda to recoup the revenue. Especially in SaaS, customer onboarding is the start for impressing customers with the best customer experience. But it’s the issue of emotional disconnect during the Customer Onboarding process that needs attention!
Likewise, the behaviors of the customers also exhibit that they like to initiate a purchase from the brands who value building an emotional connection with them as per the study from Gallup. These companies are likely to increase their sales by 85% compared to their competitors.
Suggested Read: Customer Onboarding guide
The fact is sales and marketing can sell to the customers because they emotionally connect with the goals of the customers and that’s their proposition to add value to customers’ purchases.
This isn’t any different to the customer success teams as well. Remember customers don’t care about your product, they care if it can help them. If it’s taking too long than ever to onboard customers then revise the methodology!
The focus must be on guiding them and not on making them consume products.
Agreed that it involves technical descriptive sessions to help them use the product but that isn’t enough! It’s about setting a goal and guiding them in their way to achieve it. That’s how you emotionally connect!
Be a catalyst between their goals and your product!
You’ve been seeing it all wrong by thinking they care about the product! You’ll make them do what they need to do, by leveraging the relationship you created by emotionally connecting their goals to the usability of the product.
Don’t just show them a view of technical customer onboarding.
That is not just the point of your role as a CSM. It is about helping them align to the technical process while reminding them of their reason for buying the product in the first place and how the new business relationship can aid in achieving it.
That was about changing perspectives to handle emotional disconnect! More on the effective customer onboarding plan, here.
The effective onboarding plan to address emotional disconnect during customer onboarding:
Figure out when the customers are going to be onboarded.
It all starts knowing when and how to onboard the customers to comprehend this process. Milestones come into the picture only after onboarding customers. Or trying to comprehend the value potential in their collaboration with us is important to know before making a plan. Note that the customer onboarding differs on the type of customer itself. and declaring they are onboarded, happens only when you contemplate what progress they have made in the market.
Extra Resource: SaaS Customer Onboarding Framework
Layout the plan as to how to get them to call “Onboarded.”
Understanding what stage they are currently in and where they are heading to is the most important thing to decide. So that shall have a plan that differs depending on the type of customers. The next step is to understand how to reach point B and the consecutive ones.
Figuring out what integrations they need in the software and what would you need to get done beyond the software and who all are being part of it. Similarly from your end, layout the plan for a perfect onboarding.
Now with that clear, it’s easier to identify the ways to intervene with them to move them along the path. What do you think is appropriate to them at their maturity levels is also another question to think about at this stage,
What’s on the plate after onboarding?
Identify the next steps once they reach the threshold. This needs to be conquered as the customers must know where they are headed after onboarding and the handing-off process must be clean to avoid chaos.
It’s important that you understand if you need an Onboarding Specialist to help CSMs fix the emotional disconnect during the Customer Onboarding process.
Now it is about how long it takes to reach there.
The KPI to track at this time is Time to Early Value or “Time To First Value.” If they reach the goal before the TTFV then it’s great! Otherwise, intervene to know where it is staying behind, is it from your end or their end, and if so, how to take it ahead?
Incorporating this into the situation can lead to moving the onboarding process correctly.
Conclusion
The proposition you are making in the onboarding process is to emotionally carry the connection that the sales team built. If you completely disconnect from the hand-off process then customers find excuses to stay aligned with you. Hence fix emotional disconnect during customer onboarding with an effective plan!
