The general agreement is that successfully onboarding a customer on a B2B SaaS platform involves ensuring the customer knows how to use your product. Yet, it’s often easy said than actually done, especially, when you’re looking for Customer Onboarding at Scale.
Most often, you will realize that your customers gradually start moving from the onboarding process even before they start seeing your product’s value. Understanding the value of your product is what enables a customer to get to that ‘aha moment’. This is when they see where it will save them money and/or time and create a greater experience for their customers.
To help you, we have compiled a list of the top 8 strategies that will enable you to carry out customer onboarding at scale.
8 Best Strategies for Customer Onboarding at Scale.
Well-defined Sales-to-Onboarding Handoff
Making a connection with the customer is essential before they’re onboarded. This begins with the sales to onboarding hand-off before the end of the sales cycle. This enables the onboarding specialist to take control of the situation and answer questions about the path forward after contracts are signed. This ensures a smooth and comfortable hand-off. The customer begins to understand that the onboarding manager will take them through their customer journey.
Most often, what happens is that too much of the customer information is not shared or lost during the hand-off process. Instead of interviewing the customer again to understand key customer requirements, their desired outcomes, business values, etc., it’s better to have the onboarding team present before the sales cycle ends.
Suggested Read: The Effective way to Sales, Customer Success, and Implementation Handoff
Partnership Kick-off meeting
The relationship that you have with your customers should be more of a ‘partnership’ than a ‘vendor-client’ relationship. This introductory meeting lets the onboarding team know the customer and their business well.
It’s vital to understand the customers’ expectations and what success looks like to them – with the product and the process. They know their business better than you, just like you know your software solution better than they do. So you need to understand how you can add value to their customer journey. Understanding these concepts at the beginning of the onboarding process sets everyone up to succeed.
Check out the Successful partnership kick-off template to know more!
Cross-functional collaboration
This point can’t be emphasized enough. In today’s remote world, business teams are more siloed than ever. As a result, the lack of cross-functional collaboration between teams often leads to stagnated growth. However, if you encourage them to collaborate and give them the opportunity to share resources, it can solve even the most complex business problems.
For example, the ICP (ideal customer profile) should be in harmony with the entire organization. So, getting in sync with the marketing team is essential to create personas that present your customers accurately.
The same goes for the sales teams also. Include them in the pre-sales meetings with customers and encourage them to share their experiences with them. Also, this way they get to know customers and their pain points better. This leads to a smooth transition of customers and creates a better customer experience.
A best practice for a firm’s growth is to create more cohesion among departments working toward a unified goal —long-term customer retention.
Use Data for Personalization
With the small customers, you’re most likely not talking to them, so you can’t ask them how they’re using the product. So, shift from generic onboarding messaging to personalized messaging based on what a customer has or has not adopted over the past year. Start including personalized onboarding videos in your emails that offer different information and recommendations based on the customer’s data.
Customer Education
Yes, educating your customers is crucial. Doing the same proactively is even more important. If you feel that the customer onboarding process is not moving forward as planned, probably then it’s time to focus on educating the customer.
You can do this by giving demo videos or in-product training guides. As your customers learn about features, they’ll be more willing to accept new ideas and start trusting your product.
First, understand where your customers are in the customer journey and gauge if they need any sort of help to move forward. A video academy series is a good option to start with. Providing customers with in-app tutorials and training videos is a great way to educate them about the product.
In-Product guidance
This point is in continuation to the previous one. If your team can inculcate the key adoption points and messages into in-product notifications, that can make onboarding a step further in effectiveness and scalability.
Additionally, you can leverage in-product reporting to identify new customers who are behind the ideal adoption schedule, and then leverage the human touch for those customers. This directs your employee resources toward potential risks. Therefore, it’s a clear opportunity, and it’s not too late to intervene and get the customer course-corrected.
Resource: What role can Customer Success Manager play in product management?
The right content is the game-changer
Never underestimate the value that the right content at the right time can bring to your customers and business. Try hosting Customer onboarding webinars depending on your customers and the stage at which they are in. This is an effective way to onboard a small customer effectively by giving them a personal touch.
Customers, usually, stay loyal to a firm that invests its resources in onboarding content. Customers get the first impression that they’ve been welcomed and educated as they wanted. Webinars, blogs, white papers, e-books, etc., are valuable resources for the same.
However, overloading them with onboarding content can backfire. Thus, be prudent while providing them with the content.
Suggested Read: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Onboarding
Drive Time to Value (TTV) faster
By this time, you probably know adopting which features lead to long-term customer retention. If you can identify and encourage these feature adoptions for smaller customers, that’s a good high-level approach for driving time to value faster. Furthermore, make sure that the sales team is aware of what you’re trying to drive the customer toward in that first 30/60/90 days, and enable them to drive that message forward.
Using scalable customer success software, like CustomerSuccessBox, you can develop time-bound activities and tasks for each stage in the Customer Onboarding playbook. This will help you in measuring the actual TTV. Once done, you can create intervention tasks if a customer deviates from the planned roadmap.
The focus is on demonstrating value to them. Long-term perceived value is important for long-term customer retention.
Final thoughts on Customer Onboarding at scale!
The relationship that you have with your customers should be more of a ‘partnership’ than a ‘vendor-client’ relationship. You need to give expert advice on how every detail that matters to them. Customers respect this and they’d also want to know how other customers are achieving success. This can open up an avenue for you to pitch in and say, ‘hey, let’s help you get time to value faster because we’ve learned our lessons and we’re good at correcting them’. This simple approach can help you win their trust.
The first step to creating a loyal customer starts with understanding the account health of the customer. This can happen only if you have a robust customer onboarding strategy in place.
Photo by RODNAE Productions: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-realtor-welcoming-a-client-into-the-house-8292804/
