Perfect Onboarding is the first step to customer retention

Customer Onboarding includes all steps that you take to get your customer acquainted with your product so that they can achieve early value. It includes step by step trainings, tutorial, support and milestone to track whether they are in the right track to achieving early value

You need to proactively provide all resources to empower your customer and keep them engaged. The type of resource and help will depend a lot upon the customer segment. Some of the steps that you can use are -

1)welcome email moment your customer signs up

2)kickoff call to ensure your customer and account manager are on the same level of expectation

3)Product guides or tutorials to them them step by step through the setup process and start using your product

4)Educational emails to hep the customers in case they are stuck

5) Setting up product adoption milestones to check how the customer is doing in the product adoption journey

6Checkup calls for interventions and feedback

7)Quick celebrations on milestones achieved

8) Proactive outreach in case customer is behind or stuck in their journey.

Most common reasons why customers churn is due to customer not getting value out of your product. Customer Onboarding is the first step to solving this. Right customer onboarding ensures your customer reach the"Aha" moment in the least possible time which sets the path to a strong relationship

Onboarding tools helps to improve the onboarding process by guiding the customer on how to use your product effectively. Some of the common tools that are available are-

1) Tutorial based onboarding tools that allows you to add tooltip style actions to your product to guide the customer.

2)Email based user onboarding tools where you can guide the customer through emails based on the user analytics

3)In- app messaging tools where you can guide the customers through in app messages 4)customer success softwares where you can create playbooks and journeys to guide the customer in each stage of their onboarding journey.You can directly track the product telemetry data, configure preset rules to know where the customer is in their product adoption journey and know intervention is needed and what type of intervention will help the customer to achieve early value

Few tips that can help you improve your customer onboarding experience are -

1) Understand the use case the customer is trying to solve

2) Have a successful kickoff meeting to set the expectation.

3)Each stage in the customer journey needs to be time tracked.

4)Keep a track of where the customer is in the onboarding journey and provide proactive support if s/he is behind

5) Have regular catchup calls to take feedback and understand customer sentiments

6)Using cohort data on onboarding will help you understand the onboarding performance over time and can also point out lacunae that can be improved

Some of the customer onboarding best practices are -

1)Identify who will own the onboarding process- CSM or Onboarding specialist

2) Understand the use cases the customer is trying to solve by using your product

3)Set clear expectation in the beginning itself

4)Determine how onboarding will take place- self serve, Low touch or High touch

5) Determine the onboarding journey of the customer

6)identify the milestones that you want to achieve in the onboarding journey

7)Create playbook with definite tasks to be done at each step of the onboarding journey

8)Be in constant touch with the customer for feedback 9)make sure you have enough learning resource and tutorials to guide the customer at each step of their onboarding journey

1.Time to first value

2.Post onboarding CSAT,NPS

3.Milestones achieved

4.Overall product adoption

Customer Onboarding playbook is a repeatable process that you create for a same segment/cohort of customers that delivers consistency and helps customers achieve early time to value.

Customer onboarding journey is the path that you identify that customers should underatke to achieve early time to value. The onboarding journey map will have various stages with milestones identified for each stage. Each stage will multiple steps that the customer and the CSM needs to do to ensure the customer is on the right path to success

The customer onboarding specialist guides the customer from the very first moment s/he signs up for your product and guides and supports him/her till s/he achieves the early success. The customer onboarding specialist ensures the customer is in the right track on the ideal customer onboarding journey crafted