What is Effective Customer Onboarding: 10 Best Practices

A well-designed onboarding process can turn new customers into long-term advocates——the goal of any business that hopes to grow and keep customer churn rates low.

That’s why it’s so important that you have a solid customer onboarding process that ensures your customers achieve the intended purpose with your product or service. ed. A comprehensive customer onboarding process is crucial for customer success and building long-term relationships.

What is customer onboarding?

Customer onboarding is a stage of the customer lifecycle when you welcome, train, and introduce them to use your products and services.

During this stage of the customer journey, a customer might start a new trial or sign up for a product or service. Then, it’s up to you to not only onboard them in the short-term, but also help improve the customer experience to the point of the customer sticking around for months (or hopefully) years to come.

During customer onboarding, your goal should be to teach your customers about why your product or service is so important to them. Talk about the problems your business’s product or service can solve for them and how it can make their lives easier. Solid onboarding is essential to helping your customers succeed, which will ensure they get the most out of your product or service and continue to use it in the long term.

Why Customer Onboarding Is Important

A smooth customer onboarding experience is the ideal way to get customers to stick with your business for the long term. An effective customer onboarding process will do several things for your company, including:

1. Boost Engagement: Customer onboarding will boost engagement with your company by ensuring customers have the knowledge and support they need to get the most out of your products and services.
2. Increase Conversions: Good customer onboarding ensures new users can get started with a product or service immediately. With simple intake forms and help learning the ropes, they’re more likely to convert and stay with your company in the long term.
3. Enhance Brand Perception: Good customer onboarding processes also involve excellent customer support. When customers have a smooth onboarding process and access to a helpful customer success team, they’ll have a better experience and view of your company and all it has to offer.

Customer Onboarding Process: 5 Steps and Best Practices

The steps of the customer onboarding process can vary from one business to another. Here are five steps and their best practices that you can use to make the best impression on new customers.

1. Sign-Up Process

The sign-up process is the first step in onboarding a new client, and it’s a vital stage. Your brand has to determine the best way to get a customer to sign up without abandoning the intake form.

Sign-Up Process Best Practices

As a best practice for the sign-up process, it’s a good idea to keep your intake form and sign-up requirements as short and sweet as possible. You can download an intake form template to help if you find yourself getting too long-winded.

Another option is to split up long sign-up forms across multiple pages. When you split up the requests over several pages, people can take a break as they move through each section. Even better, you could complete the primary sign-up process on the first page and then ask for any additional information after the user logs into their new account.

2. Welcome Email

As the next stage of the client onboarding process, consider sending out a welcome email with important information included.

Welcome Email Best Practices

To send out the best welcome email possible, you should start by saying thank you. Your welcome email isn’t just about passing along information; it’s also about recognizing customers and the value they bring to your business.

You’ll also want to include any vital details or information about your product in that welcome email. You don’t want to make the client search for the product they were looking at on your website; share all the resources they’ll need to get started right away.

Always send the customer back to your product, and don’t forget to continue using strong call-to-action language. Even though they’ve signed up with you, that doesn’t mean they won’t churn at the end of a trial period. Keep that in mind as you handle the next several customer interactions and steps of the client onboarding process.

3. Initial Login Experience

Logging into your website or app and getting to experience your product is the next step of the onboarding process. This stage is when your new customer will go through a tutorial or get to know your product through a demo.

Initial Login Experience Best Practices

During the initial login experience, customer success relies on everything running smoothly. Your goal should be to help your customers get used to using your product. During this stage, anything that helps them get going from zero to 60 as quickly as possible is key. You might set up a guided tutorial, for example, or use a set-up wizard to ensure each customer knows the exact steps to take as they install your product or begin using a program or app.

4. Product Walkthrough

Another part of the client onboarding process is the product walkthrough, an important stage for consumers. During this walkthrough, it’s helpful for customers to see how a product can take care of problems they’re already experiencing.

Product Walkthrough Best Practices

Product walkthroughs should be positive and engaging. The walkthrough takes your customer through specific tasks, such as importing data or launching a website.

Often, the simplest way for customers to learn about your product is by actually using it right away. But, you can do them one better by ensuring you provide walkthroughs that specifically address their needs.

When you create a walkthrough, ensure customers have the support they need as they get started with your product. You should also add an option to skip or pause the walkthrough, as some customers may need more time or might not need the walkthrough at all.

5. Follow-Up Communication

Finally, a necessary item to add to your onboarding checklist is a follow-up email. A follow-up email engages customers after they’ve signed up or started to use your product. These emails may contain helpful onboarding guides, tips and tricks to get started, or other guidance.

Follow-Up Communication Best Practices

To make the most of follow-up communications, you can try creating follow-up emails or texts with resources that answer commonly asked questions. You can also include short, step-by-step tutorials, which can help reduce churn by helping users get started quickly.

Rather than inundating a customer with one long email, consider sending multiple short emails or text messages. Customer success relies on them opening and reading your emails or texts—short, frequent messages are better than a singular long email.

Finally, don’t forget that you’re still proving yourself. Don’t be afraid to share studies, statistics, and other kinds of social proof to remind the consumer about the benefits of all of your brand’s products.

5 Tips and Best Practices for Crafting a Customer Onboarding Strategy

Now that you know more about what you can do to simplify customer onboarding, you need to know how to create your onboarding strategy.

Some helpful steps to get you started include:

Clearly Defining Onboarding Goals

The first step to creating a customer onboarding strategy is to ensure customers have multiple ways to sign up. You might want them to sign up through your app, a website, or a link sent to an email. You may need them to call for a demo. Whatever the process is going to be, it’s important that you figure out what it’s going to look like.

Your onboarding process will likely differ depending on how the customer signs up. For example, if the customer is looking at a demo when they choose to sign up, they may need to speak directly with a service agent that they’re working with at that time. Alternatively, someone who is signing up through the website may be able to connect through a live chat.

Personalizing the Onboarding Experience

The onboarding experience should always be customized to each user. Welcome emails should have their name or username when possible. The onboarding process should also take them through the steps necessary to do the tasks they’ve obtained your product to complete.

You must understand your users to personalize the onboarding experience. While there will be some parts of onboarding that are one-size-fits-all, you don’t want every part of the onboarding process to feel that way. You may need to design multiple onboarding paths to ensure users can finish signing up and reach their goals in the shortest number of steps.

Some options might include using a self-service model, which allows customers to sign up and onboard themselves, a low-touch model, which offers some key features (such as chat support), or a high-touch model, which includes highly personalized onboarding support for those in need of the most guidance.

Starting With a Strong First Impression

Put each customer’s needs at the top of your mind because the first impression of your product is the most important of all. The customer needs to see the value of the product immediately, or you could risk them walking away from your product (which hurts your churn rate).

One way to help customers get a great first impression is by making it simple to get started. When a customer logs into your service, they should quickly see a tutorial or way to get started. There should also be easy access to customer service, whether that includes a chatbot, live agent, phone number, or email they can use to reach out.

You can also include a simple FAQ or knowledge base that customers can access for quick and easy answers in a pinch.

Making the Product/Service Value Clear Quickly

A key part of customer success is showing customers why your product or service is of value to them. One way to do this is by using feature callouts.

Feature callouts are typically simple banners that you use within the new user portal or dashboard. These callouts might also work as popups during a tutorial or as they browse the dashboard or product for the first time.

Don’t mistake these simple popups for a tutorial. They should be short and sweet but show why your product is so good for the customer.

In addition to these popups, you may want to include interactive training material, a resource center, a chat agent (such as Podium’s AI Employee, which can respond to customer inquiries immediately), and even routine check-ins from live agents.

When you make your product’s value clear and provide excellent customer service along the way, new customers are less likely to churn and more likely to stay on board for the long haul.

Establishing Clear Communication Channels

Finally, don’t ignore the importance of having clear communication with your users. As you set up your new onboarding processes, it’s vital to come up with multiple ways for them to get in touch with the team. You may opt for chat agents, social media messaging software, email, phone, or other communication channels.

You need to be with your customers during every step of the onboarding process and customer journey if you want to reduce your overall churn rate, so making it easy to get in touch and get the excellent service your customer success team can provide is essential. Customer success is your company’s success, so be sure customers know how to reach out and how long it will take for you to get back to them.

The Best Customer Onboarding Software

Working to meet your customers’ needs is a part of the sales process. But, to get customers to go through the onboarding process and keep them engaged once they’re ready to try your product, you need to ensure every part of the customer journey is nothing but smooth sailing.

Podium’s AI Employee can help with your onboarding process. Your AI Employee responds instantly and communicates with your customers around the clock. Podium’s AI Employee works tirelessly, offering rapid customer service support, responding to customers with human-like language, and providing your team with an extra set of hands during your busiest times.

Ready to learn more about how Podium’s AI Employee can boost your customer experience? Watch a demo.