Characteristics of a Well-Designed Customer Onboarding Solution

A well-designed customer onboarding solution leaves customers feeling satisfied and confirms that they made the right choice by selecting your business, which ultimately can help them stay customers for life. 

The greatest challenges regarding sales and eventual onboarding come from miscommunication and misunderstanding between customers, business, and product. Shifting to a more digital experience can alleviate a lot of confusion or stress for both customers and team members.

Thanks to tools like conversational AI, onboarding solutions are becoming more automated and less time-consuming, and they offer a smoother experience for all parties involved. Industries like finance or banking are some of the fastest-growing users of digital onboarding. It has become a critical tool in maximizing revenue and lowering costs, while simultaneously providing a better customer experience.

One of the most challenging aspects of having a business and providing a specific product is selling it and engaging with customers. Once a sale is secured, a slight sigh of relief can follow. The customer chose your business and product for a reason; they believe in it and your company. The company is now responsible for keeping the customer happy and satisfied. You can do this by ensuring that the process or experience of utilizing the product is exactly what you promised in the sales pitch. It needs to fulfill every promise made in the sales and marketing efforts. It is the responsibility of the business and team members to create an easy, seamless customer experience from start to finish and provide all the support necessary to make the customer happy. Below we outline the best characteristics of a successful customer onboarding solution.

What is Customer Onboarding?

Customer onboarding is the process of getting newly acquired customers familiar and comfortable with your product. A well-designed customer onboarding solution should include in-depth videos and tutorials, 24/7 access, guidance, support, and “celebrations” when a customer successfully uses your product. Many of these can be provided by conversational AI. This conditions customers to stay with your company because they are interacting correctly with your product and being successful on their own while having support via company-run chatbots.

Where is the Value in Customer Onboarding?

While the sales and marketing process is essential for unifying customers and businesses, the onboarding process can further establish and stabilize the continuing relationship between the parties. A well-designed onboarding process increases customer lifetime value (LTV), reduces churn (or the measure of loss a company suffers in subscribers or customers for a given time period), and turns new users into loyal customers. The importance of onboarding can be seen in the following: 

• A company receives a majority of its revenue from established customers
• Satisfied customers are one of the top sources of referrals
• Customer retention lowers acquisition costs and maximizes revenue

So, customer onboarding is critical to customer retention and the growth of your business. 

Top Characteristics of a Well-Designed Onboarding Solution

#1. Know Exactly Who Your Customers Are

Make sure that before creating an onboarding solution, you know your buyer persona through and through. By utilizing chatbots, the onboarding process can be personalized by pulling data from previous conversations or interactions between a customer and the company. This customization makes it well-known that you the provider, understand every challenge, concern,  obstacle, or confusing aspect that may arise and offer ideal solutions and support. This information helps customers feel supported, enlightened and know that the onboarding process is customized just for them. 

#2. Show the Value of the Product and Define Expectations

Yes, the customer believes in and has decided on your product, but it is important to reemphasize the value and reasons it can help them in their unique scenario. The top valuable factors, uses, and solutions should be reiterated so that the product’s value is never lost, even when a customer experiences frustration or potential setbacks.

Include specific examples of how the product addresses those previously mentioned challenges or obstacles. Add personalized aspects to the solution that are tailored to the particular customer. Product tours, videos, Q&A guides, and chatbots are vital tools that can simplify the onboarding process, show the value of the product, and allow customers to reach their goals even faster. If they run into an obstacle, they will be better prepared to deal with it and not give up because they know the value of using the product. There are many tools available to them (like the ones mentioned above) to help guide them through and make perfect use of the product.

#3. Let Customers Define Their Goals

Each customer has specific goals and measurements unique to their particular need for using your product. Allow them to clearly define their version of success, and how they want your business to help them achieve it, and then help them to create measurable goals to reach along the way.

#4. Measure Your Success

When AI is incorporated into an already well-scoped onboarding process, the business and customer benefit tremendously. It is important to analyze metrics associated with success and use them to your company’s advantage. 

Having some insights regarding brand engagement is vital. It can help you to track progress (or setbacks) and plan accordingly. You can gain valuable insight as to where customers are struggling to understand the product and how they are using it. Conversational AI can help by tracking login activity, analyzing usage of features, and unfortunate onboarding abandonment.

Progress reports are another valuable aspect of a digital onboarding process. Companies can personalize onboarding components like training and scheduling and design it for the costumes convenience. Conversational AI is able to assist at any time of the day without the need for human interaction on the company’s side. By allowing this to be at the customer’s convenience, new users have better chances to perceive and retain information regarding your product.

Constantly ask for customer feedback, check in with them, and identify improvement points. Surveys can be deployed, Q&A submissions or chatbots checking that pop-up to check-in are examples of this feedback aspect of the onboarding process. This way, the business is frequently aware of what is working best and where improvements are warranted. 

#5. Maintain Consistent Communication

After the deal is done, products are sold, and onboarding has begun, communicating with the customer is vital. Pop-up chat and automated emails are a great, convenient way to stay in contact with customers (without a mundane task for a human team member). With conversational AI tools, they can automatically offer to send tutorials and guides if the customer requests them. Staying in contact with your customers is crucial to success and making sure they feel valued and supported. 

#6. Impress, Impress, Impress

Every time someone from your business interacts with a customer or potential customer, it should be a positive, helpful experience. It should reassure the customer that they are making the right choice, made the right choice, and have (or will have) support with your product. Deliver an outstanding performance so customers will praise your product, business and refer others to you. Companies that stay focused on customer support have a far greater reach and goodwill with new users. These goals can be achieved with conversational AI tools. Support is automatically offered, even when business hours are done for the day.

Onboarding solutions should not just be about upselling or convincing customers of the value. The entire experience of doing business with you should be customer-oriented and have the best customer service. 

Simply put, businesses should be cognizant of the following to make the onboarding process as positive as possible.

• Personalize every customer’s experience by answering any questions, easing concerns, and tailoring your solution to the customer’s needs, specifically. Utilize previous conversations and interactions between customers and your business to customize the experience and make the customer feel even more appreciated.
• Explain things clearly and concisely. Break things down in as simple a way as possible. Only ask a new user to do one thing at a time and don’t overwhelm them. Make use of tutorials, step-by-step guides, videos, and chatbots to obtain the best results.
• Have 24/7 availability. If they get stuck or are having trouble, offer resources to help them quickly and efficiently. Utilizing conversational AI will make the entire onboarding process better and allow the business to get valuable feedback on where things are falling short. Should the proper continue into regular business hours, have new-user team members available to assist as well.
• Acknowledge every milestone a customer has with your product. Encouraging and rewarding success creates lifelong customers who feel valued and supported.

Digitalizing the onboarding process is helping businesses engage with more customers and create more helpful processes. Customer feedback is highly valuable and allows businesses to see what is working and what isn’t. Chatbots are able to constantly interact with customers, offer round-the-clock support and try different solutions relating to customer onboarding. Testing, learning, and improving are three skills essential to business success regarding onboarding solutions. When designing your onboarding solution, keep these characteristics in mind, understand your customers and find out what they want and what is best for them, and keep testing to improve continuously.

Ready to learn more? Get the definitive guide on conversational AI for onboarding!