If you’ve been following PostFunnel for a while, you already know that your approach to onboarding your customers can make or break their overall experience with your brand.
Overall, the goal of onboarding is simple:
Equip your new customers with everything they need to experience success with your brand.
Though the definition remains unchanged, its interpretation has evolved over the years. In addition to helping them get the most out of a specific product or service, customer onboarding today is about acclimating new followers to your brand’s overall experience.
This slight shift in approach to customer onboarding has major benefits for both parties. For the customer, it means they’ll continue to experience sustained success and growth with your company as time goes on. For your business, you’ll have gained a loyal customer for life.
Now, the question becomes:
What does this shift entail?
In this article, we’re going to discuss three key ways to evolve your approach to customer onboarding—and continue receiving value from them over time.
A Holistic Omnichannel Approach to Customer Onboarding
It’s no secret that the modern customer experience is moving in the omnichannel direction.
Really, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that many of today’s consumers want their favorite brands to be omnipresent in their lives to varying degrees.
For providers, this presents the opportunity to engage with customers like never before—and keep them engaged, too.
This all transfers to the onboarding experience in two key ways.
Omnichannel Onboarding
Back in 2012, a report from PwC suggested that by 2020, “the need for a unified consumer omnichannel experience will be complicated by the need for nearly perfect execution.”
Here in 2020, it’s clear this prediction has come true. Companies that offer a strong omnichannel experience retain an average of
89% of their customers (with non-omnichannel brands retaining only 33%).
The onboarding experience is, of course, an area in which an omnichannel approach is essential.
Proper omnichannel onboarding boils down to three things:
- Merging the physical and digital experience for your customers
- Centralizing internal data
- Enabling enhanced communication and collaboration
Merging the customer experience means allowing the user to take the next step in their journey regardless of the device or platform they’re using. Whether working through a certain process or consuming a piece of content, your customers should always be able to pick up where they left off—and be able to get back on track as quickly as possible.
This can only happen if you keep your customers’ data (and your internal data) in a centralized location that allows for omnichannel access. This ensures that the most accurate and up-to-date information is always delivered to your new users during the onboarding process right when they need it—making it easy for them to take the next step forward.
Internally, your onboarding team members need to be able to stay on the same page at all times. To do so, they must be able to communicate with each other and with the customer via multiple channels—that is, whichever channels will most efficiently allow the customer to achieve their goals.
Holistic Onboarding
As we said earlier, onboarding is about continuously helping your customers grow, not merely teaching them how to use your product.
Think about it:
If your onboarding process simply teaches them how to use one of your products, there’s a good chance that’s all they’ll ever end up doing.
But if your onboarding process looks past the product and dives into your new customer’s overall needs, new users will not only learn how to use the product in question, but will also understand how else you can help them grow in the future.
This is why obtaining a 360-degree view of the customer is essential: while your onboarding processes should help your customers quickly solve their immediate problems, observing the bigger picture will tell you what the next steps in the new relationship will be.
Balanced Use of Emerging Technology
As with pretty much every other aspect of the customer experience, onboarding is continuously being transformed by emerging technology.
Automation, in its various formats, is impactful to both the internal and customer-facing sides of the onboarding experience.
Automated Data Collection and Analysis
On both an individual and audience-wide scale, access to accurate and dependable data is essential for optimizing the onboarding experience.
On an individual level, the data you’ve collected on a specific consumer will allow you to tailor your approach to onboarding in a number of ways. On a broader scale, your data can provide insight as to how to optimize your onboarding processes to increase engagement and improve retention.
The role automation plays here is vital:
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies are making it easier to actionably interpret mass amounts of data. By analyzing your customers’ behaviors during onboarding (among a variety of other data points), these tools can help you identify improvement areas in order to enhance engagement.
To be sure, AI-based data analysis isn’t the be-all-end-all when it comes to decision making. Though these tools can help guide your onboarding team in various ways, this doesn’t mean you should follow them blindly. Rather, use them to handle the grunt work of data collection—then let your onboarding team dig into the information at hand.
Automated Customer Engagement
On the customer-facing side of things, automation technology has enabled companies to… well, automate a vast majority of processes.
A few examples:
- Email drip campaigns delivered to new users on a predetermined schedule
- On-demand engagement with instructional webinar series
- AI-based chatbots used to deliver quick answers and info to simple questions or point users to further instructional content
Again, it’s essential that all these tools be connected to a single centralized data hub, which is the only way to ensure the data being automatically presented to your users is 100% accurate.
Moreover, these tools aren’t supposed to replace your user-facing onboarding team; they’re meant to supplement them. Though you can use automation to help solve your new users’ more basic problems, your human team must be on hand at all times to tackle your customers’ larger issues—and to further engage them with your brand.
Create a Comprehensive, Controllable, and Concise Onboarding Experience
A high quality client onboarding experience in 2020 is one that’s simultaneously comprehensive, controllable, and concise.
Let’s take a closer look at what this means.
Comprehensive
The goal of your customer onboarding experience is to fully enable your new users to accomplish exactly what they were aiming for from the get-go.
(To go a step further, your onboarding process should prepare your customers to accomplish even more in the near future. Again, it’s not about generating “one-and-done” customers, but to create loyal users of your various products or services.)
At any rate, providing a comprehensive onboarding experience involves:
- Delivering instructional guides and other product- or service-focused documentation to facilitate proper usage
- Providing full access to any and all necessary data, information, and multimedia content your customers need to achieve their goals
- Being transparent with regard to policies, regulations, contractual terms, and any other such information your customers must know when engaging with your brand
While you’ll share this information with your new users over time in digestible chunks, you’ll also want to make it available at their leisure as well. A robust and comprehensive customer-facing knowledge base will ensure information never slips through the cracks on its way to your new customers.
Controllable and Controlled
During the onboarding experience, your customers will want to know that they’re always in control—while knowing at the same time that you’re there to support them whenever they need you.
Allowing your customers to take control of their onboarding experience requires two key things:
First, always provide your onboarded client with some level of choice at every touchpoint or juncture.
In the example above, Slack provides two options for new users to choose from.
Will the tool eventually lead new users through both quick tutorials? Sure.
But the simple act of allowing the user to choose which one to tackle first provides the control they want to feel during the onboarding experience.
Pacing is another area to consider when giving your new users control of the onboarding process. Here, the idea is to allow your customers to proceed at a comfortable pace while still moving into appreciating the value of your offering.
Take a look at how Acorns uses a progress bar to track a new user’s progress:
What’s interesting about this example is not only that new users have a choice as to how to proceed, but also that there’s very little pressure to reach 100% “completion”. Hypothetically, one user could link a single card and deposit a quick $100 into their account without linking a second card—while another could focus on connecting their accounts, setting up recurring investments, and tailoring their other options as they inch toward $100.
In both cases, the user can be considered properly onboarded to their level of satisfaction—but will always have a clear idea of what to do next if they want to engage further with the tool.
Concise
Generally speaking, nobody wants to sit through a long, drawn-out onboarding experience. In order to communicate all this information without making it feel like a slog for your new customers, there are two things you need to do:
- Be concise
- Provide quick wins
Regarding conciseness, you should only provide the instruction and information necessary for the specific task at hand. For example, Duolingo asks new users one question per screen when progressing through the intake form:
This allows the user to focus on one task at a time, and not become overwhelmed by multiple questions on a single screen.
What’s more, it also provides a sense of progress that likely wouldn’t be felt if the user had to scroll endlessly to fill out the form.
More than providing a sense of progress, you also want to celebrate your new user’s progress—and do so often.
Going back to Duolingo, users who make it through their very first lesson (which they do before actually inputting any contact information) are treated to a celebratory screen, given their first “experience points,” and invited to come back the following day.
That’s it. Duolingo’s onboarding process takes about five minutes, after which new users are free to go until the next day. By that point, they’ll know exactly what to do to resume their lessons.
Clear and concise, with quick wins mixed in throughout.
That’s what effective user onboarding is all about.
Wrapping Up
Client onboarding is about teaching your new users how to use your products or services in a way that will allow them to most effectively reach their goals.
Note that the endgame isn’t to teach your new users how to use your product; it’s to pave the way for them to reach their goals. In other words, your onboarding experience should always be focused on your customers—not what you’re providing them.
While part of the mission is to teach your customers everything there is to know about your product or service, your onboarding process should focus on tackling that which will get the individual up to speed and ready to move forward on their own. Once they’re able to accomplish their initial goals with your product, they’ll almost certainly stick around to learn more about what you have to offer.