Some businesses do not fully appreciate the importance of the customer onboarding process. The reality is, a bad first impression can lose money. 

If you’ve found yourself in this situation, you must feel like kicking yourself. But it’s something that can be fixed, and quite easily too. In fact, the guidance and advice we share below you can take away and put into action today. 

We first look at customer onboarding and why it’s important before taking a deep dive into the process, the best practices to follow, measuring success, and the key mistakes to avoid. 

We also explain the big opportunities that automation and technology can offer to vastly improve your customer onboarding process.

Let’s dive in.

About customer onboarding and why it’s important

Customer onboarding is the process of welcoming and signing up a new customer for your services or products. It’s a broad phase that can involve everything from initial sales calls to negotiating contracts, setting up payments, and feedback meetings. 

In many cases, it’s this initial process that’s the most important. A relationship has not yet been established with a customer. They may have paid you but received no results, so steps need to be taken to fill them with confidence that they’ve made the right choice. 

Success in this early phase can have a lasting impact too. Research published in the Harvard Business Review has long-established that it costs more to win new customers than it does to retain existing ones. That all comes down to strong relationships, which begin with the first handshake. 

How to onboard new customers - a step-by-step guide

Every business is different, and the needs of their customers may vary, but a good onboarding process usually has the same objectives: setting expectations, removing barriers for the customer, and delivering results quickly.  

Here are six important steps you can follow to give new customers the best onboarding experience possible:

Step 1: Define onboarding goals and success criteria

The best place to begin, before you do say hello to a single customer, is to decide what a successful process looks like. This is your definition of “done”. Your process should build to that conclusion. 

A good way to approach this is to think about what your customer wants. What will they want to achieve, and then ask how you can deliver it. This is otherwise known as the “first value moment”.

For a project management tool, first value might be a team completing its first project. For an accounting platform, it might be the first reconciled month. For a service business, it might be the first deliverable the client signs off on.

With your value in your mind, give yourself an estimate of the time it will take to get there, and as we’ll see next, build a process to get to that point. 

Step 2: Send a welcome email and confirm next steps

Whenever you receive that first contact, it’s important to follow up in good time. If it’s a purchase, that could come in a matter of minutes. For services, that could be a few hours, but the sooner the better in many cases. 

The purpose of a welcome email is to do four things: 

• Thank the customer for reaching out or making a purchase
• Confirming the enquiry or sale
• An explanation of what happens next
• Sharing information about their point of contact 

It’s vital not to overwhelm at this stage. Focus on delivering clarity and providing reassurance. 

Step 3: Run a kickoff or welcome call

Depending on the nature of your business, a welcome call may be a necessary step to take. This is where you can get to know your customer and begin to forge a working relationship with them, with a clear understanding of their needs and aims.  

A good kickoff agenda covers: 

• The customer's goals and how they'll measure success
• Who's who on both sides, including roles and decision-makers
• The onboarding timeline, with dates and owners for each milestone
• What you need from the customer, such as data, access, or approvals
• How you'll communicate moving forward

When you have a meeting, it’s good practice to follow up. This could be with a quick summary, or reaffirming the agreed next steps. 

Step 4: Guide customers to first value

This is the most important step in the onboarding process. Again, depending on the nature of your business, it involves showing your customer the path to achieving their first valuable outcome.  

For example, if you offer lead tracking software, that first value could be the first independently recorded lead enquiry. The steps building up to this could involve clear checklists, video tutorials, walkthrough or demo calls, or weekly check ins from staff.  

Once a customer sees that first value, their more likely to be happy and satisfied and stick around in the long run. It’s important to reach this stage quickly, however. Vague promises about returns months down the line will see any clients walk. Be specific and as accurate as possible. 

Step 5: Deliver training and product education

A big part of the success of the onboarding process is providing training and education to customers about how to get the most out of the product or service.

For example, you may create software that may require at least an induction to use. This could be delivered in a personable way by a member of staff, or it could come in the form of video demos or written guides.

The more forms you can provide information in, the better. 

Step 6: Gather feedback and hand off to ongoing success

In order to measure the success of your new customer onboarding process, it’s vital to track key metrics. We dive into this in greater detail below, but by sending out the likes of surveys or holding wrap-up conversations you can get fantastic insights into the process.

Honesty is key, and sometimes the truth hurts, but if you really want to improve, it’s important to listen to all feedback, good and bad, and act upon it where necessary. When you create your own customer onboarding process you can use the feedback to further improve as necessary.

Download our free customer onboarding checklist

We covered a lot in that last section, and to save you having to keep referring to this page, we’ve created a free customer onboarding checklist that you can download and print off. 

It covers the full onboarding process, covering what you’ve found here in this guide, from welcome emails through to training, all adaptable for your own company.

To download the free customer onboarding checklist, click here. 

How can you measure the success of customer onboarding?

Before you undertake any work on improving or optimizing your customer onboarding process, it’s vital to put in place methods to measure the results. This way, you can see how effective the new system is and can identify problematic areas to improve. 

Let’s take a look at some of the key metrics to look at and to start recording when you launch the new system:

• Time to first value - this is usually the number of days between purchase or sign-up and the delivery of the first meaningful result. For example, if you’re a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) agency, customers may expect sales from the ads generated within the first month. If that isn’t happening, you may see a spike in cancellations—our next key metric.
• Cancellation rate - it’s important to determine how long your onboarding process is. That could be a week or a month, but once you know it, you can examine the number of cancellations made in that period. A high cancellation rate is indicative of a major problem, but it can’t tell you the full picture, which is why you need to look at the below too.
• Completion rate - the completion rate is the percentage of new customers who finish the full onboarding process. A low completion rate may point to obstacles, confusion and a process that feels overwhelming. 
• Engagement rate - linked to completion rate, engagement rate is the measurement of customers who perform key actions, like syncing data from other accounts, inviting teammates, or completing a workflow. If engagement is low, cancellations could soon follow. 
• Customer satisfaction scores - one of the biggest metrics you can track to help improve your process is feedback forms that ask customers to score the process. Low scores clearly indicate errors. You can then follow up with customers to get more information, or you can look at the next key metric.
• Support ticket volumes - if you’ve received more than a few support tickets from new customers during that early phase, then you can analyze their content to see what the problems are, and then take action to right them.

The idea is to track all of these key metrics together. That way, you’ll have a fuller picture of your current set-up and can deduce clear reasons for any areas requiring improvement.

Key onboarding mistakes to avoid

As well as the best practices, it’s also important to be aware of the potential traps and pitfalls you could fall into. Some of the key mistakes we’ve seen people make include:

• Overwhelming customers early - it’s exciting when you get a new customer, but don’t let that excitement translate into a mass of content early on. Too many emails too soon can cause things to go ignored, for example. It can be better to drip-feed information or keep things running in line with a reasonable pace for your customer type.
• Treating all customers the same - it’s important to appreciate that a one-size-fits-all process is unlikely to work. Different customers come with different expectations, goals, and technical confidence. If you don’t adapt the process, you could lose business.
• Letting momentum slip - in the early stages, a new customer is enthusiastic and keen to move forward. If too much time passes after the initial sign up, they may lose interest and even go to a competitor.
• Having no clear definition of the end of the process - if you haven’t set key milestones for your onboarding process, it could drift on aimlessly, which is bad for both customers and staff.
• Messy handoffs - in companies where there are multiple teams who fulfil different responsibilities, if the transition from one to the other is sloppy, clients could grow annoyed. Watch out for things like teams failing to share information and poor communication to the client about what’s happening next. You can head here to learn more about what makes a good client onboarding experience here.
• Ignoring silent customers - sometimes, you may find customers grow quiet during the sign up process. This is rarely a good thing. It could, for instance, mean they’ve gotten stuck somewhere. You can introduce alerts and reminders to keep you informed of things like this.

By keeping a keen eye out for any of these potential issues, you can ensure your process works efficiently and smoothly. 

How to automate and scale customer onboarding

If you’re looking to achieve greater efficiencies with your customer onboarding process, you could look to introduce automation.

This refers to the process of onboarding tasks being conducted as part of a workflow, with triggers put in place to advance through it. 

For example, when a new customer completes a contact form, they could receive an automatic email with an invite to book a first consultation. If no meeting is booked, the workflow could trigger a reminder email. 

Advanced automation, such as what you can find here at Onthen, can handle more complex steps, like uploading and processing ID documents. If your competitor is still asking for documents to be scanned and sent over by email, then that extra leg work might put customers off.

By automating these simple administrative tasks, customers can work through onboarding quickly and with minimal fuss. A quick system also looks professional and can offer a strong first impression. 

To learn more about customer onboarding and how you could improve it with automation, just head here.