The one sure shot way to ensure customer stickiness is a successful onboarding process. Simply put, if customers don’t know how to use it, they won’t. The flip side is that when a customer is successfully onboarded, they become THE customer voice for your product or service … and that’s just invaluable!
Welcome to 2024! Wishing all you readers good health and happiness in the year ahead.
The holiday season accompanied by the exchange of gifts – always so festive. As with any newly acquired gift (whether a product or a service), one would want to use it and explore feature-functionality and options, see what we like-don’t like and form an opinion. In that regard, some things are easier to explore than others and some warrant a bit more effort in terms of assembly, learning ‘how-it-works’, before we get to using the product / service to it’s full capability. There’s definitely something to be said for simplicity and ease of use, and the direct connection it has to user satisfaction.
Extrapolating this to subscription technology products and the business world, the word ‘complexity’ is an understatement. So many variables to consider – size of the organization, industry it belongs to, type of product, the problem it solves, specific use cases, number of users, size of data, history of the data, real-time refresh of the data / not – there are innumerable factors impacting true user adoption. Yet, it’s always surprising to see how little organizations invest in defining a rock solid Customer Onboarding process. Businesses spend an insane amount of time/money/effort upfront, into acquiring a customer, and an insanely LITTLE amount of time/money/effort into actually ensuring that that customer is then able to use their product/service effectively. The reality is that if a customer isn’t onboarded and using the product/service within the first 60-90 days of acquisition, the risk of them running into issues with adoption is exponentially higher. As the ‘Time-to-Value’ increases, the business is effectively courting non-renewal, but not without first having run the gamut of pain points and frustrations for the duration of the subscription term. Innumerable conversations, meetings, escalations, frustrations, and threats to move on by the customer later, we now face the reality and wonder if the customer’s use case was truly satisfied in the first place.
So, do yourselves a favor and take some time to ensure that an operationally viable Customer Onboarding process, with specific, well defined, outcomes exists and is in place. Run Onboarding like a project with a start date and end date, assign owners, gather requirements, define deliverables, ownership, and milestones, and guess who’s at the hub / center of all of these moving parts? – none other than your rockstar CSM!!
Question for the Reader: When does Customer Onboarding actually begin?
a. Prior to the sale
b. At the time of sale, once the customer signs the dotted line
c. A reasonable time after the sale – every customer needs some time to catch their breath from the fast-and-furious sales process
Include your answer in the Comments section below. Feel free to add additional color.
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to seeing your responses!