Outstanding Customer Experiences Begin With Onboarding

Increase customer loyalty and reduce customer churn with strategic onboarding.

A great way to nurture customer loyalty and increase lifetime value of each account you land is to personalize the initial experience they have with your company. The goal is to make the customer completely comfortable from the start and help educate them to get the most benefit from your products and services.

Psychologically, humans naturally prefer consistency of experience with minimal disruption. Prospects desire a good understanding of what they signed up for when they enlist your company. This dictates a seamless, strategic process for onboarding a prospect from contact to customer. The onboarding effort should be consistent across the company from marketing to customer service reps to the sales team.

These efforts immediately show the prospect you are interested in doing business with them and value them as a person and not a “target”. Once the contact becomes a customer, there should be a predetermined schedule of multi-step events that offer the customer a positive experience while serving your company’s goal to nurture loyalty.

When planning your onboarding process, start with customer centric-goals. Assemble data on past customer transactions and data collected to develop an understanding of their needs and desires. Systemize the communications to address questions and build a comfort level with the new customer. Offer ongoing outreach and training without being overbearing. Measure results with brief customer surveys. Stay focused on the goal of offering positive, personalized experiences for customers.

Here are some compelling reasons to launch a strategic onboarding initiative.

According to Hubspot:

• You’ll lose 75% of your new users within the first week.
• 40 to 60% of free trial users will use your product once and never come back.
• Most revenue comes from existing customers.
• Happy customers become your top referral sources.
• Customer retention lowers acquisition costs and increases revenue.

Remember, customer nurturing should begin the first time a prospect engages your brand. Building trust and rapport often starts with clear messaging on your website or outreach marketing. The prospect must trust your company, process and messaging to engage a person to initiate the onboarding process.

Contact me to discuss sharpening your communications focus for better customer retention and loyalty.