The Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Onboarding: Checklist & Template

In an extremely competitive field the first interaction you have with new customers can determine the fate of your relationships. That's why customer satisfaction when they are onboard is crucial.

The experience your customer has when they arrive will set the stage for the rest of the relationship your customers have with your business and the journey of your customer.

Similar to a comprehensive instruction manual for users, your onboarding procedure introduces them to your products or services and, if done properly ensures they have a the best possible and enjoyable user experience.

In this article we'll look at the effects of customer success onboarding on key metrics, the key components of a checklist for onboarding, and onboarding best practices.

Skip Ahead:

•         Understanding Customer Success Onboarding
•         Impact on customer retention and satisfaction
•         Essential Components from an Onboarding Checklist      
•             Research and record customer details
•             Welcome the customer
•             For more information, contact us.
•             Make a phone call with the customer
•      Set clearly defined expectations and objectives
•             Schedule timely follow-ups
•             Track and improve
•         TABLE: Key Points of the Onboarding Process
•         Best practices to help the customer's success during onboarding
•         Personalization as well as human touch
•         regular communication as well as subsequent follow-ups
•         The measurement of success onboarding
•         Final

Understanding Success for Customers

Prior to diving into the checklists of onboarding as well as guidelines, let's start by defining what onboarding means for a customer:

The process of onboarding customers is what customers go through immediately following the purchase. The process is designed to introduce customers to your products or services, familiarizes them with its essential features and lets to gain value quicker than if they were to discover and navigate the offerings on their own.

There are three main options for customer onboarding - high-touch, low-touch, and self-serve, each offering a varying degree of contact and personalization.

1. Onboarding with high-touch involves personal contact usually person-to-person. It usually reserved for enterprise customers. Examples of support for this model of onboarding include a dedicated account manager and customized training calls regular check-ins, and an immediate support call.
2. Low-touch onboarding takes a more standard approach that requires the least amount of contact between people. The model is usually used when products or services aren't overly complicated, or the customer prefers a certain level autonomy. The types of services that support this kind of approach include emails, online courses and guides as well as community forums and online support.
3. Self-serve onboarding is completely driven by the user and is typically only available for products that are simple, typically designed to appeal to a wide population. Examples of support for the model are how-to tutorials as well as automated setup wizards Q&As, and online resources libraries.

Effect on retention of customers and satisfaction

Whatever your preferred approach to onboarding, the customer experience is a major factor in customer retention and satisfaction. Below are a few of its advantages:

• It builds trust and confidence. A smooth and comprehensive onboarding procedure assures clients they are assured of your wellbeing and that selecting you over your competitors was the right decision.
• Increases product understanding - Introducing clients to key features will ensure that they'll know what to do, when, where, and the reason to utilize these features, which will reduce confusion and frustration.
• Clear expectations are set - Onboarding explains what customers can be expecting from your product service, as well as what they can expect from them, removing any potential confusion.
• Engages customers - If they know when, what and how to use your product or service, they're more likely it.
• Reduces the need for support Customers who are educated and knowledgeable tend to be less dependent on help with basic tasks and procedures. So, by creating educated customers, you'll be able to reduce the overall demand your support team faces.

Here are some of the key performance indicators that effective customer onboarding can impact:

• It increases the value of a customer's lifetime (LTV) because your customers understand your offering are confident in you and are more enthusiastic about the product, they tend to utilize it for longer.
• Improves customer satisfaction score (CSAT) If customers have clear expectations and an understanding of the product and your product, they are less likely have a difficult time implementing your service or rely on the support of your customer. The result is a higher general satisfaction.
• Accelerates time-to-first value (TTFV) An onboarding process that is thorough helps customers adopt your offering more quickly, and get they to the point at which they are able to benefit from the product more quickly.
• Boosts upsell/cross-sell rates - Educated and content customers are more likely to buy more of your services or products. Furthermore, they are engaged in the onboarding process and you will have an invested audience tuned in to the additional services that they may get.
• Reduces customer churn - Higher customer satisfaction often correlates with less customers' churn. This positively impacts your LTV, CSAT, and the rate of cross-sells and upsells.

Essential Components of an Onboarding Checklist

Customer onboarding checklists effectively function as a guideline for the customer success manager to ensure that customers are guided to a specific way to help educate their customers. The checklist for onboarding is broken down into three distinct parts:

1.         Pre-onboarding preparation
2.         The first contact, and the welcoming process
3.         Setting clear expectations and goals

Each of these parts is crucial to help your customer success team help customers along their journey from activation to the point of adoption, and ultimately becoming life-long customers of your service. Further, each section includes its own specific line items that, together, make the actual checklist for onboarding. The items listed are:

     Pre-onboarding preparation  

1.         Research and record information about customers

     The first contact, and the welcoming process  

1.         Welcome to the client
2.         Request additional information
3.         Make a phone telephone call with the client

     Clear expectations and establishing goals  

1.         Set clearly defined expectations and objectives
2.         Follow-ups are scheduled on a regular basis.
3.         Improve and track

With a clear overview of an effective customer onboarding checklist, let's look at each item and section closer.

Pre-Onboarding prep

The section that is pre-onboarding of your experience as a user is like the foundation of a home. When laying the foundation, each intentionally-laid brick plays an crucial role in the overall foundation, and ultimately the success of the finished construction. This is also true for foundations.

No matter what model you choose for your onboarding The pre-onboarding process always is about capturing customer information. It is the goal to comprehend the specific needs of your customer and problems and complete any gaps that there may be in the customer base you serve, such as the reason they've chosen your particular product to resolve the issue.

Find and store customer information

At this stage in the onboarding process for customers details about the customer can comprise the basics such as name, email address, phone number, date of purchase, and company information.

In the end, depending on your chosen model, particularly low-touch and high-touch models, you may want to gather more information that you would were using the self-serve onboarding option. The reason is that the more data you gather today, the more customized each subsequent step will be.

Still, it's feasible to ask for too much info. In the words of Forbes, "...more than 50% of consumers will opt to not complete their account creation process in the event that they believe they are required to provide too much private information." So, the key is to strike the right balance when gathering customer data.

The first contact and the welcome process

Your first point of contact with new customers is one of the first impressions you get. While your customer is likely familiar with your company and its brand, the first touchpoint during the onboarding process is their first impression as a new customer. For many of your customers, the onboarding process will determine the future with your business.

Welcome to our customer

The next step in the process of onboarding a user when the client has bought your item or service. It's when you will greet the client. Though a welcome mailer might seem low-risk, as we've already discussed, this initial contact point is an important first impression.

A successful greeting should:

• Send a warm and welcoming greeting to the client
• Provide clear, precise, and easy-to-follow instructions for getting to the point of getting
• Refer to any resource that could prove valuable immediately
• include a single call to act (CTA)

Contact us for additional details

It is a choice dependent on the extent of your onboarding process. The high-touch process may need to receive additional information from the customer, while low-touch companies can proceed and make a phone call.

If you believe that collecting more information is necessary for your onboarding process, then the message in the customer welcome should send them to a survey such as a survey or questionnaire. Again, aim to strike an equilibrium between collecting all the data you require without asking too much of customers in the initial stages of your relationship.

After you have completed your survey, make sure you be sure to include the CTA, this time directing them to step four.

Make a phone call to the client

It's now time to set up a time for a phone call with the client. This step may seem simple compared to other steps in the checklist, it's crucial to be aware that this action sets your team and the customer up for the third last, perhaps most important section of the onboarding process that is setting expectations and goals.

This is the same step where you may join your customer with the customer's success team If you don't have one already.

Set clear expectations and goals

Create specific expectations and set goals

This final section aims to explain how you can use the product and show the way it can address their requirements or issues. It is possible to accomplish this in the meeting you set up in the previous step.

During your call in your conversation, you must define milestones for the client's experience and identify successful metrics. These milestones may include finishing the initial set-up or their initial task using your offering. Also, defining successful metrics involves engaging with the client to discover what success looks like for the company and what metrics they can use to gauge the success. As an example, is it measuring the rate of adoption, ROI or another KPI?

Finally, you should create your own personal strategy. Creating this plan is two-fold.

The first step is to create a custom plan is an ongoing endeavor--it should occur at the call's beginning, middle and end. You should ask insightful questions throughout your interaction, which should inform your meeting which will result in an engaging and lively discussion, not a scripted, transactional call.

Next, define the next actions. The steps include step 6 as well as the steps that they need to take to achieve their success measures.

Schedule timely follow-ups

Schedule timely follow-ups, either at the end of your call from step 5 or in an email follow-up within 24 hours of the last call or email. Your goal is to create an agenda for frequent meetings to keep track of the progress of their performance indicators. Adjust your frequency for these sessions in accordance with your model of onboarding the budget, importance of your client, and other factors.

Ultimately, these follow-ups act as feedback loops, which allows you to keep an eye to see if they're working and also the success of your onboarding process. In addition, they allow you to reinforce your relationship with the customer, smoothing out any obstacles that they'll encounter as well as promoting the good interactions they've experienced to date.

Track and improve

With your customer in the final stages of their onboarding experience now is the time to record, evaluate, and improve your process for onboarding.

The first step is to monitor onboarding metrics. Self-service models might include course completion measures, log-ins that are complete, or feature engagement. Processes that are high and low-touch might include more detailed data.

After you've gathered and recorded key metrics, analyze the data to find patterns and patterns. If, for instance, customers fail to schedule their first call, there may be a problem with the initial contact. Also, if they're not completing their onboarding course in the third lesson, perhaps it's a problem with the course.

You can share your data and any insights you might have with your internal teams. Remember, information for individuals is useful but only anecdotal. It is important to find trends in larger data sets and for longer durations of time like a month, quarter, or a whole year.

Take the lessons you've learned from this exercise to help inform changes you can make to the process of onboarding moving ahead. This can help you refine your onboarding process.

The most important milestones of the Onboarding Process

The best practices to ensure the customer's success during when they are onboarding

There are many things you could do to create a custom onboarding experience for your customers, personalization frequent communication and evaluating your process's success are the three top best practices to be following.

Utilizing a strategy that incorporates the human element across many ways, remaining connected and knowledgeable on the customer journey as well as constantly improving the process of onboarding by creating a constructive and engaging environment. We'll take a review of these 3 best ways to help your customers onboarding.

Human Touch and Personalization

Regardless of industry, market, or even niche, automation and technology are rampant in 2024. While automation and technology certainly have their position in the current market however, human interaction becomes especially important due to the expanding and ever-changing tech.

There is a way to provide a higher level of personalization with various methods like in-app notification, email as well as phone calls and even in-person meetings. These methods are ideal for recognizing milestones and customer success and effectively improves the user experience, builds your relationship, and helps increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Regular communication and follow-ups

Consistent communication and following-up are essential to any effective customer onboarding strategy. Communication ensures customers feel supported and valued, which ultimately supports their overall experience, however, it also improves your odds to provide a great customer experience, and enhancing it as time passes.

The most efficient channels for communication include email messages in apps telephone calls, video calls and even the corporate messaging platform such as Slack or Teams. The goal of all is to help users while making it easy for them as well as beneficial to both parties.

Measuring onboarding success

Measuring the success of your customer onboarding process is similar to taking a pulse on your customer's experience at regular intervals. The goal is to make sure your customer is happy and happy with the service or address any problems should they arise.

Check the health of your customer relationship through the collection of:

1. Metrics such as TTFT, the churn process, and CSAT
2. Customer feedback.

By monitoring this information in this way, you'll have the ability to identify areas for improvements and keep delivering a smooth user onboarding experience.

  Make sure your clients are prepared to be successful.

A great way to ensure your customers are satisfied is to make sure they receive the results they want from your product or service using a user-friendly, straightforward customer onboarding process. That takes knowledge, and an LMS for Customer Training software is the best method to gain that understanding and effectively process at a larger the scale of.

Conclusion

Thank you for looking through the customer success onboarding checklist and onboarding best practices with us.

  If you're looking to take the next step and gain personalized advice to streamline your user onboarding process with online education Get pricing information and live demonstrations of Plus, don't hesitate to reach out to our specialists.