“If you hold a customers’ hand for ninety days, they will be loyal for life.”
John Jantch
The consumer onboarding process is an essential aspect of every customers’ journey. It determines if they will achieve goals with a product and return for more purchases.
Many users value a brand’s support as a crucial part of the buying process because it facilitates their experiences and activities with a product. Data shows 86% of customers say they will be more loyal to businesses that provide an onboarding process.
So by supporting users with the materials and tools they need, they are likely to become consistent and loyal consumers of your products and services. This article discusses six practical ways to simplify their onboarding experience.
Let’s get into it.
Top 6 ways to enhance users’ onboarding experience
The goal of an excellent user onboarding process is to make users’ experience smooth, eliminating any hitch in their journey and enabling optimal success with brands. Below are the top six ways to make that happen:
- Use onboarding tools
The most prominent way to make onboarding easier is to automate the process with efficient tools. For example, use onboarding software instead of manually documenting tutorials and organizing answers to common questions with an excel sheet, Google Doc, or PDF file.
Onboarding tools are comprehensive, collecting information in a place for easy accessibility. They also facilitate flexibility by supporting customers with the resources they need without your presence.
When selecting the software for onboarding users, employ highly intuitive tools with personalization features. This is because software with a deep learning curve will complicate rather than make experiences easy. Also, it won’t meet users’ specific needs without effective customization, making onboarding less effective.
Therefore, find easy-to-use software that can customize processes. Activate its personalization features and offer recommendations according to buyers’ unique stages. You will experience increased product activation, conversion, and retention rate when you do this. Click here to learn more about the benefits of an excellent onboarding flow.
- Start early
It’s essential to start the onboarding process as early as possible. Don’t wait until consumers start using the features or become customers; begin when they show interest in your product or when they buy.
For example, someone who subscribes to your email list is interested in your brand or buying from you in the future, so rather than wait until they purchase, start an onboarding process immediately. Email about your products’ benefits, importance, and features. With regular updates, you remain in their minds, enhancing them to buy faster.
Additionally, rather than waiting to troubleshoot a challenge, begin to onboard new buyers after purchase. Essentially, your onboarding process should meet everyone at each point of their journey, rather than a generalized stage.
Therefore, put tools and resources in place to onboard every user as quickly as possible. The faster they can achieve their goals with your product, the quicker you improve adoption rate, convert, and retain them.
- Create a self-service onboarding experience
An excellent way to make users’ onboarding experience easier is to eliminate delays and offer quick solutions to their problems. However, although a support team can help them troubleshoot issues with a product, 81% of users prefer to solve challenges by themselves before reaching a customer care representative.
The primary reason for this is that contacting support is time-consuming, and users prefer fast answers. Therefore, provide a self-help onboarding process with a good knowledge base.
They serve as an online library with information about your product, service, or business. So, when buyers are seeking answers, they can search it to access details.
Create a knowledge base consisting of how-to guides, video demonstrations, tutorials, and more. This will allow users to access information without help, making their onboarding process more straightforward.
Also, self-service significantly reduces the number of calls the support team receives, thereby decreasing their workload and boosting productivity.
- Provide various onboarding materials
Your customers prefer various learning modes because they comprehend differently. So, when onboarding them, provide various options to navigate the process. For example, rather than onboard using FAQs alone, use different formats, including short and long-form blog posts, live-training sessions, video tutorials, illustrations, etc.
By providing different formats, they can select their most preferred learning methods, boosting their experience by making the process easier for them.
- Improve your user experience
User experience (UX) is how users feel when interacting with a website, product, or system. Providing excellent UX means studying customers’ challenges and eliminating barriers on their journey.
If customers visit your website to solve a challenge or find more information on your product, they expect to see them seamlessly. However, if they encounter a slow loading process or get confused, they become frustrated and abandon the activity. Consequently, you experience customer churn, dissatisfaction, and poor retention.
So, conduct user testing to examine customers’ experience on your website and the knowledge base. When you do this, you will get accurate insight into their pain points and improve. You can then create a straightforward user experience that makes the onboarding process uncomplicated for them.
- Improve your customer success
The primary goal of a successful customer onboarding process is to enable users to achieve their objectives with products. This means if a buyers’ goal is to sign up on an app, the onboarding system should allow them to do so.
Also, if their goal is using more features, it should provide resources on fully maximizing a product’s functions. Therefore, onboarding is only effective when it helps your customers reach their aims.
Since customers’ goals are unique, it’s critical to understand every users’ needs to meet them. Therefore, set clear expectations at the beginning and provide appropriate tools to fulfill them.
Afterward, follow up on their journey and supply materials required to help them succeed as their goals evolve. This will improve your customer success score, boosting loyalty and retention.
Conclusion
User onboarding is essential to convert leads to customers, increase product subscriptions and satisfy customers. To build a functional onboarding system, use tools, begin early, introduce self-help, use different onboarding formats, and monitor customer success.
