“The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie
Customer onboarding is your chance to show customers how your product delivers value from day one. It lays the groundwork for a productive relationship and influences every interaction that follows. This guide will help you craft an onboarding process that’s straightforward, effective, and sets your customers up for long-term success.
What is Customer Onboarding?
Customer onboarding is the process of helping new customers get started with your product or service. It focuses on showing them how to use it effectively and providing the support they need to feel confident from the start. Here’s what you can expect in your typical onboarding session:
- Product setup: Helping customers integrate and configure your solution.
- Training and education: Offering resources, tutorials, or workshops to deepen understanding.
- Milestone tracking: Keeping tabs on progress toward the customer’s goals.
Stat: According to Wyzowl, 86% of people say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding.
Why Customer Onboarding Matters
Why does onboarding deserve your attention? Because first impressions matter—a lot.
- Increases retention: Customers who see value quickly are 50% more likely to stick around (Wyzowl).
- Boosts satisfaction: A smooth start leaves a lasting positive impression.
- Encourages advocacy: Happy, engaged customers are more likely to recommend your product.
Pro Tip: Customer churn is highest within the first 90 days. A strong onboarding process can significantly lower this risk.
The Evolution of Customer Onboarding
Generic welcome emails and packets are a thing of the past. Modern onboarding puts the customer’s goals front and center, focusing on what they want to achieve rather than simply showcasing a product. It starts with asking, “What do you want to accomplish?” and providing tailored, use-case-driven onboarding paths to guide them. Today, onboarding is about creating personalized journeys that address each customer’s unique needs, helping them not just set up a product but truly understand how to use it to succeed.
Common Customer Onboarding Mistakes
The worst thing that can happen is a customer who never gets the hang of your technology—starting in the red and staying there. Onboarding is the key to not only driving adoption but also ensuring long-term retention. After all, it’s well known that acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than retaining an existing one (Harvard Business Review). Avoid these common pitfalls to create a better experience:
- Information overload: Don’t dump too much on customers at once. Gradually introduce them to key features so they can master each step.
- Lack of communication: Customers need clear timelines and next steps. To prevent confusion, keep them informed and engaged throughout the process.
- Ignoring feedback: Failing to act on customer insights can stall improvement. Listen to their needs and adapt your onboarding strategy accordingly to keep them on track for success.
Businesses lose up to $1.6 trillion annually due to poor customer experiences (Accenture).
The Customer Onboarding Process
We analyzed the key elements that consistently led to our most successful customer onboarding experiences. The common thread? Each successful process followed these essential stages:
- Personalized Welcome: Instead of a generic greeting, tailor your introduction based on the customer’s unique needs or use case. Provide them with a customized roadmap or resources that align with their goals.
- Guided Setup: Go beyond account creation. Offer hands-on support during the setup phase, whether through live chat assistance or step-by-step configuration guides tailored to the customer’s context.
- Interactive Training: Rather than just offering static guides, provide interactive training opportunities like live webinars, hands-on demos, and personalized walkthroughs that help customers see exactly how the product will solve their specific problems.
- Proactive Feedback Loops: Set milestones and engage customers with brief surveys at the 30, 60, and 90-day mark to gauge their comfort level and gather insights about their experience. Use this information to adjust the onboarding flow or offer additional resources if needed.
- Ongoing Success Support: After the initial onboarding phase, ensure that customers have continuous access to support channels, proactive check-ins, and refresher training. Consider creating a community or knowledge base that allows customers to learn from one another and grow together.
Tip: Breaking the onboarding process into bite-sized progressive trainings can help make it more pallatable to your customers.
Best Practices for Customer Onboarding
“A customer who feels they’ve been heard and understood is a customer who is more likely to succeed and stay with you.” – Shep Hyken
To ensure a seamless transition from prospect to loyal customer, it’s crucial to follow best practices in your onboarding process. Here’s how you can set your customers up for success:
- Start early: Begin the onboarding process as soon as the deal is closed. This helps you hit the ground running and ensures that the excitement from signing the contract doesn’t fade. Initiating the process early shows your commitment to their success from day one and creates a smooth handoff from sales to the customer success team.
- Set clear goals: Align with your customers on what success looks like for them. Understand their business objectives and tailor your onboarding journey around their specific needs. By setting clear, measurable goals early on, you create a mutual understanding of expectations, and customers know exactly how to measure their success.
- Use multiple channels: Customers absorb information in different ways, so using a combination of communication channels—such as email, calls, and in-app messaging like a slack channel—ensures that the information reaches them in the format that best suits their preferences. This multi-channel approach also helps foster a sense of continuous support, keeping them engaged and informed throughout the journey.
- Track progress: Monitoring key milestones throughout the onboarding process is essential for a smooth experience. By tracking progress, you can identify potential roadblocks early on, offer proactive assistance, and ensure that customers are on track to hit their goals. Regular check-ins help you address any issues before they become bigger problems and demonstrate your ongoing commitment to their success.
63% of customers consider a company’s onboarding process when making a purchase decision (Wyzowl).
How to Onboard a Customer
How to Onboard a Customer
The kickoff call is crucial in everything for setting the tone of the relationship. Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide, along with examples and a roadmap checklist, to ensure you’re helping your customers every step of the way:
Kickoff: Start with a meeting to discuss goals and set expectations.
The kickoff call is your first opportunity to establish trust and understand the customer’s objectives. This call should be more than just a routine meeting—it’s where you lay the groundwork for success.
What to cover in the kickoff call:
Customer Goals: confirm goals that were established in earlier discovery calls to make sure everyone is on the same page
Set Clear Expectations: Be transparent about the onboarding timeline, roles, and responsibilities. For example, “We plan to have your web forms fully set up within 1 week. During this time, you’ll need to complete [X] tasks, and we’ll check in regularly to ensure things are progressing smoothly.”
Timeline & Milestones: Break down the onboarding process into specific steps, using a visual timeline or milestone chart.
- Example: “In the next week, we’ll focus on account setup and initial configuration. By week two, you’ll have your first form live, and by week four, we’ll review your data and optimize the workflow.”
Address Concerns: Open the floor for any immediate concerns or questions, ensuring that the customer feels heard.
- Example: “Is there any particular functionality you’re unsure about? Or any roadblocks you anticipate?”
Customized Plan: Develop a roadmap tailored to their objectives.
Once you understand the customer’s goals, build a plan that addresses each need. Customize the steps for their business use cases and show actually (not just in theory), how your product will support their goals.
Sample Roadmap Action List:
Week 1: Account Setup and Configuration
- Action: Ensure the customer has access to their account and start basic configurations of user roles and permissions.
Week 2: Core Features Training
- Action: Focus on core features that directly support the customer’s use case and that are most critical in product adoption.
Week 3: Integration & Advanced Features
- Action: Dive deeper into more advanced features or specific integrations they will be using (e.g., file storage or Salesforce).
Week 4: Review & Optimization
- Action: Ask for training feedback and make adjustments to your onboarding based on common themes.
Ongoing: Check-ins and Continuous Learning
- Action: Part of onboarding is knowing how to submit tickets for troubleshooting and how to apply updates for product improvements. Directly invite your client to ongoing training opportunities and webinars so they can grow their skills.
Resource Sharing: Provide easy access to documentation and training materials.
Make sure customers have easy access to resources that will help them succeed. This is especially important during the onboarding phase when they need clear guidance on how to use the product.
Resources to Share in An Onboarding Welcome Document
- Knowledge Base: Create a centralized online hub where customers can find step-by-step guides, FAQ sections, and video tutorials.
- User Group: Share access or direct them to a user group where they can look through existing forums for questions or ask other users for best practices
- Training Webinars: Record and share all training webinars so they can revisit what was covered. Offer to add them to a webinar email list for new releases and functionalities.
- On-Demand Tutorials: Offer self-paced tutorials with on-demand learning for customers who prefer to learn independently.
Ongoing Support: Ensure customers know who to contact for help.
Onboarding doesn’t stop after the initial setup. Continuous support is key to maintaining customer satisfaction and long-term success.
What to include in ongoing support:
Dedicated Support Contacts: Assign a primary point of contact for the customer, such as an onboarding specialist or customer success manager, but also include any other contacts that would be helpful like billing, sales, after-hours support options, etc.
Proactive Check-ins: Schedule regular follow-up meetings to ensure customers are progressing smoothly and to address any concerns. These can decrease over time based on need, from weekly to biweekly to monthly then as needed.
Customer Feedback Loop: Create a web form for collecting customer feedback after each milestone to continuously improve their experience and your product.
4 Must-Haves of a Customer Onboarding Plan
- Know your audience: Segment customers by industry, size, or goals so onboarding specialists can become experts in that area
- Document the journey: Create a visual flowchart of the onboarding phases for easy reference
- Gather feedback: Use surveys to identify what’s working and what’s not.
- Iterate: Regularly update your plan based on performance metrics.
Pro Tip: Keep your sales and customer success teams on the same page to ensure the messaging for features and performance are aligned.
Measuring Onboarding Success
What does successful onboarding look like? Did it work out? Track these metrics:
- Time to value (TTV): How quickly customers achieve their first success.
- Engagement rates: How often customers use your product’s features.
- Retention rates: Percentage of customers staying beyond onboarding.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely customers are to recommend your product.
Reducing TTV by just one week can increase customer retention by up to 20% (Forrester).
Onboarding Automation
Automation means LESS steps for new users; it helps create a consistent and streamlined onboarding experience. Examples include:
Automated emails: Trigger messages based on actions or milestones.
In-app tips: Offer contextual help directly within your forms or training platform.
Analytics dashboards: Monitor progress and flag potential roadblocks.
Companies using automation in onboarding see a 20% increase in customer satisfaction (McKinsey&Company).
Conclusion
Customer onboarding is how you reassure customers they made the right choice. By investing in a thoughtful, methodical onboarding plan, you’ll build trust, encourage engagement, and set your customers up for long-term success. FormAssembly customizable web forms and workflows are ideal for any onboarding structure. Trigger data flow between applications, automate email responses, and set off approval sequences at the pace of your client’s onboarding.
Learn how to set up an onboarding workflow with FormAssembly. Request a demo today.
