The need for businesses to focus on customer onboarding is stronger than ever.
This is how you build relationships with your customer.
This is how to make sure they go from one-time buyers to lifetime customers of your business.
How do you do this?
It requires a firm knowledge of your audience and their needs.
It also take some planning.
There can be some major challenges to face along the way.
Here are five of the biggest challenges to successful customer onboarding.
Oh, and I’ve included some tips to overcome them.
1. Post-Sale Abandonment
The main challenge for customer onboarding is to prevent customers leaving you right after the sale.
What this means is they bought the item and disappeared, possibly because it didn’t live up to their expectations.
This is where you need to jump in and start the onboarding process.
Right after they complete their purchase is the perfect time to follow up with customers.
Connect with them to make sure they can set up and use the product correctly.
Emphasise again the benefits of the product and offer the support they need to enjoy these benefits.
2. Where Are Customers Struggling?
Successful onboarding requires you to understand where the customer is likely to struggle so you can offer the help they need.
The challenge here is discovering where they’re struggling.
The way to avoid this situation is to create plenty of touchpoints with your customers and optimise them.
Touchpoints are opportunities for you to communicate directly with your customers.
You can use these to better learn their needs so you can offer the help they need at that moment.
3. Sharing Your Knowledge
You know your product front and back, but how do you communicate all this knowledge to your customers?
The challenge here is to present the information the customer needs right at the time they need it.
Too much at once will overwhelm them.
Not enough will leave them frustrated.
The onboarding process presents the necessary information one step at a time, starting with setup.
You should also create an archive of educational content in various formats that your customers can access.
Organise it so information is easy to find.
Make sure your customers know about it and how to search for what they need.
4. Too Many Customer Support Issues
One major challenge is that you may find yourself with too many support issues and you can’t keep up.
If your customers are constantly contacting you for support, it means you’re not teaching them well enough how to use your products.
Look at the requests and try to find common root causes.
You may find that there’s one particular issue that’s causing all these enquiries.
You can then focus more on that issue in your onboarding.
Better education and more tutorials will reduce requests for support.
5. Low Feature Adoption
You may find your customers learn how to use your product effectively and enjoy the benefits.
But some may miss major features.
The result is that they won’t get the full value out of the product.
You can combat this by refining your onboarding to focus more on these less-used features.
Prioritise the features by the amount of value they deliver and spend more time on those at the top.
The Importance of Customer Onboarding
Poor customer service or a bad customer onboarding process can hurt your business.
When customers don’t find the value in their purchase it can affect customer retention.
Get started today creating a plan that will confront these challenges so your customers can get the most out of your products.
