Most companies offer some kind of user onboarding to immediately improve customer satisfaction, whether in the form of printed instructions, in-app video tutorials, or extensive training programs designed to help users unlock the full potential of the product or service they have signed up for.
A good onboarding program walks your customers through the basic features and benefits of using your product or service. Depending on your program’s success, users will not encounter as many hurdles in their early days, minimizing frustration that could eventually lead to churn.
Yet, 90% of users feel that brands could do better when it comes to onboarding new customers. Furthermore, 8 in 10 users have deleted an app because they didn’t know how to use it, and 55% returned a product because they didn’t fully understand how to use it.
Just take a look at how easy it is to start using Slack, a team messaging app that’s exceptionally popular for its design and user experience.
You are guided from sign-up to setting up your first workspace and project in three swift steps. But what if these steps were missing and you were left on your own to figure out things? Perhaps Slack wouldn’t have been as popular today.
Clearly, selling a product or service is only half of the job. That’s because the sale would be worthless if you aren’t able to deliver what you promised, which is why you must provide instructions and support to give your users the kind of value they expect from you. There are many benefits of a strong customer onboarding program.
Some of the goals of customer onboarding include:
The benefits include:
But how do you go about creating an effective onboarding strategy? First, you need to understand your users and their requirements before you even begin to craft your onboarding strategy. Make sure you understand your customers’ pain points and challenges to tailor the onboarding experience accordingly.
Once you know the pain points you wish to address and have the goals of your onboarding process outlined, you can consider implementing some of the following ideas to build a kickass onboarding program for your users:
Simplicity is the key to success with new users. With a single sign-on, users have the option to instantly access your product by signing up with social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. Not surprisingly, they often prefer this way of signing up as they don’t need to create a new password or wait for a confirmation email to get started.
Of course, it only makes sense to provide both options – single sign-on and the option to sign up with an email address, to improve user satisfaction, like Canva does in the image below.
Users are most likely to have questions during the onboarding process.
It is during such times that they need to know how exactly they can contact you. Hence, we suggest you have a live chat option available to them to resolve their concerns using the bot’s automated responses easily.
The biggest benefit of using live chat software for the customer onboarding process is it aids in building relationships with high-ticket customers, thereby ensuring authenticity and trustworthiness.
Here are some stats that showcase how powerful live chat software can come in handy to develop high-touch relationships for companies of all sizes:
Creating a high-touch customer onboarding experience through live chat helps you understand when the users are likely to need assistance. This can be done by providing automated responses to common questions.
Your first correspondence with a new customer sets the tone for the length of your relationship. Therefore, it is good to adopt a warm and cheerful style for welcoming customers on board.
You may start by congratulating them on their purchase and thanking them for choosing you over the competition. Let them know how excited you are to have them on board, followed by the next steps for getting started.
Alternately, you may embed a link to your knowledge base or a short demo video to guide users during their first digital interaction with your product.
According to various statistics, welcome emails have four times the opening rate of other types of emails. Some brands also include video tutorials in their welcome emails to increase engagement.
Here’s an example of an effective welcome email:
Hi [first name],
Congratulations! Welcome to acquire.io.
We’re thrilled to have you onboard and excited to help you reach your goals. Sign in now to get actionable insights on your customer service and explore tips and tricks to improve your customers’ satisfaction and engagement.
If you need help, we’re here to walk you through to reach your customer service and marketing goals. Watch this video to understand how you can use acquire.io to transform your customer service.
[Link to sign in and knowledge base or onboarding material]
To your success
XYZ at acquire.io
The most logical place for users to learn about your app is while they are using it. In-app touchpoints like guided tours and tips help users get started at their own pace, discovering various options as and when they need them. Therefore, it is often a good idea to build onboarding right into the user interface by using UI elements like modals, coach marks, and tooltips to guide visitors around.
Grammarly, a popular tool that acts as a personal writing assistant, adopts a “learn by doing” approach for onboarding. Just head to their homepage to see how Grammarly starts onboarding visitors with engaging and straightforward examples that show how easy it is to get started with it.
Videos are popular as onboarding tools because they replace dull and verbose copies with exciting visuals that appeal to multiple senses at one go.
Data reveals that 72% of people prefer to learn about a product via video instead of text. Thus, by including video tutorials in your onboarding plan, you will attract more attention and deliver content in a format preferred by users.
Dropbox, known for its remarkable onboarding experience, took a risk in 2009 when it wiped its homepage clean to show a 2-minute explainer video with a download button. With this single move, they condensed their entire pitch into a witty video that resulted in enormous revenues and led them to acquire a heap of funding subsequently.
Videos, emails, prompts, info-text; these are all useful methods of onboarding users but only when used correctly. Too much information and over-actionable content can have the opposite effect and scare new customers away.
Generally, it is good to have four to five onboarding screens to get the job done, but it is easy to go overboard with too much of a good thing. However, if you pay attention to user feedback, you’d perhaps not make this folly while fine-tuning your onboarding process continually.
For example, you can consider using a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey to gauge customer satisfaction from your onboarding experience.
By asking customers how difficult it was for them to get started with you, it is possible to identify the obstacles they faced during onboarding and address them immediately for increased user satisfaction.
Building a one-time onboarding strategy isn’t enough. It is essential to realize that onboarding is a continuous process that must evolve with your customers’ needs for the best results.
Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate, and out-of-the-box-thinking woman having vast digital marketing experience. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field, leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results is her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things, and spending quality time with family. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay
Dan Gingiss is a customer experience keynote speaker who helps unlock your team’s potential by fostering a culture of remarkable experiences.