When you onboard new customers the experience should complement your product offering and create confident, empowered end-users. To develop the most successful onboarding strategy, you first need to know your customers. From there, you can build a strategy that will best support them and create the desired outcome.
First, spend some time understanding what the ideal state would be for your customer onboarding.
How many days does this take? Who is involved and what are they accountable for in the process? What things lead to a poor experience for the customer? What leads to a great experience? What would a perfect implementation look like to you? What would it look like to your customers?
Answer these questions, then begin to work on your strategy. Here are 5 things to consider if your ultimate goal is a happy customer with empowered, self-sufficient users that can effectively leverage the technology you provide:
1. Set expectations upfront
The onboarding process for new cloud calling customers can seem daunting. Large, business critical elements are in transition. From porting critical phone numbers, migrating high profile users and properly mapping out business hours call flow, there truly are a lot of moving parts. Many of which can significantly impact the operations of your customer’s business.
Therefore, delivering detailed “what to expect” content to your customers both during the sales process and on day one the new agreement is critical. Help them prepare for the implementation and understand the critical milestones that they will need to be involved with prior to go-live. This onboarding content could be something as simple as a checklist, or as robust as an interactive web guide. Find something that works for you and your users.
ProTip: Deliver getting started content items where usage/clicks can be tracked. This will allow you to find out if customers are leveraging your onboarding and getting started content, and adjust where needed.
2. Excellent Information Gathering and Call Flow Design
Strive for excellence in your information gathering and call flow design process. This is key to a smooth implementation. Provide visual call flow diagrams that are intuitive and engage customers for their real reviews and approvals.
3. Custom, Engaging Training
Deliver pre-install admin and user training that is tailored to your customer’s unique needs. This is key in driving user adoption and increased customer satisfaction ratings. Different types of training can serve different purposes. Live virtual training provides real-time expertise and the opportunity for questions and feedback.
4. Post-Activation User Support
Provide post-activation onboarding support services to assist with any common post-activation changes or call flow modifications that your users need within those first few days following their number port. Providing baseline post-activation support can significantly drive down calls to your Tier 1 Support and serves as a bridge between your implementation teams and support teams.
5. Ongoing Support
Empower your customers with ongoing online help and support content. This should include a robust selection of Getting Started topics along with content covering complex applications and features and evergreen resources on the basics that your users can always go back to.
While customer onboarding only happens one time, that customer is going to onboard additional users on an ongoing basis. Don’t leave their new hires hanging.
Consider a training and support platform like Smart-Lynk which utilizes content with integrated and unique tracking IDs to increase your visibility of user activity and engagement..
Building Onboarding Into Your Offer
Sales teams should be confident speaking to the breadth of the onboarding training and support you provide during their discovery and sales process. When positioned correctly and introduced as a value-add to your product or service, a sound onboarding strategy can be an instrumental part of your offer.
With help and support from the experts at B-Lynk, you can develop a robust, customized onboarding strategy that will help you increase sales, empower your users, support them long-term, and keep them coming back to your product time and time again.