But it turns out this may not work as well for your customers.
When we talked to buyers and implementers of software (your customers!), they had some tactical ideas for how Customer Success teams could make their onboarding programs more successful:
1. Don't ask them to be Sherlock Holmes!
Typically, your customer has only 5-10 minutes to focus on your onboarding program any given day. Too often that time is wasted because they’re searching around for that buried collateral or template, reading through an email chain, trying to figure out what they should be doing to move the ball forward (because, let’s face it, they forgot from the kick off call).
Ideally, everything is accessible to your customer in one place. Help them help you by getting work done before your next check-in.
2. Spell it out
Keep your instructions and next steps simple and make them to the point.
- Bullets and
- (1) numbers work really well here.
- Make it snappy and act as if you're giving directions across town to someone who just became a neighbor
You may be an expert on your product, nomenclature, and setup but your new customer certainly is not. They probably know less than you think.
3. Be clear about assignments & don’t be afraid to remind
OK ok, I know this is like two in one but they kind of go hand-in-hand. If you’re working with multiple stakeholders at your customer, you need to make sure assignments are crystal clear - there should be one owner ultimately responsible for a line item.
We also need to nudge those responsible. Your customers are busy and they often are juggling so many things that you need to repeatedly move up in their mind’s inbox - they’re not trying to purposefully put you off.
They need you to be proactive.
The easiest way is to do this through automation, as always having the burden of following up with your customers before calls across all projects may not be the best use of your time (though it may make sense in certain situations).
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Keep these in mind when building your onboarding flow and your customers will really thank you for making their lives easier :)
If you’re looking for help with the above and want to chat, customer onboarding is what we’re building for here at OnRamp and it’d be great to talk to you.
