If you’re a customer success leader, the new year is a perfect time to map out what you hope to accomplish over the next 12 months. Whether that’s eliminating efficiencies in your onboarding process or adding more personalization, the plan you make now will play a big role in determining how successful you are.
That’s why we’ve created this guide for onboarding success in 2024. Keep reading to find our best tips for onboarding customers more effectively this year.
Begin By Reflecting on 2023
Before turning the page on 2023, consider what the year taught you about new customer onboarding. Some strengths and weaknesses of your current product onboarding experience may jump out at you immediately. But it can also be helpful to take a closer look at customer feedback and satisfaction scores to see if there’s anything you might have missed about your onboarding software or customer success program more generally.
Defining Your Onboarding Goals for 2024
The weaknesses you identified as the last step can help you identify where your efforts should be spent in 2024. However, you can also set proactive goals for onboarding clients based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your company. These may include:
- Time to onboard
- Onboarding completion rate
- Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)
- Conversion rates from trial to paid users
- Churn rates after onboarding
- Other internal metrics that matter to your company
But you don’t just want to name general targets for the year. It’s important to make sure you’re setting realistic, measurable goals. That could mean reducing your time to onboard by five hours, increasing your onboarding completion rate by 10%, or whatever else you choose as long as you can easily measure your progress throughout the year.
Focus On Team Empowerment and Training
One of the big factors influencing whether you achieve your goals this year will be the efficacy of your team. If they can improve, that should be reflected in the KPIs you track throughout 2024.
That starts by assessing the current skill set of your new client onboarding team. This will help you identify training needs and find opportunities for skill development – whether that means teaching workers how to use new onboarding SaaS software more effectively or how to approach clients with certain problems.
Investing in this type of continuous education will ensure your team stays up to date on the latest industry trends and best practices. That way, you don’t start falling behind competitors who also emphasize these practices.
Look For Opportunities to Enhance Collaboration
The new year is also a good time to reassess how your customer onboarding solutions interact with other parts of your company. You may find new avenues for collaboration that can help you achieve your goals.
For example, you may find that the hand-off between customer support and onboarding teams is inefficient and frustrating for customers. Or your product team could find new opportunities for improvement with the feedback your team gets from customers.
This kind of collaboration encourages a more customer-centric culture across the organization. The net result can be a simultaneous improvement for product onboarding and other teams.
Leverage the Power of New Technologies
You may also have an opportunity to drive improvement by taking advantage of new technology in the onboarding industry. For example, customer onboarding software can give you the tools you need to bring your vision to life without the excessive coding that comes from having to build solutions from scratch.
There may also be a chance to integrate existing technologies into your onboarding process. That might look like connecting your CRM with client onboarding software or implementing automation where possible to improve efficiency.
Incorporate Customer Feedback and Iterate
The goals you set for 2024 today may already be based on customer feedback. But that feedback can always change – especially as you make changes to your onboarding processes in the pursuit of improvement.
That’s why it’s important to create a feedback loop for continuous improvement. Make sure you keep soliciting feedback from customers at key onboarding touchpoints to ensure you continue taking the right actions throughout the full year.
One thing to note is that software like OnRamp can make this much easier. Our onboarding tool automates the process of collecting feedback so you don’t have to worry about doing it manually.
Use What You Learn to Build a Scalable Onboarding Model
As you go through this process of gradual improvement, you may want to keep in mind the objective of building a scalable onboarding model for the future. Scalability is key in onboarding because you don’t want your department to become a bottleneck in the process of acquiring new clients.
Building scalability can look like:
- Creating repeatable, yet personalizable module and task templates in OnRamp
- Developing a flexible onboarding model that can accommodate different types of clients
- Planning for challenges in growth and mitigating associated risks
Don’t Forget to Celebrate Successes
Finally, don’t forget to recognize your team as they help your department achieve its goals this year. Studies have found that companies with formal recognition programs have 31% less voluntary turnover.
2024 may be the year to bring a more formula kind of recognition to your workplace. Doing so should help you create a more positive work environment that fosters a culture of success.
A Successful 2024 Starts With Your Plan
New years are opportunities for reflection and goal-setting. They also set the tone for the next 12 months of work. We hope this article has given you the tools and strategies you need to set a successful foundation for onboarding improvements in 2024.
But creating a strong plan is only the first step. You’ll still need to execute throughout the year by keeping your team on track while onboarding new customers and making adjustments as you receive ongoing feedback.
OnRamp can make all of this much easier to do. Our all-in-one customer onboarding solutions can automate many of the tasks you do today, give you new tools for bringing personalization into client onboarding, and much more.
You can schedule a free demo with us today to see the kind of value our customer onboarding platform can provide.
