Every customer goes through their own journey when deciding to buy a new product or service, but the key stages of the process tend to remain the same. This emphasizes the importance of being able to move your potential customers from one stage to the next – and keep existing customers interested in new features.
But how can you execute a strategy? Your customer onboarding tool might be your superpower for crafting more powerful customer journeys. As a platform that can help you make a strong first impression, educate your customer base, and automate tasks, a customer onboarding software is an essential tool for any business.
In this article, we will explore what customer onboarding tools are, how they can improve the customer journey at every stage of the lifecycle, how to choose the right tool, and common mistakes to avoid.
What Are Customer Onboarding Tools?
A customer onboarding tool, or customer success onboarding tool. is any technology that helps new customers learn how to use your product. Onboarding software guides new customers to product mastery, while generating data that your brand can use to optimize the experience for customers moving forward. Onboarding software is typically highly customizable, giving companies the tools they need to put their unique onboarding strategies into practice.
By facilitating customers through the onboarding process, these tools can establish a positive working relationship between your brand, and your new (and existing) customer base. Customer onboarding tools can help customers learn from many formats, including tutorials, videos, tipsheets, messaging options, and more, setting them up to proficiently and independently make the most of your product.
Most businesses already use software like CRMs to manage their customer interactions, or project management tools to keep their teams organized – but many leave a gap in their onboarding process. And there are tools specifically designed to optimize and support customer onboarding. Let’s explore.
How Can a Customer Onboarding Tool Improve the Customer Experience?
Incorporating customer onboarding tools can improve the customer experience by:
- Establishing a level of trust with your brand through transparent and accessible communication and instruction. This often leads to stronger customer retention in the long-term.
- Clearly indicating milestones so that customers can track their progress, knowledge, and product usage, keeping them engaged.
- Fostering independence and proficiency, by providing your customers with everything they need to know to operate your product autonomously – helping them boost success in their business.
- Promoting additional features within your product that your customer may want to sign up for or upgrade to gain access.
Why Customer Onboarding Tools Matter at Every Stage of the Journey
Onboarding software may seem like it would only be essential after a customer has decided to buy your product. However, it can also provide benefits at the earliest stages of the customer journey – before a customer has committed to a purchase, when they are still shopping for solutions. In fact, customer onboarding tools can help interested customers preview the product, understand its benefits, and get a sense of real-world applications. By previewing the onboarding tools, they will also get to see that your brand prioritizes the customer experience, and visualize what it will look like to onboard and get started if they decide to choose your product or service.
Let’s explore the way customer onboarding tools can contribute to each stage of the customer journey – from awareness to post-purchase.
Awareness Stage
The awareness stage of the customer journey is the first step, where a potential customer first encounters and hears about your brand – before even considering a purchase. At this stage, the customer has identified the challenges they are facing, a need for a solution, and are slowly becoming aware of the types of solutions that exist on the market. At this stage, it’s important to focus on providing educational content that can help customers get more familiar with the solutions you offer, through blogs, interactive guides, or informative landing pages. But, it’s important to remember that customers at this stage are not yet ready to think about making a purchase.
That’s why your customer onboarding tool can help at this point in the customer journey. This tool can house educational content material, and enable potential customers to interact with general tutorials or informative video content. At this stage, a customer could also provide their email address in exchange for a free one-pager, newsletter sign up, or tailored set of resources that match their industry or needs through a nurture campaign. Ultimately, at the awareness stage, your customer onboarding tool can help you build trust, set customer expectations, and even build your list of new leads.
Consideration Stage
The consideration stage of the customer journey is the next step, where the potential customer is beginning to actively research different solutions that they can choose from. They will have clearly identified their challenges, realized what needs to be solved, and be comparing products and services to figure out which one will solve their problems, with the features, options, and pricing that best suit their needs.
This means that customers in the consideration phase are actively looking at your competitors – so it’s essential that you stand out, and employing your customer onboarding tools can help you do so. By offering a trial period, potential customers will get a sample of the onboarding process, while gaining access to software and product demos, as well as other features they may benefit if they choose to work with your brand. By using an onboarding tool, you can offer a more cohesive, organized trial experience to customers in the consideration phase, and reassure them of the value you could add – reducing their perceived risk when choosing your software.
Decision Stage
At the decision stage of the customer journey, the customer has gathered the information they need to make a purchasing decision and is ready to choose one product. At this key moment, your customer onboarding tools can help you close the deal. You can use the platform to set up personalized demos that are tailored to each customer’s unique needs. You can also highlight your onboarding software’s integrations with other technology, such as CRMs, project management, and communication tools, to demonstrate the ways in which your customer will have a seamless experience transitioning their existing workflow to your product and integrating it into their team.
Plus, they will be reminded of your effective onboarding method as a preview of what they’ll experience when they choose your solution. By leveraging your customer onboarding tools at this stage, you can help ensure that your customers have confidence in their decision to purchase your solution.
Post-Purchase Stage
Onboarding software may have the biggest impact on client satisfaction during the post-purchase phase which describes the time when a customer has signed up for or purchased your product, and is now an existing member of your customer base. This is a time to develop customer loyalty now that you have them in your system. It’s also an opportunity for cross-selling and upselling.
Your onboarding tool will help you deliver better experiences to every customer. With onboarding tools, you can provide clear and structured training, incorporate gamification to help your customers stay engaged, automate check-in processes and reminders, and track customer behavior to identify other opportunities or features that may interest them. The net result is happier customers, which tends to improve loyalty and increase their lifetime customer value.
Features to Look for in a Customer Onboarding Tool
With many customer onboarding tool options available, you’re probably wondering which tool is used for customer onboarding. Well, the best customer onboarding tools will be able to offer:
- Customization, so that you can tailor training, content, and automations to meet unique customer needs at every stage of the customer journey.
- Integration with existing tech stacks so that your customers will be able to easily incorporate it into their existing processes.
- Data and analytics that can help you gain insights about your customers so you can further optimize your processes.
- Automation to streamline repetitive tasks and take some of the burden off of the customer success team.
- Scalability, so that the platform can grow with your company and its customer base.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using Customer Onboarding Tools
While it’s important to choose a customer onboarding tool that can help automate repetitive tasks – and trigger automations to keep customers engaged – don’t let the automation remove the human touch. Over-relying on automation can result in a cold experience for prospects and existing customers alike, and it can also mean that you pass-up opportunities to personalize crucial experiences that may have the power to convert new customers, or upsell existing customers.
Additionally, while customer acquisition and onboarding are the main areas of focus, don’t overlook the post-purchase stage of the customer journey. Be sure to use data analytics and feedback forms or conversations to understand how your customers are progressing and identify where they may be interested in additional features and upsell opportunities.
Implement a Customer Onboarding Tool
Perfecting the customer journey can help you land more customers and improve the overall value of your business. And your customer onboarding tool will have a significant role to play in that pursuit. Customer onboarding tools can help you support potential and existing customers through each phase of the buying process – from awareness to post-purchase. By offering a seamless customer experience, establishing a positive relationship, and guiding your customer to new product features, your onboarding platform has the potential to increase overall customer lifetime value and loyalty.
OnRamp makes it easy to take advantage of the benefits of onboarding tools throughout the customer journey, with key personalization capabilities, a centralized customer portal, automations, and more. Sign up for a demo to learn more about how we can help.
Customer Onboarding Tools FAQ
Which tool is used for customer onboarding?
OnRamp is thoughtfully designed customer onboarding software built to guide customers and teams every step of the way. With a dynamic customer portal, process automation, and project and task management features, OnRamp helps your customers have a better experience – and in turn helps your business increase customer lifetime value and customer success.
How do you do customer onboarding?
Using a customer onboarding tool, brands can offer customers a seamless and straightforward customer onboarding process. A tool like OnRamp can help you scale your onboarding strategy with a full customer portal that provides a positive first impression, increased customer engagement, insightful analytics, and automated processes.
Which software is used for customer onboarding?
OnRamp makes onboarding seamless, engaging, and impactful. The platform helps brands drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth through a seamless, integrated software.
What is an onboarding toolkit?
An onboarding toolkit is a set of materials you can offer to new customers to help them get started with your product or service, including videos, interactive tutorials, instructional guides, ebooks, blogs, and more.
What is a customer onboarding framework?
A customer onboarding framework is the structural and strategic approach a business uses for the process of onboarding new customers. It helps to move potential customers through the customer journey, and get new and existing customers integrated with the software and excited about adding new features.
