Keeping Customers With Better Onboarding
When you’re starting a business, getting customers may seem like the most important thing.
But keeping those customers and making sure they actually use your product or platform is just as important, particularly if you’re a software or technology company.
Onboarding is the process in which a company eases customers into becoming users of its platform or product. It’s something Renée Warren, CEO of marketing agency Onboardly, says startups need to focus on when launching. You can have the best marketing and product in the world, but if people are having trouble using it, you’re in trouble.
“Your product, if you’re an app or a software or platform, needs to have the experience people would expect. It can’t be complicated. You only have those few seconds to get somebody’s attention even in the onboarding process,” Warren says.
“As soon as there’s too many steps, there are too many vague or ambiguous stages in getting to use a product, the more people fall off. I’d say it’s a given, but some just don’t get it.”
Yet, even if you have a very complex platform, it’s still possible to onboard happy and satisfied customers. Warren uses HubSpot as an example. It’s an incredibly complex content marketing platform that takes months to learn, yet they have plenty of satisfied users.
“They’ve created essentially the ultimate onboarding process. You get access to their onboarding team. You get a person who works with you for the first few months as you work through onboarding and understanding the product,” she says. “They know the possibility of somebody falling off their platform can happen quickly because it’s so complex, so they put people and processes in place to avoid losing the attention of the customer.”
When it comes creating a good onboarding process, Warren says companies need to be honest about the information and time they need from their customer.
“I think expectations are the biggest thing. Whether you’re a simple dating app or a more complex automation tool, set the expectations of what it will be like to use your product the first day, the first week, the first quarter,” she says.
“If you set up those expectations and you clearly outline them from the beginning, then people will know ‘Gee, this isn’t something I’m just going to learn overnight, there’s going to be a person who works with me and guides me through the process the first few months. I get it.’ That’s a big thing that a lot of startups forget. You should show the customer or user what to expect [at] every point [of] working together.”
This is something Halifax-based Affinio knows all too well. The marketing intelligence platform makes onboarding a crucial part of the business. With big clients like Spotify, BBC World, L’Oréal and Sony Music, it’s not just about training, it’s about training the right people.
“When we do our onboarding, one of the things that we implemented over the last few months is making sure that we have all the right people on the call and being diligent about who those people are, because there are different people in that onboarding process that you need to highlight different things to,” says John Gleeson, vice-president of customer success at Affinio.
For instance, you would need to train the person who will be using the platform the most on all the nuts and bolts, but you may want to train an executive who won’t be using the product daily on things like how to pull results and track effectiveness.
“I think it’s best practice to lay out who those roles are. In the early days we ran into the issue that we did really great training, and you didn’t necessarily see that result in a customer who renewed or a customer who grew or expanded,” Gleeson says. “It came down to the fact that maybe those roles weren’t clearly identified early on. The right people weren’t seeing the right output.”
Gleeson says he still considers sales to be the lifeblood of any business; yet sustaining that lifeblood is a whole other challenging process in itself. Both are equally as important to the whole operation.
“I don’t think one is harder than the other,” he says. “Both require a lot of process and a lot of hustle, but there are two sides of the coin.”
Martin W. Wielemaker, who teaches entrepreneurship at University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Business Administration says onboarding is something some of the startups he sees struggle with.
“I do think a lot of people in startups are focusing too much on the product or service itself and why it’s so great and why it would benefit customers as opposed to thinking about the process in which these customers are going to adopt a product,” he says.
Wielemaker says one common challenge a lot of service-based companies face is they require the customer to provide information. Though it’s necessary to a business, it is all boring, dull and even annoying to potential customers.
“They need to provide you with information, they need to provide you with a profile, those are things that are going to turn people off if you’re going to walk them through all of those,” he says. “So you have this tension from providing this great user experience but also as a company needing these users to go through boring but necessary steps, and that’s the big problem.”
The good news is a lot of big companies have already figured this out. For example, on many platforms and services, one can log in using either their Facebook or Google account.
“So with one click you have the made the experience much easier but you as a company have gotten the necessary information that you need,” he says.
Wielemaker says good onboarding really comes down to putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and thinking about how you can make their experience better. With so many other companies doing it right, it’s not too hard to find good solutions and ideas.
“Just think of all the steps that a customer has to go through and then think about all the activities a customer needs to do and then think about how you can minimize it,” he says. “When you talk about steps, it’s good to let the customer know what the steps are that they need to do.”
No matter what you call it, “onboarding” is essentially providing good customer service.
“The word [onboarding] itself is almost off-putting. It’s really just providing a great experience to customers and making the introduction to the product and use of the product easy,” Wielemaker says.
“That’s all it is. Don’t get hung up on the word.”