Your marketing department is busy trying to get you eyeballs that will look at your product or service in the hopes of creating loyal customers.
Even if marketing is doing a great job of driving customers to consider your product, how these customers are able to fulfill their needs with your product or service offering and their interaction with your company will make or break the relationship.
Everything is about value. It is for this reason that user onboarding is an essential facet in reducing customer churn. Otherwise, you are wasting money on your marketing efforts.
What is Customer Onboarding? –
According to UserIQ, customer onboarding is the process of helping your customers use your resources, product, service and website masterfully and easily so that they come away every time with exactly what they hoped for from the interaction, and hopefully more.
Customer onboarding is the process of providing enough hand-holding with new customers so that they know exactly how to find what they need each and every time.
Also, it is the process of providing new learning experiences to allow them to find even more of the value they desire from your company in the future. The best customer onboarding is personalized.
How to Master Customer Onboarding –
Provide Guided Tour Software –
When a new user enters your website, guided tour software helps them find what they need and begin to learn their way around your website. These tours can be tailored to the customer type and to such factors as their payment status.
Provide Follow-Up Interactive Usher Software –
In the first few times a new user is interacting with your website, they can easily have questions or sticking points. Interactive software provides pop-ups with the availability of on-demand mini-tours, tips on how to use tools within the page and answers to frequently asked questions.
This saves the customer time because they will not have to call your office and speak to customer service to find out how to fulfill their need on your website. Also, this type of interactive in-app assistance helps to mold how customers will use your website in the future, which helps improve onboarding.
Consult Product Usage Analytics –
Even if the user, from the first to their last time on your website, has access to guides and navigation information, you really don’t know how to improve customer interaction with your website unless you have usage analytics. Usage analytics show customer trends in terms of clicks, behavior and engagement as customers navigate around your website.
As Forbes stated, analytics also need to show user demographics. The trick there is how to not get too nosy right from the start, so users feel interrogated. Analytics show lost potential online as well as choke points. Analytics also show customers who are at risk of churn. Then, you can provide a targeted campaign to support them in getting their needs met again.
In-App Messaging Helps Move Customers to New Features –
Customizable messaging that customers receive while they are on your website or in your app can direct the customer to new products or features of their online experience of your site. These messages can also help users learn to utilize a new website tool.
In-App Mini-Surveys Can Ascertain More Information on Engagement and Needs –
Small surveys that pop up at key points in user interface can gather more insight into the whys and hows of customer engagement and satisfaction.
The Difference Between Mobile and Laptop or Desktop –
A really great insight by Forbes Magazine is that it is all too easy to not think through how to provide a better mobile onboarding experience.
If programmers are not careful with their user onboarding efforts, mobile users will be frustrated with a plethora of permission-request pop-ups. Of course, this is just the opposite of easing customer onboarding.
Reach Out –
As UserIQ states, one of the most important facets of onboarding is the ability for customers to reach you in numerous ways – chat, email, video conference. Also, you must be pro-actively reaching out to them as well.
Overall, potential customers need to quickly find value that meets their needs in your offering. They need to be taught how to successfully navigate around your website and utilize it to create the value they desire.
This can be created within your website in-app to shepherd customers through the best use of your offering. Gathering analytics about user experiences also helps in finding sticking points and places where the potential for churn can fester.
Finally, quick and open communication that is conducted through multiple platforms can help that customer stay in your camp.