In today’s world proliferated by SaaS and apps, customer onboarding is more important than ever. The customer onboarding process starts the minute a potential client hears about your brand and starts considering your product as a solution for them. Customer onboarding is directly linked to client retention, revenue, and business growth. Understanding what it is, why it’s important, and how to do it well is crucial to your business’ success.

What is Customer Onboarding and Why Does It Matter?

Customer onboarding is the process by which organizations take on new clients. It is the first step of the customer’s journey, during which the business has a critical opportunity to show how their product or service provides value to the client. The customer onboarding process is a window of time for clients to evaluate a product or service and decide if they will stay onboard as customers or jump ship. In other words, the easier you make your onboarding process, the more likely you are to form a long-lasting relationship with a client and turn them into advocates for your business.

According to Hubspot, 75% of customer will stop using your product within a week, and 40-60% of free trial users will use your product only once. This is why it’s so important to make onboarding an easy process for your clients and demonstrate the value of your product or service right away. When you retain customers, most of your revenue comes from them, and they will be your biggest sources of referrals.

Developing a Customer Onboarding Process

To successfully onboard new clients and reduce customer churn rate, it’s important to develop a customer onboarding strategy and implement some best practice. You need to understand who your customer is, what value they are looking for in your product, and then set realistic expectations for your customer so they know what they can expect to get from your product. Make it clear what the features and benefits of your product are to your clients, but be honest about any limitations as well. At the end of the day, your clients are going to decide for themselves after testing out your product if they are going to stay on as customers.

You need to communicate with customers during the onboarding process. Consider how your customer service team will communicate with new clients; will it be via email? Phone? Chat? Make sure to provide training and demos if your product is complex. The number one reason for customer churn is that they don’t understand your product, so they don’t see how it is of value to them.

Monitor usage of your product as much as possible during the first week. Follow up with clients to try to get them to use your product more than once during the first week. Ask questions to see how you can help them find value in the product. Think of your customer service team as a second sales team; after a customer signs up for your product, a good customer service team is responsible for keeping them onboard as clients.

Customer Onboarding Strategy Tips

• Know who your customer is and what they are looking for.
• Set realistic expectations for your product and be clear about any limitations it has.
• Demonstrate the value of your product early on.
• Stay in communication with your customer and provide any necessary training.
• Monitor usage of your product during onboarding and collect data.
• Try to get customers to use your product as much as possible during the first week.
• Ask customers questions and gather feedback.

Ideas for a Customer Onboarding Process

• Send a welcome email to every new customer when they sign up.
• Send a second email to remind the customer to try the product if they are inactive for 2 days.
• Create greeting messages and call to action pop ups within your app.
• Make calls or send emails to check-in with new customers and ask questions.
• Make it easy to request training and demos, or schedule this as soon as customers sign up.

How Does Workep’s Customer Onboarding Process Work?

With Workep, it’s as simple as signing up with your Google account, and you’ll be up and running in just minutes. Our project management platform integrates so seamlessly with Google, and is so intuitive to use, that you’ll feel like it’s just another G Suite application.

If you do need some help to get started, a call with one of our Customer Service Specialists is just a click away, and they will be there to answer any questions you have about using our project management software. If you’re not sure about signing up for project management software just yet, you can request a demo with one of our customer service specialist so that they can show you how Workep integrates with G Suite to centralize your project teams and keep your projects on track.

We offer 3 different plans for our project management software, so you can choose what works best for you. We also offer a free 15-day trial of our Growth plan for you to experience all the value Workep has to offer, including the ability to create multiple project teams, assign team and project roles, use our automated Gantt chart methodology, monitor time with the time tracker tool, and get priority access to customer support.