Client onboarding is the phase when you start building a relationship with your client. It is the time when you get a chance to create a positive perception about your company in your customer’s mind. The best way to avoid any confusion or missing out on any step during onboarding is to follow
Client onboarding is the phase when you start building a relationship with your client. It is the time when you get a chance to create a positive perception about your company in your customer’s mind. The best way to avoid any confusion or missing out on any step during onboarding is to follow a client onboarding template. We have created a template that you can use for your business.
Before you start on using the template, you must understand clearly the importance of onboarding. There are chances that you have created a flawless product but your new client doesn’t know about it yet. They need a hand-holding during the initial phase of using your product. This is the time when you clear all their doubts and apprehensions about your product.
As a customer success manager, your main responsibility is to retain the customer for long-term. If you are waiting for your customer to raise an issue that they are facing with your product, then you might lose the end game. You cannot wait for them to finally reach the point where they get so fed up with your product or service that they finally decide to move away. You need to act proactively to prevent any bad experience that customer might have right from the beginning. And that’s why, it all has to start from the onboarding phase.
So, here’s the client onboarding template you must follow for a successful onboarding.
This is the first section of the client onboarding template where you gather all the business information about your customer. Below are the data that you must ask them to fill in a form:
Before you start interacting with your client, you must appoint the employees in your organization who would handle this account. Hence, you must include this in your client onboarding template. It is based on the availability of your employees and you must also consider the team size that you would allocate to serve this client. In determining the team size, knowing the client’s budget is of utmost importance. Because only on the basis of that you can justify the cost of serving them based on all the resources you deploy. Some of the key personnels in your organization behind the client account can be:
Once you are done with setting up your team, you must approach the client with your welcome package. They should be systematically sent to your clients and in an organized manner so that your client doesn’t get overwhelmed with too much information in the initial phase. You must send the following resources and emails to your client:
This is a very important meeting that you must include in your client onboarding template. Basically, in this meeting you are going to set a roadmap with the client of the goals they would achieve through your product or service. In this meeting, you can also bring out from them what expectations they have from you. These strategic discussions would help you cover the aspects that would make you accountable at a later point in time during your term of relationship with them.
Client onboarding template is easy to maintain when you adhere to strict guidelines of your onboarding process. Don’t execute all these steps in one go. Give some time to the clients to get slowly immersed in your organization’s environment. They also need some time to grasp the handling of your products. So make sure you keep your technical staff always free and ready for giving prompt support to the new customers. Because no matter how simple your product is, or how thorough your introductory tutorials are, a user is bound to face doubts or glitches when they use a product for the first time. 9
Once you execute this initial onboarding phase with much ease and systematically, you would prepare the client for another journey towards customer retention. And all the experience they gathered during onboarding would give extra mileage for them to remain subscribed and loyal to your brand.