While there is often a lot of emphasis on getting people to buy your products, that is only the beginning. To succeed in capturing customers and getting them to stay with you for a long time, your startup company needs to help them get more out of your products.
This is where customer onboarding becomes an important task. It paves the way for a proper introduction of your product to the customer. But how do you pull that off exactly? Let’s look closer at this and discover how Virtua Solutions can help.
Understanding Customer Onboarding
In its simplest definition, customer onboarding is about getting customers acquainted with your products. It has two main goals. The first is to help users learn how to use your products. The second is to help them discover more about that product.
The Importance Of Customer Onboarding For Your Startup Company
Effective customer onboarding can bring in a lot for your startup business. Here are some of the more prominent benefits you can gain from your efforts.
Greater Customer Retention
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Good onboarding isn’t just about convincing people to come back. You also get to convince them to come back for more. Once they understand what your product offers, they become more willing to invest in it, boosting revenues.
Lower Customer Service Costs
The idea here is that once customers become more familiar with your product, they are less likely to encounter significant issues with it. And even if they do encounter issues, they are more capable of resolving these issues themselves. Your customer service team can then save all its efforts on other important matters.
Shorten Time To Value
If your startup business operates on a recurring-revenue model, you face a unique challenge. You need to prove to customers your value every month. Through excellent onboarding, you can lessen the time required for such activities. Customers will be convinced once they see the value of your product early on.
Increased Word Of Mouth
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As we have said before, a good customer experience can pave the way for customers advocating for your brand. That begins with onboarding. When people see that you are there to help them from the beginning, they become even more vocal about their love for you. That will help convince more people to check you out.
Developing Your Startup Company Customer Onboarding Process
Customer onboarding can vary from business to business. It depends on the type of products you have and the nature of your customers. Nevertheless, there are several key elements that your strategy should have for it to succeed.
A Definite Process
The first essential element of good onboarding is a definite process. That will help guide both you and the customer in discovering how to use your product. The actual process you develop will vary but they have some common characteristics.
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First off, you want the process to be straightforward. The goal is to help customers learn about your product with as few steps as possible. Make sure that everything is intuitive so that they can quickly go through the process.
You should also not overwhelm customers with too much information. Instead, reveal new features in succeeding stages. That creates an “aha!” moment that encourages them to explore further.
The Right Tools And Technology For Your Startup Company
You should also take advantage of whatever tools you have to help customers get the hang of your product. The growth of the Internet has provided a startup company like yours with many new tools to help educate customers. It has also made product training a lot more accessible to customers.
Bring all these tools together under one customer relationship management system. That will make it easier for you to oversee the operation of the tools. On the other hand, it also facilitates faster customer feedback collection.
Training And Coaching
One thing to remember is that customer onboarding still needs to be personal. While customers will learn a lot from your tools and process, they can get more with your agents by their side. And for that to succeed, these agents also need to have the right training.
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The idea behind agent training is that the conversations with customers should not be scripted. Instead, the agents should be able to direct the conversations based on their judgment. The talking points that are there will serve as a guide.
This part is also where coaching becomes vital. Note that these coaches are not there to force agents to “follow the script.” Instead, they focus on helping agents discover more points for improvement. That encourages them to create richer conversations with customers and better direct them.
Sustainability
One thing you need to bear in mind is that onboarding does not only happen at the beginning of the customer journey. As you create new products or expand the capabilities of the current ones, you will need to retrain your customers for them to get the same level of satisfaction from these new or improved products.
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Here, you would also want to improve your current onboarding process. Take advantage of the various measurement and analytics tools to determine which aspects of the process deliver the best results. Use this data to develop new strategies that your onboarding agents can explore.
Giving Your Startup Company Additional Support
With all of the elements that a good customer onboarding effort requires, your startup company has a lot on its plate. Virtua Solutions is here to help you with the task at hand. We provide more than just additional agents to help train more customers.
Our team can cover various other aspects of the onboarding process for you. For instance, we can take over the management of your knowledge base and online training resources. These are critical components, as they provide customers with quick access to product information.
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Virtua Solutions can also assist in the training of your agents. We can handle the coordination with coaches to ensure that they can observe agents at work. Additionally, we can handle the legwork to help your coaches analyze agent performance.
How well you do customer onboarding can make or break your relationship with product users. Thus, you want to have the right help for the job at hand. At Virtua Solutions, we are ready to see to it that your startup company succeeds. Contact us today for consultations.