We’ve talked before about our preference for flywheel model rather than a sales funnel. With the flywheel model, you aim to attract, engage, and delight your customers. Working this way means that you inevitably focus on creating positive customer experiences and how to improve customers' satisfaction. By creating a customer-centric experience strategy, you not only generate customer loyalty but active brand evangelists and valuable word of mouth promotion.

In this model, the customer journey doesn’t stop at the point of conversion. Continuing to delight and engage them post-sale becomes part of your product or service offering. 

Taking a good look at your client onboarding process as part of your CX strategy can reap dividends. While it may be more common to talk about onboarding sequences in relation to SAAS and software companies, you can still add greatly to your customer experience post-sale even if you are a business services company. 

What is customer onboarding?

No-one wants a customer to regret their purchase. Nor do you want a customer that buys and then never uses your service because they don’t fully understand what it can do for them. Equally, you don’t want your clients to feel that what they’re getting doesn’t match your sales pitch.

Customer onboarding delivers on your brand promise and sets your customers' expectations for what it means to do business with you. When your onboarding sequence works well, you confirm to your new clients that they’ve made a good decision by choosing to buy from you.

Instead of simply abandoning your customer to figure things out on their own post-purchase, your onboarding routine continues to strengthen the relationship and helps your clients to get the most out of their investment.

With a well-designed onboarding sequence, you can guide your new clients and show them the benefits of being with your company. You can ensure they don’t feel lost or unsure, and that they feel supported. You might provide self-service customer support resources to help them get set up. You could consider building a knowledge base of tips and tutorials on aspects of your service, and use the opportunity to point them to other add-ons or services that may benefit them.

What are the benefits of onboarding?

“We know that brands that can improve the customer journey see revenues increase as much as 10 to 15 percent while also lowering the cost to serve 15 to 20 percent.” McKinsey

Here are just some of the benefits of client onboarding:

1) Increased retention

Most businesses are in a position where it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. If you want to build continuing mutually beneficial relationships with your clients, then continuing to please them after the sale with a well-thought-out onboarding sequence is the way to go.

If your clients feel understood and well supported once they start using your service, they are far less likely to look elsewhere. Instead of constantly losing existing clients and having to chase new ones, you can focus on building deeper relationships with the clients you already have. Not only does this save on your marketing budget, but you’re that bit closer to turning clients into raving fans who can’t wait to talk about you.

2) Relationship building

Clients who feel you have their best interests at heart and that you really understand them will trust you more. You’re likely to develop stronger relationships with them when they see that you don't just forget them once you get the sale. Over time, you can develop the client relationship, adding on more services and perhaps upselling to higher ticket offerings. All of this without running on the hamster wheel of constantly having to acquire more and more new clients.

3) Taking care of client needs

Impress your clients—both new and existing—with the wealth of your knowledge and expertise. Answer their queries and provide information on what to do next based on their behaviours and the information they’ve given you.

Marketing automation now means you can provide information before they need it based on your knowledge of your clients' interactions with your site. Imagine being able to do that and think about how good that personalised service would feel to your clients. The more you can do that, the less chance of them leaving to go to another company because they know they’d be starting again with a company that doesn’t understand them as well as you do.

4) Banish client frustrations

If your onboarding sequence is set up correctly and optimised, your clients will move seamlessly through every stage of working with you without feeling like they’re struggling with anything. If you’re always there for them - whether it’s with a quick tips video on the website, a timely checklist delivered to their inbox, or simple ways to get hold of you - they can relax. They feel taken care of and important to you instead of overwhelmed or frustrated.

5) Superior customer experience

With excellent onboarding, you’re treating your clients to a genuinely great customer experience from the first time they encounter your business to their latest contact with you. Remember that we talked about delighting the customer? This is how you do it.

Steps to creating your own onboarding process

How do you create an onboarding experience that works? As usual, it starts with knowing your audience and their customer journey.

Understanding what support and resources your clients need starts long before they buy. From the moment clients first encounter your business, their interactions on your website and social media provides valuable data. Paying attention to your customers interactions with your company gives you all the information you need to know what they want and how they want to experience it.

Use this information to create a journey of discovery that maps out every touchpoint and continues to build their knowledge post-sale. Start to narrow down what would delight your clients, so that you can work out how to give them more of it.

Get input from all of your customer facing teams and record customer feedback. Plan what information you need from your customers and when, as well as what information they are going to need from you and when.

Don’t overload them by asking too many questions or delivering too much content all at once. Understand what is most important at each stage. Create a hierarchy of information you need to exchange and create a drop feed of interactions to make sure it is received and understood.

Finally, look at content creation. What do you need to serve your clients’ needs, keep them engaged, and educate them? Look at your existing content assets and see what you already have, then plan to fill any gaps. You might need to create or repurpose assets, such as explainer videos, demonstrations of your client portal, and checklists.

Measure customers' responses if you’re sending them training and tips. By keeping track of the data, you'll know whether they prefer to watch videos or read step-by-step guides. You also have an indication of the value of creating additional content, such as a VIP customer experience providing one-to-one coaching or group webinars.

Elements of the onboarding process for professional services firms

Here are some elements you could include in your onboarding process. This can and should change and develop over time. You should certainly look at your onboarding sequence regularly to see where you can improve and if there are any points of friction.

1) Automated email workflows

You can welcome new clients to your business with an automated email sequence. Start with a welcome email and then use triggers based on customer behaviours and click-throughs. You can send them follow-ups to keep the relationship moving forward, invitations to connect, and to attend training, webinars, demos, and more, as they need them.

Every part of this sequence should be tailored to suit your clients, based on what you know about them and on seeing other clients go through your onboarding process.

Ensure your welcome email is positive and filled with good energy. Tell them that you’re happy they’re here and thank them for choosing you. Then point them to just one step that they need to take next. If you try to give them a list of things to do, they could get overwhelmed.

As your clients continue to work with you, the triggers you’ve set up can direct them to specific help pages or FAQs based on their needs. You can send them just the right set of instructions at the right time, or show them how to find answers about their project or account in your client portal.

Later, you can send them information about new features or services you have that they might need and let them know what else you can do for them. You can provide education and training to help them run their wider business and on how to work more efficiently and smoothly with you.

2) Client portal

If you have a client portal, you can provide them with all of their details and information in one place. You can add their documentation, project details, timelines, meeting minutes, checklists and more. By keeping all of their admin in one place, you make keeping track easy for them.

Your system may also be able to do automated prompts for follow-ups, such as when big milestones or deadlines are due, and when you need sign-offs.

3) Knowledgebase content

Training your client on how to be a better client is a vital part of your content strategy. It not only makes your life easier, it makes their job less frustrating.

Think about how your clients prefer to take in information and include instructions in their preferred formats. Including video, audio, and written content helps to address the needs of different types of learners and makes your content accessible to all.

Think about how you can deliver this learning to them in a strategic and timely fashion. Use automation and triggers to deliver more related information when they search for help, and add further information to your email sequence. This keeps them updated on other ways you can help and on how they can help themselves.

You don’t have to start from scratch when creating a knowledge base. You probably already have a wealth of content you can use. You can adapt blog posts, articles, presentations, manuals and more into step-by-step guides and checklists, or use them as the basis for video scripts.

4) Support systems

Make it easy for your clients to get more and personalised help when they need it. Chatbots, like Intercom, make it easy to reach out to someone for support while using your website.

Chatbots can also take some of the load off you by automatically pointing your clients to information in your knowledge base.

However, don’t make it difficult to get hold of a real human being if that’s what your client needs. Always give your clients options and ensure their support preferences are catered to.

5) Booking systems

When your clients need more hand-holding or they need a meeting with you or their account holder, make it easy for them to book a meeting with a booking system. This means they can book at any time of day or night, without you having to be there. They can also choose from a range of dates and times to find one that suits. A good booking system makes it easier for both of you and reduces friction.

If your client feels they are being heard and that they can speak to someone for quick questions and book longer meetings as needed, they will feel supported and that leads to a good customer experience.

6) Gamification

Could your process benefit from gamification? For example, does your onboarding have a linear progression that you can display a progress bar for? Or perhaps you can set expectations by having a dashboard that checks off tasks as your clients work with you? Is there a step-by-step or an educational element to the process with milestones that can be celebrated and rewarded?

Think about adding an email or a pop-up to celebrate when they achieve milestones such as completing a training module or filling in their information in the client portal. If they’re working through a course, use software that ticks off the sections as they go. They’ll get a huge dopamine hit when they complete steps for a feel-good factor that will help them want to stick with you.

7) User journey monitoring

There’s no point in doing all this work if you aren’t tracking what’s happening in the customer journey. Track how clients are interacting with your site and your client portal so you can see where they are getting stuck and offer assistance. Look at click-through rates in your emails, too. This data holds a wealth of information about what needs they are servicing and what’s not catching their attention.

Tracking can also help you improve your onboarding sequence and improve the customer experience further.

Take Your Next Step

With some work, a well-created and maintained onboarding sequence can take your clients through the post-sale period and make them feel supported and looked after throughout. If you'd like to find out more about how marketing automation and content strategy can combine to create a truly excellent customer experience, get in touch.