Imagine you’re hosting an incredible party and you’ve invited your favorite people as guests. Your guests arrive and present their invitation, but you’re not there to greet them. Instead, you leave your guests alone to wander the party by themselves. You never speak with them. In fact, you completely ignore them. Your guests leave the party wondering why you invited them in the first place and begin to question if you really are the friend they thought you were.

That same feeling is how a new customer feels when they’re “invited” to the products and services of your business but are not properly transitioned through a thoughtful onboarding process. Onboarding clients is essential to the success of your business and the customers they serve. If you’re wondering how your industry or company can implement successful customer onboarding, here are seven client onboarding tactics and examples of them in action.

1. Trim Onboarding Process Time

One of the greatest challenges of onboarding is designing and implementing the steps for completing the process. A client onboarding protocol can take many steps and is often cumbersome and time-consuming. It is essential for companies to identify the purpose and necessity of each step and look for ways to trim the process.

Looking at your current process, how many steps would you currently list: 20, 50, or more? Can you say with full confidence at this moment that all those steps are necessary? Could they be combined, streamlined, or altered to decrease the number of tasks you currently use? If so, how much time would that free up for your company to use on other projects? These are deep questions every business should consider.

2. Boost Project Manager Capacity

Your project manager for the client onboarding or client success team is likely tasked with tracking resources and time, as well as designing a cohesive implementation process. Without software to guide project management, excess hours are spent reviewing spreadsheets, notes, and more to ensure all tasks are completed and hours are billed properly. When managing projects manually, the project manager often loses valuable time tracking the project that could be better spent improving systems and the overall client experience.

3. Decrease Meeting Length

In a Harvard Business Review study on meetings, 71 percent of senior managers said that meetings are unproductive and inefficient. While not every meeting is unproductive or inefficient, this study does point out that some meetings may need to be trimmed from the day’s schedule. But how do you determine which meetings should be cut or how to trim the length of each meeting?

4. Improve Customer Service

First impressions are everything, and if you miss the opportunity to show your customer they are important to you and that you are there to help them achieve success, they will soon look elsewhere for that help.

How do you know if your customers are unhappy? One way is to look at the churn (customers who leave your company for another) and turnover of clients. Another is to read reviews about your business via social listening or through review apps. What are your customers saying about you? Bad service reviews, while frustrating, can be a powerful tool to help you find ways to improve.

5. Implement a White-Glove Service

White-glove services are customized offerings to personalize the customer experience. Businesses that establish these individualized relationships with their clients need customizable systems and templates.

If you offer these high-end services, it is likely that your current process takes a great deal more time than a standardized service approach. Is there a way to marry both the best service possible with time-saving processes?

Some customers need handholding. With GUIDEcx, we don’t have to disrupt our processes to help them. On the platform, each task is a specific feature, you can still offer white-glove service, and scheduling meetings only involves the click of a button.

— CHERI KLUSSENDORF—
AgriSync

6. Add to the Sales Team Resources

In order to increase your client base, you need resources to grow your sales team. This can’t happen when resources are being spent in other areas, such as lengthy client onboarding processes or cumbersome data-sharing programs. As the sales and customer success teams work in tandem with one another, each group looks for ways to trim the fat, giving them additional resources for new hires.

Many businesses begin their client onboarding with the use of simple tools such as Google Sheets. While Google Sheets is a good place to start, it definitely has its limitations. Data within Google Sheets can be difficult to sort, analyze, and track. As your client list grows, you’ll need a more robust system to track and onboard clients.

7. Increase Productivity

Using manual systems to onboard clients creates bottlenecks in the process, which slows down the overall productivity of the customer success team. This can leave a business feeling like they are drowning in onboarding tasks. If you’re struggling to keep up with the enrollment of new clients, you’re in need of a more efficient onboarding process.

Client onboarding works when you have the right tool to streamline the process, include all team members, create transparency, and guide the process. Ensure your clients feel like guests of honor by providing them with the best customer experience possible. To learn more about how GUIDEcx can help your business successfully increase productivity, improve customer service, and boost project capacity, schedule a demo with one of our onboarding specialists.