Client Onboarding – The Process You Build, And Use Will Impact Your Customers Beliefs And Their Results

Building lasting relationships is truly about helping the customer feel with your actions that you care, and not just hearing that you care about their business. What you do speaks so loudly; I cannot hear what you say!  Your client onboarding gets one shot to do it right. Your actions and process for client onboarding must and should create beliefs that you care, validate them, and listen to their needs! You must be the catalyst to build their beliefs on WHY they invested in your solution or service. 

The best leaders at the best companies worldwide constantly strive to create a customer-centric culture! The culture of customer-centricity is more than just saying the customer is at the top of your mind. It’s about truly understanding who your customer is so you can anticipate their needs and how they want communication and creating a meaningful interaction and experience that validates why they invested in you! This is what is called “Cognitive Closure.” In other words, you get to influence their mind with positive beliefs you create, and you need to do it quickly and efficiently!

Focus on the Customer Experience

For decades companies have utilized tools that don’t help the customer experience quickly reach the time to value they want. According to McKinsey & Company, poor onboarding engagement and customer service account for 52% of customers leaving in the first 90 days. 

And most of the time, you may not know the customers are unhappy. According to research conducted by Esteban Kolsky, the founder of thinkJar, 1 in 26 customers complain when unhappy. This now begs the question, why do companies settle with less than the best in world-class processes for onboarding new customers?  

When we choose not to focus on the customer’s experience, we must realize the customer is already afraid of project failure when they start having trouble in the client onboarding process. This is the quickest way to a customer’s defense mechanism and creates doubt. When this happens, good luck getting them back on board with a view that your company is top-notch. Your customer will either embrace the self-defeating belief and lose hope this will work at all, or they may be the one who says to their company, “see, I told you this was not going to work,” or “this was too good to be true.” They might even say, “the ROI is just going to take too long; we need to look at something else.”  You may even hear the dreaded, “oh, the integrations just are not going to work as we thought; we must abandon this now”… Any of these comments sound familiar?

The Value of Creating Positive Experiences for Your Customers

The key to the right process and positive culture is ensuring everyone is informed on both sides of the journey. Transparency!  Remember, you cannot overlook this if you want to create positive customer results in the client onboarding journey and experience. It begins with one important yet simple principle: Creating Positive Experiences for their beliefs about you and your product, solution, or service!

There is a mathematical formula for this equation. EXPERIENCES that you create for your customer are what drive their BELIEFS. Think about this for a minute. If you are settling for a less-than-optimum process that isn’t customer-centric, you must own the beliefs you create for them. If they are not positive experiences, you can take it to the bank; this will directly impact their actions. These actions will be evidenced in the outcome of the equation, known as RESULTS. They will be visible in your NPS Scores (PPS), Net Revenue Retention (NRR) going down, churn, lack of user adoption, and a host of other issues associated with negative customer beliefs that started from day one that you allowed to be created about your company during client onboarding. 

These results you get speak so loudly that you either did or didn’t give them what they needed in the beginning. You must focus on creating positive experiences in the onboarding journey so that they have the foundational beliefs that drive positive actions in your relationship. These positive actions yield results such as cognitive closure (mentally embracing your product and service as a critical piece of their business), increased customer engagement, excitement about the value you bring (creating your raving fans), and bigger investments in your product/or services. 

You Hold the Key; it’s your Decision

You hold the key to the entire process at this critical point in your customer journey. The results always speak for themselves. Experiences create beliefs, good or bad. These beliefs create the actions your customer will take, and ultimately the actions they take to the bank will yield the positive or negative results you will see! It’s all a simple formula, and you must execute the right way to get the right results.

This formula is not rocket science, but ask yourself, what do you compromise in your customer journey and experiences today that are costing you with the customer to yield the results you both want in the end?

The key to helping change this madness of churn and all other issues caused by the negative beliefs of your customer is simple. You must not think old school anymore by simply trying to utilize strategies to manage a customer onboarding project on paper, spreadsheets, or a PM (Project Management) tool that doesn’t manage customer engagement with transparency and accountability. 

The companies today that are wildly successful are the ones who focus on creating the beliefs upfront for their customers during onboarding. They empower them and enable them to get the highest possible results. They are the companies that automate and manage the engagement of their customers during a project. This is a major shift in thinking and how you execute, but the facts do not lie. It will completely enable the power of building the beliefs that ultimately drive the results you seek for your customer while effectively reducing the time to value them!

Yes, managing your customers’ engagement in a project while you manage the project is exactly how you will get the positive results you seek in the customer journey!

I love the tagline from Capital One, “What’s in your wallet?”  

I will modify that for this post and ask, “What’s in your wallet to build positive beliefs for your customer?”

Are you building something that gets you by, just settling, or are you employing a world-class process that sets you apart from your competition?

The Results Speak for Themselves

It’s important to remember you must ‘Create Value’ not only post-sale but create experiences during the sales process, pre-contract or close stages, and use your defined process of the client onboarding journey as a huge selling point to building value and reducing time to value for your customers! Give them the vision of “why” they need you and “how” you will deliver by focusing on creating the right experiences upfront to drive the beliefs and actions you desire for them so that you both get the right results!