We hear a lot about a customer’s journey to get to the point of making a purchase or signing a contract for your product. Companies spend a lot of time and money streamlining the funnel to find customers and attract new business, but perhaps an even more important customer journey is the one that starts as the sales process wraps up. That’s the journey of an existing customer: onboarding, adoption, and hopefully retention (or indicators that the customer is lagging and likely to switch).

Why Retention Matters

Most people are aware that retention is important, and know that having a high volume of churn is not ideal, but may not know the true costs:

• S. companies lose over $136 billion a year from avoidable customer switching to a competitor
• 33% of people would consider switching to another company after a single bad experience with customer service
• It costs about five times as much to attract a new customer than retain an existing one, but that could be significantly higher for companies with large or complex products
• A mere 5% uptick in customer retention could increase profits by 25% to 95%
• The success rate of selling to an existing customer is between 60-70%, while selling to a new customer has a 5-20% success rate

How to Improve a Customer Journey

The customer journey within your company starts when sales hands off a new client to the onboarding team. This is perhaps one of the most critical points in your contact with the client because it sets the stage for all your future interactions. If your onboarding team is proficient, helpful, and friendly, the client will have a great first impression and feel confident that they will continue to get exceptional service from you in the future.

Onboarding

To improve onboarding:

• Have a plan for onboarding that is consistent, and you can easily deploy as soon as the sales team provides information about a new client
• Customize the experience for each clients’ needs (but use software like GuideCX with customizable templates so you don’t have to start from scratch every time)
• Create an onboarding process focused on your clients and their needs, not on the product—too many companies have onboarding that is just a knowledge base in-person to checkboxes on showing how certain features work, but it should be a process built around helping the client realize the software meets his or her needs
• Stay in touch with clients throughout the process so they know exactly what they can expect and when onboarding will be done
• Keep everyone on your team and the client-side accountable with visibility into upcoming tasks and reminders

In part two of this blog, we’ll cover the adoption and lagging portion of a successful customer journey. In the meantime, schedule a demo with GuideCX to learn more about how our industry-leading onboarding software can help you create successful user journeys from the start.