Providing excellent onboarding shouldn’t just be the goal for your employees—it is also absolutely essential to your customers. Unfortunately, customers are often left to fend for themselves as soon as they buy a platform, resulting in slow-moving adoption and time to value (TTV). And after receiving full attention throughout the sales process, the transition to using a new tool can be jarring: Over 90 percent of customers feel that the companies they buy from could provide a better onboarding experience.
The best onboarding experience for your customers can be achieved by digitizing onboarding. A digital onboarding experience can help you ensure long-term customer loyalty, increase revenue, positively impact KPIs, and even boost employee engagement—and that’s just the beginning. Digital onboarding can also help your customers achieve more with your service, encouraging them to continue investing in you.
Is a digital onboarding platform the right solution for your organization? Let’s dive into the details of digitizing onboarding, including the limitations of manual onboarding, how digital onboarding eliminates customer onboarding challenges, and how to digitize your own onboarding processes to develop the best customer experience possible.
The Effect of Manual Onboarding on the Customer Experience
Did you know that it costs up to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one? However, it’s not always easy to keep your clients happy—especially if you don’t start off on the right foot. Manual onboarding especially can disrupt your processes and leave your customers wanting much more from their experiences. Here are a few reasons why.
Disorganized, Disparate Systems Create Poor Experiences
First, because manual onboarding lacks a unified system, teams often work and track progress in disparate tools like Excel spreadsheets, Google sheets, emails, and/or paper files. Not only does this create a lackluster experience for your employees as they must track everything themselves, but it also affects your customer experience. Slow support, unhappy employees, and missed or late tasks will only leave your customers feeling forgotten and frustrated.
Similarly, manual processes prevent your employees from feeling well-supported and unable to offer the experience your customers have come to expect. Client satisfaction begins with your employees: When they don’t have the support they need to get your customers onboarded well, they will not be able to provide seamless service.
You Don’t Have Access to Data or Insights
Manual processes also do not offer intuitive data, time tracking, or insights into the customer experience. When onboarding is done manually, your team must also attempt to gather data and analytics on their own time, resulting in poor or unclear information.
This makes it difficult to track customer satisfaction, potential roadblocks, and task completion, as well as proactively identify actionable steps you can take to improve employee and customer satisfaction. As a result, tasks can be forgotten or overlap, preventing your teams from providing excellent results or working as efficiently as they could with more support.
Employees Are Burned Out and Unable to Provide Great Experiences
Finally, when your employees’ sights are set on immediate, pressing, daily tasks, they are often burned out before they are able to strategize and be proactive. They are working in fight-or-flight mode to complete their tasks every day and cannot provide comprehensive support.
Overall, organizations that use manual onboarding systems often report the following challenges:
- Low feature adoption
- Product abandonment
- A heavy burden on clients to handle documentation
- Poor employee experiences
- Low customer satisfaction
- Insufficient customer engagement
- High employee and customer churn
When employees are expected to use disparate systems, teams are more likely to miscommunicate, miss deadlines, have unfinished projects, and deliver a less-than-excellent customer experience. The result, unsurprisingly, is greater customer churn.
If your team has always used manual onboarding practices, the good news is that it’s not too late to find a better solution that will empower your customers to achieve more.
Digital Onboarding Eliminates Customer Onboarding Challenges
While manual processes can disrupt your customer experiences, digitizing onboarding provides you with one unified platform that improves as you adapt and empowers you to achieve your business objectives and overcome onboarding challenges. Eighty-eight percent of service leaders agree that customers have higher expectations than they did in previous years. Digital onboarding can help organizations meet those standards and make an exceptional first impression.
With the powerful capabilities of digitized onboarding, your team can not only make their workflows more efficient but also eliminate common challenges like insufficient reporting, customer churn, overloaded employees, and poor customer understanding. For example, you can use your system to calculate a customer satisfaction score with surveys, enabling you to gather real feedback, discover pain points, learn about your customers, and drive improvements.
By gaining greater visibility into your customer onboarding roadblocks and processes, you can also use them to identify opportunities for improvement, ensuring your customers have an exceptional experience from the beginning.
The following are more of the significant benefits of digital onboarding:
- Uninterrupted business operations with greater opportunities for automation
- Reduced time and costs
- More personalized experiences
- Increased consistent and accurate workflows
- Comprehensive reporting on all operations
- Real-time forecasts and task tracking
- Easy integrations with additional tools like Salesforce, Gainsight, etc.
When you have a powerful digital onboarding platform on your side, you’ll be able to gain these benefits as well as drive greater customer retention, quicker time to value (TTV), and more revenue.
How to Digitize Onboarding
Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of digital onboarding, you’re ready to move your processes to a platform! But where do you begin? Digitizing customer experiences starts with choosing the digital onboarding platform that works best for your organization.
Choosing the Right Digital Onboarding Platform
While your needs will vary based on your industry and business objectives, here are a few things to look for in a digital onboarding tool:
- Customer dashboards with high-level overviews of projects and customer health
- The ability to calculate customer satisfaction scores
- Easy integration with your favorite tools
- Full visibility into client interactions, engagement, and projects
- Ongoing training and services for full support
- Pricing options for unlimited contributors and guests
- Mobile app availability
- Intuitive overviews of your timeline, tasks, and dates
- Continuous improvement and the development of better tools and capabilities
An excellent onboarding platform will be proactive and provide you with the tools you need to succeed. It will also be provided by experts in the field of onboarding that can offer valuable tips, tricks, and support as soon as you need it.
If you’re having trouble choosing a platform, take a look at the customer service the provider offers. They should give you the opportunities and support you need and want to guarantee for your own customers.
How to Start Using the Platform
After you’ve selected your ideal digital onboarding platform, it’s time to design a roadmap for widespread adoption and use. Review your current processes and workflows and enter them into the platform, using templates as much as possible. Relying on tried-and-true practices and templates will help you identify which processes are working well and which have gaps that need to be filled. Identify what you’d like to change and how you will change it.
Once you have a foundation built, it’s time to start using the platform across your organization. Help your employees get started with training and support, and promote widespread adoption with leaders ready to help teams as needed. Encourage your team to run all communication through the platform to learn its intricacies and identify potential improvements. Then, once your organization has become accustomed to the tool, you can receive feedback from your employees and iron out any bumps in the road.
On top of this, don’t forget to utilize data and analytics to continuously improve your processes and drive greater results. Continue educating yourself and your team on all platform features to take full advantage of special capabilities as they’re released. With the right tool, automation and reporting will continuously improve, offering your team more benefits as you continue using it to optimize your investments. Don’t forget to ask for help in the case of any problems—your provider is there to give you comprehensive support and ensure you’re optimizing your use of the system.
Discover the Power of Digitizing the Customer Experience with GUIDEcx
With GUIDEcx, you can scale more efficiently, track progress toward deadlines, and improve the customer journey—all while maintaining the human element. GUIDEcx users report the following:
As the leader in customer onboarding, GUIDEcx provides a new level of insight into your onboarding process. GUIDEcx offers the following features that will elevate your customer experiences:
- Customer Dashboard
- CSAT
- Integrations Marketplace
- Status change reasons
- Robust reporting
- Real-time forecasted end dates
- Unlimited contributors and guests
- No customer login required
- Mobile app
- Training sessions
- Live chat support
- And more
To learn more about how GUIDEcx can help you transform your customer onboarding experience and achieve greater ROI, take a moment to schedule a demo today.
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