Reducing Your Customers’ Time-to-Value
No matter what industry you’re in, your success is built upon customers who are satisfied with your products or services. So how can you help your clients (especially new ones) feel confident in their decision to work with you instead of your competitors? The answer is to reduce their time-to-value (TTV).
Why is it so important to minimize your clients’ time-to-value? Because doing so allows them to experience all the benefits of your product or service as soon as possible. In other words, the longer it takes for a new customer to start enjoying the benefits of working with you, the greater the chance they will regret their decision and start looking for someone else.
What Is Time-to-Value?
Basically, TTV is the amount of time it takes for your client to see the value in what they purchased from you. It’s the moment they see a return on their investment. When does that recognition of value happen? That depends on the exact nature of your product or service, but it’s usually somewhere in the customer onboarding process. It’s crucial to pinpoint that moment so you can find ways to make it happen sooner.
Why Is It Important to Shorten TTV?
Time-to-value significantly affects your company’s churn rate (how fast customers leave). It’s always important to find ways to minimize churn rate; happy, loyal customers are the foundation of any successful business. But many companies don’t understand how early in the onboarding process a customer may start to think about leaving, especially if they aren’t seeing a return on their investment.
As such, it’s crucial to optimize your customer onboarding process. You want to help every client reach that ROI moment as soon as possible. A positive customer experience during onboarding creates a favorable impression of your company, and it can encourage new customers to overlook the minor hiccups that often happen during training and implementation.
SaaS customers usually recognize a return on their investment when they use your program to complete a project for the first time. They might not see the benefits when you install the software or train them to use it. Rather, they experience the value of the software when they use it and can see exactly how much time and effort it saves over their old process.
SaaS providers need to minimize the time it takes to implement and train users on their software. The sooner your customers can start to use your software, the faster they can see a return on their investment and the less likely they are to think about moving to one of your competitors.
As such, a time-efficient customer onboarding process is essential. By maintaining communication, increasing automation, and streamlining training, you can shorten the time it takes for your customers to use your software and understand its value.
For a financial technology company, time-to-value has a significant monetary aspect. If it takes a long time to get onboarded and start using your products, your customers may lose money and harm their reputation with their own clients.
A financial provider will likely have high TTV expectations because they understand the significant monetary impact inefficient onboarding and poor customer experience can have. Conversely, an exceptional onboarding experience can build your clients’ trust and minimize that time-to-value so they see the full value in your services.
HealthTech providers may recognize a human aspect when considering time-to-value. Often, fast, error-free implementation of new tools and programs can help save lives and facilitate effective patient care. Shortening time-to-value can have a significant positive impact on your customers and their patients.
Focus on shortening your customers’ TTV with reliable communication, fast troubleshooting, and clear task management. Make sure that miscommunications and missed deadlines don’t elongate the onboarding process, especially if you are working with customers who have team members in multiple locations.
Reducing time-to-value is crucial for education tech providers who must follow a strict schedule and hit tight deadlines. Streamlined onboarding with adequate support is a must for EdTech providers.
Additionally, it’s vital to consider training when looking for ways to reduce TTV. Accessible, relevant training is often a crucial factor in a short time to value, especially in the education sector when clients understand the power of information. Offering on-demand training materials is an efficient way to support customers without overburdening your customer onboarding team.
What Are the Key Features and Benefits of a Customer Onboarding Solution to Reduce Time-to-Value?
Customer Experience
- Communication: Keeping your customers engaged and updated during onboarding is essential. That means your external communication is just as important as internal communication. GUIDEcx includes automated status notifications and task updates that simplify communication and ensure that everyone stays apprised of changes during onboarding.
- Engagement: Do you know what a customer’s onboarding experience is like? If you don’t engage with them regularly, you won’t be able to give them crucial support. And without that support, it takes far longer for your customers to reach their ROI moment when they understand the value of your service offerings. Use our platform’s prebuilt surveys to solicit feedback and make necessary changes to improve the customer experience.
- Training: Inadequate training can significantly increase time-to-value; many customers simply stop trying to use new tools and programs if they don’t understand how they work. It’s crucial to give your clients the information and resources they need to start using your products effectively; reduce TTV further by providing on-demand or self-guided training that customers can access at any time.
Accountability and Efficiency
- Transparency: An effective onboarding process relies on an excellent task management system to assign and track those tasks. But it’s not enough to simply monitor those tasks internally; it’s beneficial to share projects with your customers so they know what’s going on at all times. This eliminates that common issue where customers may feel frustrated that nothing seems to be happening.
- Standardization: If your onboarding process relies on a high number of manual tasks, there’s always a risk of human-related errors and missed steps. GUIDEcx automates reporting and email communications, which reduces mistakes and saves time. Automated processes and standardized templates also facilitate efficient scaling, making it easier for you to serve more customers even while growing your own team.
- On-time delivery: The GUIDEcx platform helps you bring your customers into the process so they can understand their onboarding responsibilities, reducing delays when clients don’t know your team is waiting on them. With our platform, everyone can see task assignments, which increases accountability and supports a higher on-time completion rate.
How to Evaluate Customer Time-to-Value Solutions
So how can you reduce your customers’ TTV and get them to see the ROI sooner? You improve the customer onboarding process and optimize the customer experience. Onboarding is your chance to make a lasting impression on your customers and give them a chance to see how your product lines up with what your sales team promised them.
The faster you can get your customers to see that their experience aligns with their expectations, the shorter that time-to-value is. When evaluating customer onboarding and experience solutions, consider these crucial aspects:
- Features: Focus on your customer’s experience and journey so you understand what motivates them to work with your company and choose an onboarding platform to help them reach their goals.
- Automation: Look for solutions incorporating strategic automation to minimize time delays and reduce human errors common in tedious manual tasks.
- Personalization: Ensure that every customer receives a customized experience that includes the resources, training materials, and notifications they need.
- Communication: Choose a platform that allows you to customize communications and updates so that your clients get all the information they need but isn’t overwhelmed with irrelevant details.
- Task management: A robust task assignment and management system reduces missed steps and ensures on-time delivery. Plus, giving clients a clear overview of the entire process helps them know what’s coming next and makes it easier for them to form a realistic ROI expectation.
- Price: Consider all the costs of the onboarding solution, including any additional charges for new members or additional features. You’re looking for a way to shorten your customers’ TTV, but don’t forget to prioritize your own as well when you’re looking for a solution.
GUIDEcx Is Leading The Client Onboarding Software Category
Our customers love us for our customer service and how we enable our users to engage their customers. See how we specialize in customer onboarding, task management, and project management.
The Benefits of GUIDEcx’s Customer Experience Solutions
An efficient, personalized onboarding experience helps minimize TTV and encourages customers to stay with your company. At GUIDEcx, we’re leading the way in developing solutions that help companies streamline their onboarding processes and improve their customer experience.
How Our Features Improve Customer Experience and Reduce TTV
| Feature | Benefit |
| Customer Dashboard | Clients can access their dashboard online, via mobile, or with an email link. Once there, they can easily see exactly what’s going on with the project so they have the best possible experience. |
| The Compass Experience | With the Compass Experience, your team and customers aren’t hindered by traditional (and unnecessary) project management tools, streamlining the onboarding process and reducing TTV. |
| White-Label Branding | Build your clients’ trust and reduce potential confusion by showcasing your brand colors and logos and sending emails from your domain. |
| Customer Satisfaction Tool (CSAT) | Keep tabs on customers during the onboarding process so you can identify potential problems and address them quickly to shorten time-to-value. Prebuilt surveys make it easy to request feedback and allow your customers to bring up concerns and issues that are lengthening TTV. |
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