Winning new business is only half the battle. The next step is doing everything it takes to make sure your clients feel supported every step of the way.
In this post, we’ll share our advice on designing an effective high-touch customer success onboarding program that sets the foundation for a positive, long-term relationship between your company and your new customers.
Let’s dig in!
Why you need to get customer success onboarding right
Optimizing your customer success onboarding process is a crucial part of both customer satisfaction and business performance. Going through the process:
- Helps customers understand your product better, and therefore derive more value from it.
- Improves customer loyalty and reduces customer churn, contributing to increased retention rates.
- Helps you allocate your resources more effectively, improving your operational efficiency.
- Is a means to gather helpful customer feedback that can lead to continuous improvement of your product and service to delight your customers.
- Ultimately strengthens customer relationships and drives long-term growth and success for your company.
Types of customer onboarding
The type of customer onboarding you offer depends on the complexity of your product or service. Here are 3 different forms it can take:
Self-serve onboarding
Self-serve onboarding requires minimal company resources from you. With this model, users independently navigate and learn to use simple software. This is what you would see for a product like Todoist.
Low-touch onboarding
With this type of onboarding, customers receive moderate support through tutorials, emails, demos, and prompts. This type of customer success onboarding is suitable for tools like Asana or Monday.
High-touch onboarding
High-touch onboarding is also referred to as white-glove onboarding. It’s often seen with enterprise solutions like ERP systems. These complex or highly customizable products require extensive personalized support and the involvement of dedicated customer success teams.
For the rest of this post, we’ll be sharing our advice on high-touch customer success onboarding.
5 steps to improving your B2B customer onboarding process
1. Conduct a detailed customer needs assessment
The key to delivering appropriate customer support is to start by conducting a thorough initial consultation that helps you understand the specific needs, goals, and challenges of each customer. Asking the right questions will steer you away from giving them cookie-cutter solutions. Instead, you’ll be able to tailor the customer onboarding process to align with their unique requirements, ensuring a personalized and relevant experience.
Pro tip: use a modern questionnaire tool
Using a modern data collection tool is one of the best ways to conduct a detailed needs assessment for the customer onboarding process. Instead of relying on email or meeting notes to gather information from your customers, using a tool like Content Snare can greatly expedite the process and improve organization.
Content Snare lets you build comprehensive questionnaires from scratch, or choose from a list of pre-existing templates to save even more time. The tool can collect text responses and relevant images, documents, and assets from your customers.
Related: Top 15 client onboarding tools to boost efficiency
Better yet, Content Snare also gives you an avenue to have discussions with your client within the questionnaire itself, so you can clarify matters if you need more clarity. The tool is also extremely user-friendly for the customer as well, helping you make a strong first impression from the get-go.
Streamline your onboarding process with Content Snare
The best client onboarding processes are smooth and hassle-free. Content Snare streamlines the process of requesting, gathering, and managing client information, freeing you up to focus on delivering an outstanding client experience.
2. Communicate your onboarding plan
Developing a detailed onboarding plan that outlines each step of the process, including timelines, milestones, and deliverables, is the next essential step in the customer onboarding process. This structured approach provides customers with a clear roadmap, setting expectations right from the start and guiding them through each phase of the customer journey.
By clearly defining what needs to be achieved and when, customers can see a tangible path to success, which helps in alleviating any uncertainty or confusion. This meticulous planning not only ensures that all necessary tasks are completed on time but also fosters a sense of confidence and trust in the company’s commitment to their success.
Ultimately, a well-defined onboarding plan facilitates a smoother transition for customers, enhancing their overall experience and increasing the likelihood of long-term satisfaction and retention.
For more detailed advice on how to write a strong onboarding email to notify your customers of your next steps, read How to create an effective client onboarding email template.
3. Assign a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM)
Assigning a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) to each customer as their primary point of contact throughout the onboarding process is one of the best practices for customer onboarding.
This is a key way to foster strong relationships between customers and your company since the CSM will offer consistent communication and personalized support tailored to the customer’s specific needs. Your CSM gives your customers a reliable resource to turn to for any questions or issues, ensuring they feel valued and understood.
This personalized attention not only enhances customer satisfaction but also helps in addressing potential challenges proactively, leading to a smoother onboarding process overall and a stronger foundation for long-term success.
At the same time, CSMs play a very important role in business growth. According to McKinsey, CSMs act as “growth engines” to their organizations. They know the customer best and “can surface opportunities to provide relevant solutions and expand customer value. Since CSMs are well-positioned to understand customer needs and recommend relevant products, they also contribute to higher upsells and more profitability.
4. Customize training and support
By offering tailored training sessions specific to the customer's unique use case, you can equip customers with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively use the product. This personalized approach enhances their confidence and competence, ensuring they get the most value from your product.
You can choose to do this through one-on-one workshops, webinars, or in-depth product demos. A better way to facilitate this process is by leveraging Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as TalentLMS, LearnUpon, Absorb LMS, or Moodle.
These platforms provide structured training modules, enable progress tracking, and offer assessments to ensure customers are absorbing the material. Utilizing an LMS during onboarding not only streamlines the training process but also allows for continuous education and support, fostering long-term customer success.
5. Schedule regular check-ins to collect feedback
Scheduling regular check-ins is another crucial component of an effective B2B customer success onboarding process. These check-ins help you understand your customer’s challenges as they work with your product or service, allow you to measure their satisfaction, and help you make data-driven improvements. This proactive approach ensures ongoing support and demonstrates your company’s commitment to the customer’s success.
By actively listening to customer insights and experiences, you can adapt and refine your onboarding process to better meet their needs. This enhances the overall onboarding experience, delights your customers, and fosters a strong, trusting relationship. Ultimately, this leads to higher customer satisfaction and long-term retention.
Related: Client onboarding automation: How to streamline and simplify your onboarding process
A final note!
Optimized onboarding not only equips customers with the necessary skills and knowledge but also positively impacts customer retention and overall business success. Using the right tools for B2B customer success onboarding is essential for building a strong foundation for long-term customer relationships.
By following these 5 steps for developing a well-structured onboarding process, you can look forward to fostering customer loyalty, driving higher engagement with your product, and maximizing your profitability.