Client onboarding is a major focal point for businesses to ensure future retention of customers. It’s the very first opportunity that a company gets to create an impactful impression on the customer’s mind. The organization might have a customer onboarding plan, but they may still fall short of a customer’s expectations. This results in lower customer satisfaction, higher attrition, missed customer insights, inefficient processes, and a suboptimal experience. Successful onboarding processes can ensure a lifelong relationship between the customer and company.
What are the customer objectives that an onboarding process should have?
Spotlight should be most importantly on:
- Improving the customer experience
- Enhancing operational efficiency and profitability
Some upcoming trends that businesses can use as best practices are:
Increase Customer-orientation:
Instead of building the program revolving around specific products, companies should try to build customer-oriented processes. A client-centric onboarding model advocates the building of integrated customer data so that the redundancy of onboarding the customer into multiple other processes is reduced. It can also improve the multi-product experience for customers as cross-selling becomes easier to such customers who already have integrated data.
End-to-end Digitization:
Digitization is the need of the hour. The need for a fully automated onboarding system provides several benefits to the client as well as the company. While clients are blessed with easy and hassle-free experience, it becomes easy for the companies to achieve a successful onboarding of a client with minimal manual intervention. Companies can also benefit from this trend by saving on delays and potential loss of business that are incurred in a non-automated customer onboarding system.
Add Social Logins:
Social logins provide users with a one-click sign up functionality. By using social logins, companies can enable users to create accounts on their website using their existing social network accounts, such as Twitter, Google or Facebook. To provide users with a smooth, personalizedexperience, companies should provide the option of social log-ins.
Clear Path Toward Completion:
If websites offer a structured set of steps to show customers how many steps they must complete for sign-up process, then there are greater chances for the customer to stay and complete the process. This transparency will earn the website a customer’s patience. Also progressive profiling for customers helps companies gain customers’ patience.
Customer Analytics and Insights Around onboarding:
Analytics and Insights is proving to be an effective tool to unlock the business potential of a client. As per industry estimates, most cross-selling opportunities arise within the first 90 days of client acquisition. Using analytics, organizations have a good chance to maximize the lifetime value of a client by extending multiple services. While onboarding, clients are in a positive frame of mind and are open to suggestions on other products and services. Companies can bank on this trend and expand cross-selling opportunities.
Customer onboarding is no longer taken lightly. Instead, many organizations have invested in technological advancements to make it a vital component of client lifecycle management. If organizations can create and maintain high-quality customers they are likely to succeed in new client acquisition, cross-selling, countering competition, and building customer loyalty.