When someone purchases your solution it’s a landmark event, but an even more important moment is when your new customer starts having success using your solution.
The fact is, the faster and more efficiently you can get customers using your product and getting value from it, the more likely they will stay customers. This is especially true for B2B solution providers—it’s a generally accepted rule of thumb that new customers need to be onboarded within 90 days, or you might lose them.
Here are our three top tips for getting your customers onboarded quickly and effectively.
Understand Your Customers’ Needs
Understanding the unique value your customer expects from your solution is the first step. You also need insight into how well you are delivering to those expectations throughout the process.
Despite the importance of understanding needs and delivering to expectations, a recent Harvard Business Review* survey showed that only a small number of companies they surveyed were able to deliver a highly tailored onboarding process based on their customers’ needs. The reason? Less than half of them could leverage the data and insights required to understand and predict customer needs.
Align your Teams to Deliver
Once you determine how customers should move through the onboarding process, aligning your teams so the handoff is smooth is an important, and often complex, process. Most businesses surveyed by the Harvard Business Review study reported that misalignments between these groups were a major challenge to onboarding. Make no mistake, functional groups must be aligned—and it’s not just service, sales, support, operations and product development. Finance, IT, manufacturing and marketing each can play a role.
Digitize the Onboarding Process
The complexities are enormous, and the consequences of failure are high. By digitally transforming your customer onboarding process, you can address the complexities, ensure team alignment, and deliver a high touch experience.
Q2E can help, by orchestrating all the customer onboarding tasks while also automating your communication strategy. You can create unique onboarding journeys to suit your needs: by product or solution, customer type, location or any parameter you decide is relevant. Best of all, your customer will know what to expect from day one and be fully deployed, faster.