5 Tips for Improved User Onboarding

The most important thing that many companies forget is that the selling process doesn’t end as soon as the customer purchases your product or service.

Yes, the product or service has now been paid for, but if you suddenly start to neglect the customer once that transaction has been completed, don’t expect this newly formed business relationship to last very long. If your goal is to forge long and mutually beneficial relationships with your customers, you need to do more to improve their experience of working with you.

This is why user onboarding is crucial to the success of company-customer relationships.

Listed below are five tips that should vastly improve the way your company handles the onboarding process for new users.

1. Simplify the Process

One of the easiest ways to discourage customers from working with your company long-term is by confusing them with your product offerings.

Let’s say that the customer has already bought product X, but to use it, said customer must complete steps one, two, and three. Even if the additional steps can be finished relatively quickly, it can still be bothersome for new customers to go through them.

You may not even know that your company’s onboarding process is complex. As highlighted in this Huffington Post piece, it’s easy to let the process get away from you.

Re-evaluate what your company is doing and see if there are ways you can make the onboarding process simpler and more appealing to your customers.

2. Make Your Product Offerings Easier to Understand Using Guided Tours

According to this article posted on UpWork, at least 40 percent of your customers will stop working with your company if they fail to use your software offering right away. That’s hardly a surprise.

Given the number of options on the market, there’s no reason for customers hang around if your product offerings disappoint them right away.

Address this issue by providing access to guided tours. These guided tours will detail what the customers need to do and they are designed to be easy to follow. The chances of your customer having a good experience working with your product will rise significantly if guided tours are involved.

3. Don’t Restrict Access to Guided Tours

Guided tours are good for you and your customers. You’ve already gone through the trouble of making them. The last thing you should do is limit how helpful they can be.

Make it possible for your customers to view these guided tours on-demand and let them watch them as many times as they need to. If the guided tour is the reason why your customer has a pleasant experience using your product, you should feature it more prominently.

4. Customize the Way You Communicate with Your Customers

Customers will have varied experiences related to working with your product offerings. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, that does mean that you can’t employ a uniform approach to onboarding, especially when it comes to communicating with your customers.

If a certain customer has seemingly glossed over a particular feature that is very beneficial, you can draw attention to that with the aid of customized messages. You can also customize messages based on how familiar a customer is with your product offerings.

5. Use Data to Improve the Onboarding Process for Future Customers

As you get more and more customers to buy into what you’re offering, you should be able to cultivate a good database containing information about them and how they interact with your company. You should be able to see which product offerings and services are working while also identifying the ones that are struggling.

Moving forward, you can use that data to create an even more accommodating onboarding process for your customers.

User onboarding is a process that every software company needs to take seriously. Get this process right and you can count on customer retention rates increasing. You may even be able to grow your customer base more effectively in the future.