When it comes to creating a great customer experience, business writer and former professor Michael LeBoeuf said it best: “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
Satisfied customers stay loyal to brands, driving long-term revenue. A great onboarding process is one of your best pathways to get there.
The trouble is, lots of organizations are leaving money on the table with their onboarding process:
- 90% of customers think organizations can do better on their onboarding process.
- Poor onboarding is the third biggest cause of customer churn.
- 88% of customers say that customer experience is as important as the service.
Most organizations get that great customer onboarding leads to long-term customer retention. They understand that great customer support boosts their brand image. And they know that getting onboarding right has a direct link to their profitability.
But they’re struggling to get the strategy right to maximize these outcomes consistently, for every client.
If this sounds like you, then we’ve got you. In this guide, we’ll outline how to create a customer onboarding experience that powers revenue, retention, and long-term satisfaction.
You’ll learn:
- What customer onboarding is, and why it’s important
- How customer onboarding impacts your organization’s revenue and growth
- How to build a customer onboarding strategy that maximizes revenue and customer satisfaction
- How to gain buy-in for your strategy
Let’s go.
What customer onboarding is and how it impacts your customer experience
Customer onboarding describes the process of guiding a new user through utilizing your product for the first time. It’s one of the most important phases of building a relationship with your customer, because it introduces them to your product and brand, and equips them with the knowledge to get full functionality from your product as quickly as possible.
During the customer onboarding process, your primary goal is to guide your customer step-by-step through what your product does, how it works, and how they can use it to accomplish their goals.
This usually includes:
- Supporting new users in the sign-up process, product activation, data migration, and personalizing the user experience
- Identifying your customer’s pain points and primary use cases
- Highlighting key product features that respond to their specific needs
- Providing customer support in the form of resources, tutorials, and one-to-one guidance
Sounds simple in theory—right? But in practice, there are a few reasons why some customer success teams struggle to create an effective onboarding experience:
- Onboarding content maintenance challenges: Customer onboarding programs must stay in lockstep with any changes to your product or service and growing customer base. When it isn’t, customers struggle to realize the full value of your product.
- Lack of content personalization: Each new user will have their own individual goals, pain points, and customer journey. However, customer onboarding often tends towards a cut-and-paste delivery method, giving customers a generic crash course in using the product.
- Limited scalability: The processes and resources that worked to onboard the first handfuls of new users are unlikely to cope with demand at scale. Simply put, the wheels begin to fall off. This means long delays with onboarding completion, affecting customer time-to-value and internal team resourcing.
- Siloed processes lead to bottlenecks: Customer onboarding requires participation from many different teams within your organization. But creating a seamless process across all of these different touchpoints? That’s the tricky part that organizations often miss, unwittingly creating a disjointed and frustrating user experience.
- Success is hard to measure: Organizations typically lack the reporting, analytics, and metrics functionality to track the success of their customer experience, let alone optimize it based on what works best.
Addressing these common customer onboarding stumbling blocks can help you create an onboarding experience that not only improves your customer experience quality, but actively contributes to business revenue and performance.
Four benefits of an effective customer onboarding strategy
Great customer onboarding is the foundation of every successful business.
It can transform a sales transaction into a long-term relationship with your company. It eases the initial frustrations of learning how to use a new product and gradually takes off the training wheels so your customers feel competent and confident to get to where they need to go.
Getting it right isn’t just important—it’s business-critical. And when you do, it opens your organization up to four big benefits.
| Inefficient customer service costs organizations £11.4 billion each month in lost productivity (UKCSI, 2023) | 90% of organizations experience customer drop-offs due to a poor onboarding process (ABBYY, 2022) | Improving the customer experience can improve revenue by up to 7% (McKinsey, 2022) |
1. Boost customer retention and loyalty
Happy customers are loyal customers — and customer retention is your biggest revenue driver.
Simply put, research has found that it’s far more cost-effective to keep an existing customer than find a new one. But retaining customers is far from a passive process—and the quality of your customer service has a lot to do with it.
A 2022 report revealed 86% of consumers would break up with a brand they were previously loyal to after two or three bad experiences. Poor service destroys customer loyalty and trust—and a brand’s reputation, once tarnished, may never recover, causing losses to profitability.
But get the service part right, and the pendulum can swing the other way. A 2019 study found that customer service positively impacts satisfaction, which in turn impacts loyalty. A 2020 study found that trust predicts customer commitment to your brand.
In simple terms, successful customer onboarding drives greater customer satisfaction, which leads to retention. High retention has a strong impact on business performance, which directly affects revenue and profitability. In even simpler terms—and paraphrasing the words of Joan Jett—you really should care about your bad reputation.
2. Speed up customer time-to-value and ramp time
Once money changes hands, your customer wants to get results, fast. That means you have a time-limited window to create a great first impression. But according to research, a poor onboarding process can really get in the way of helping your customers achieve their goals.
A 2022 report by ABBYY found that 90% of organizations experience some form of customer drop-out during the onboarding process, with some sectors experiencing drop-out rates of up to 40%.
When customers can’t get full value from your product or service quickly, they’re more likely to churn early in the relationship. But a well-structured onboarding process moves new users through the onboarding flow efficiently, boosting time-to-value and ramp time. In turn, this trickles down into greater customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue.
3. Increase customer support team efficiency
When your customer onboarding process is optimized to drive time-to-value, it doesn’t just improve customer experience outcomes—it contributes to internal efficiency and productivity among your support team, too.
And according to 2023 data from the UK Institute of Customer Service, these productivity gains add up. A poor customer experience costs the UK economy £11.4 billion each month due to lost productivity. Meanwhile, organizations with good customer support generate 114% more revenue than those without.
A successful onboarding process frees your customer service team up to spend more time engaging new users and building relationships that lead to long-term loyalty, rather than firefighting potential early churn. That enhanced productivity boosts employee and organizational performance, positively impacting the bottom line.
4. Boost customer lifetime value
Good onboarding gives your customers the confidence and knowledge to get full value from your product. But great customer onboarding has the potential to turn customers into champions that boost revenue through lifetime spend, referrals, and the increased likelihood of an uplift in their service package. It’s a triple whammy.
A 2021 SalesForce report found that 89% of customers would make another purchase from a brand after a positive experience. And happy customers are not only likely to spend more, but they’ll also recruit their friends, family, and business acquaintances to spend with you too. Meanwhile, a 2022 study found that word-of-mouth referrals and customer experience have a strong impact on customer loyalty.
A great onboarding process extends customer lifetime value by setting the tone for a long-term relationship, both with the customer and any potential new business they refer. Over time, this contributes to greater profitability and business performance by diversifying and expanding your revenue streams.
How to build a customer onboarding program that maximizes revenue
1. Ease the transition between key onboarding milestones
User onboarding isn’t just a customer success thing—it’s a relay that involves stakeholders from your support team to sales, marketing, customer operations, and other teams.
In this critical early stage of your customer relationship, everyone needs to play their part to create a lasting first impression. And if one team misses the baton pass, it could have a huge impact on how likely your new customer is to stay.
What this means in practice
Creating a connected experience between different touchpoints in the customer journey will avoid disjointed communication and information bottlenecks. That means your customer has a strong sense of forward momentum in their learning journey. Communication is critical to getting this right.
Right from the start of the onboarding process, your new customer needs to know exactly what to expect from their experience, how it’s going to work, and who they’re going to be working with. On a practical level, the usual customer engagement tactics apply, including sending welcome emails, product tours, and FAQs that give a sense of how, why, and when things will happen.
To keep customers engaged long-term, regular communication needs to be sustained throughout and beyond the onboarding process. But for the greatest chance of success, it must also be mirrored internally among your key onboarding stakeholders. Creating workflows, assigning accountability, and automating triggers for transition points will make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Three tips to get you started:
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2. Design a personalized learning experience that aligns with customer goals and pain points
In sales, there’s a saying: “Show me you know me.” It’s an approach to selling that hinges on developing a deep understanding of a prospect’s pain points and personalizing the sales process.
It’s the same for the onboarding process. 2021 research by McKinsey found that fast-growing companies derive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growth competitors.
When onboarding isn’t centered around user goals and pain points, it can easily lead to poor product adoption and early churn. This makes “show me you know me”—or creating a personalized onboarding and customer learning experience—a huge potential key differentiator in customer retention.
What this means in practice
Providing a scalable, consistent onboarding experience is critical to its success. But that doesn’t mean you have to give everyone exactly the same cut-and-pasted process.
2022 research has found that customer education is a critical component of long-term satisfaction, but that personalizing the learning process according to your customers’ different motivations and goals may boost this satisfaction and sense of value even further. Why? Because 89% of customers are more likely to buy when they feel a company understands their goals.
You don’t even have to offer the full bells and whistles white glove service either—instead, try to create a flexible, user-led experience that aligns with their time goals and needs. Do they need a more supportive experience, or would they prefer to get stuck in and reach out for support when needed? Being flexible to user learning levels and needs will help drive long-term satisfaction.
Three tips to get you started:
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Questions to identify customer goals during onboarding
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3. Create a cross-functional curriculum with internal subject matter experts
Your organization is full of experts. While many of these roles aren’t customer-facing, each team member is part of your organization’s internal knowledge base. And from product to sales operations to data science, everyone has the potential to become a significant value-add in your customer onboarding process.
In layperson’s terms: You could be sitting on an untapped knowledge goldmine. The trick is knowing how to extract the gold.
What this means in practice
When we say customer onboarding is a team sport, we really mean it. A 2022 study found that educating your customers specific to your product, sector, or internal expertise can have a huge impact on satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. Why? Because it helps your customer get more value from your product.
And to be clear, we’re definitely not saying that your data science team needs to be available for an hour every Wednesday to onboard customers. But you do need to make sure onboarding is a cross-functional process across customer success, product, sales, and other key stakeholders.
Make this scalable by helping cross-functional team members contribute through low-touch means, such as video creation or maintaining a team knowledge base with short articles relevant to the onboarding process.
Three tips to get you started:
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4. Create customer feedback loops that provide support beyond primary onboarding
Onboarding isn’t just about getting customers to use your product—it’s a critical opportunity for you to ask for feedback on their brand and user experience.
But while many organizations wait until after the customer onboarding process to collect feedback, checking in during onboarding can extend its impact even further. That way, you can find out exactly how your new customer is feeling, check on support needs, and course-correct in time to prevent churn.
What this means in practice
To work effectively, customer feedback needs to be an always-on process. Even more importantly, customers not only need to feel like they’re welcome to give feedback at any time, but that you’re actually listening to them when they do.
Finding out where your customers hang out and how they prefer to communicate—whether it’s social media, your customer community, text message, or carrier pigeon—will help you proactively identify and respond to common feedback questions, complaints, and support requests. Meanwhile, review sites will tell you how customers talk about you indirectly, helping you identify some causes of customer churn.
But in the long-term, establishing best practice communication norms centered around empathy, understanding, and helping customers feel valued and heard will go a long way to driving retention.
Three tips to get you started:
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Post-onboarding feedback questions Once customers are fully onboarded, send a follow-up survey to collect quantitative data on their customer and user experience. Try these questions:
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5. Streamline your onboarding process using technology (but not too much)
Inefficient onboarding processes can spell disaster for customer retention. According to a 2022 report, 29% of early churn comes from onboarding processes with too many steps. 25% comes from lengthy processes.
Creating a cohesive, connected onboarding process is critical for ensuring customers stay with you long-term. Leveraging technology can help streamline your internal process, maintain forward momentum, and create extra opportunities for connection.
The key is making sure that any tech you integrate adds to your process.
What this means in practice
The robots are definitely coming to a customer success process near you. But before you go all-in on automation and optimization, make sure you’re intentional about where and how you’re bringing tech into your onboarding process.
An LMS can help organizations scale their onboarding process more effectively by providing a centralized location for all onboarding resources and workflows. But it’s not just about creating a connected experience across your tech—you also need to ensure you’re nurturing human connections, too.
2022 SalesForce data found that 62% percent of customers feel an emotional connection to the brands they buy from most. Keeping this warm and fuzzy feeling alive relies on using tech to automate administrative or manual tasks while retaining the human touchpoints of customer service— like meetings, complaints, and time-sensitive requests.
Three tips to get you started:
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6. Collect data to measure your onboarding success
While your customer journey starts in the onboarding process, it doesn’t end there. And as customers move through different phases in their journey with you, their needs will continue to evolve and change.
Learning to anticipate and meet these needs puts the foundations in place for a relationship that drives long-term revenue. But often, organizations struggle to measure the impact of their onboarding program effectively, both from a customer success perspective—and cross-functionally across the whole organization. This means they don’t have clear insight into what makes their customer tick—and that’s a problem.
What this means in practice
A 2020 study on the B2B sector found that tracking customer data has a significant positive impact on revenue, sales performance, and the customer relationship because it means organizations can build a more customized approach based on customer needs.
Tracking onboarding-specific data helps you identify any localized pain points or unaddressed issues in your process, such as lengthy time-to-value or high customer drop-off rates. But it’s also equally important to take a long-term perspective and measure how your onboarding process contributes to the wider customer journey and business outcomes.
Taking a product-led approach to your onboarding can help you connect these near- and long-term goals. This puts your customers’ needs at the core of your onboarding process and means you’re using customer data to continuously build a better process.
Try guiding your process with the following questions:
- What is the key problem we’re trying to solve with our onboarding process?
- What outcomes do we want our customers to achieve?
- How will we test our approach?
- What does success look like? How will we know we’ve been successful?
Three tips to get you started:
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Five key onboarding success metrics to track
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Gaining buy-in for your customer onboarding strategy
Effective customer onboarding that maximizes revenue isn’t just about having a watertight strategy—it’s as much about getting the right people involved to support and sustain your process long-term.
When gaining buy-in, there are three key targets you’ll need to focus on: Customers, senior leaders, and team members.
- Involve customers in the process: Your customers are central to your onboarding success or failure—and if they’re not bought into your onboarding strategy, you’ve got a huge problem. Gaining buy-in here means engaging your customers to share their feedback and enabling a collaborative process where they have a say in how future onboarding looks.
- Communicate the business value of customer onboarding: With senior leaders, taking a data-led approach will be your best tactic to gain support for initiatives and budget for any tooling. Communicate the business value of customer onboarding by connecting customer onboarding to your organization’s strategic goals using a tool like Docebo Learn Data. For example, show how customer retention and satisfaction impact profitability and performance.
- Listen to team feedback: To encourage your team members to give up their knowledge, you’ll need to get them on side. For department heads, communicate the value of customer onboarding in terms of how it can help them surface additional insights to make their department achieve key goals. With participating team members, make sure you’re listening to feedback from your internal team on how to make collaboration and participation in customer onboarding easier.
Extending the value of customer education beyond onboarding
Customer onboarding is an essential component of your revenue-building strategy. When you have a strong onboarding strategy in place, you can help your customers realize value from your product more quickly, boost customer satisfaction, and create the foundations for a long-term relationship.
This depends on:
- Designing a personalized learning experience where customers can continue learning according to changing goals and needs.
- Creating cross-functional onboarding teams to deepen customer knowledge across specific topics.
- Enabling two-way feedback to continuously improve processes.
- Leveraging technology to automate, scale, and improve your onboarding process.
Maximizing your customer satisfaction and revenue long beyond the onboarding process relies on building the foundations for a customer relationship with continuous learning at its core.
Docebo’s customer training LMS can help you build an onboarding process that drives revenue growth, promotes product adoption and mastery, and fosters long-term retention. Learn more by scheduling a demo.
