If you’re in a B2B vertical and want to optimize the customer onboarding process to familiarize new customers with your product, there are some key steps to take. Whether you’re offering SaaS or another B2B solution, you must ensure the customer onboarding experience is consistently efficient and smooth, as it could either maximize customer retention or turn people away.
However, you might not know what B2B customer onboarding best practices to implement for a smooth, efficient process. In this guide, we’ll go over some tips for getting the best results from your B2B onboarding process.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of April 18th, 2024.
The B2B customer onboarding best practices you need to follow
If you want to excel with the B2B customer onboarding process, there are some customer onboarding best practices to incorporate into your business strategy.
Let’s dive into some of these practices and how to use them to meet customer needs in any industry.
1. Keep the journey structured
To get started with the onboarding process, you should develop a solid structure that gives you a clear path to follow as you connect and build relationships with new customers.
Whether offering a B2B SaaS or another type of new product, you should map out the complete customer onboarding journey to see where people go at every step.
Know where you initially connect with customers and follow their journey to the end, identifying critical touch points along the way. Where are people dropping off in their journey? How can you get them to move along when they slow or stop their interactions?
As you map out the journey, set some goals you want to achieve. These can set benchmarks for optimization. For instance, you might want to see people move to a particular milestone within a specific amount of time. Any slower than that could warrant further improvement to move people along the user onboarding process.
📚 Related: 11 Free Templates for a Seamless Customer Onboarding Process
2. Use automation to your advantage
Another of the B2B customer onboarding best practices to follow is the implementation of automated solutions.
There’s no shortage of ways to automate the onboarding process, including:
- Welcome emails that customers receive upon first-time interaction
- Periodic check-ins when customers stop connecting
- Recommending relevant learning materials and other content based on customers’ interests and interactions
📚 Related: A Complete Guide to Automated Training
3. Implement an LMS for customer success
One of the most effective B2B customer onboarding best practices involves implementing learning management software (LMS) to build a strong connection with your new clients and customers.
An LMS can include all types of content to carry users through the onboarding program, with tutorials, product tours, and other elements, via an interface that’s easy to immediately use.
📚 Related: 10 Best Customer Training Platforms & LMSs [Detailed Overview]
4. Ensure good collaboration among teams
To get the best results from your onboarding, you must also facilitate strong collaboration among customer success team members. Everyone in your organization should be on the same page. They should know what customers want, how to give it to them, and how to work together to develop a fully optimized onboarding journey for customers.
Everyone from customer success managers to customer support reps should be on the same page when it comes to onboarding. Create efficient workflows that keep things moving and consistently efficient.
5. Engage in mobile optimization
A huge part of effective customer onboarding involves mobile optimization. If you’re not catering to mobile users, you’re missing out on a huge market and alienating many high-value customers.
According to recent data, over half of all website traffic today comes from mobile devices. This traffic includes audiences who could find your business and use smartphones or tablets to initiate the onboarding process.
Make sure your website, LMS, and other platforms are optimized for mobile devices to provide these users with an equally enjoyable, user-friendly experience.
6. Take a personalized approach in the onboarding process
Personalized user experiences are more popular than ever, so you should offer one in your onboarding experience. At the same time, you should understand that the context of personalization is everything in today’s privacy-centric online world.
While personalization can make a great first impression among your target audiences, you should only personalize the onboarding journey based on the information your customers provide. Recent data shows that 69% of people enjoy personalization as long as it comes from data they give companies. Otherwise, personalization can veer more toward creepy than welcoming.
You can get some help with personalization by developing templates and formats that fill in customer information, such as their names and other personalized details. Also, you can direct people to specific aspects of the onboarding experience based on each user’s preferences and pathways.
7. Integrate a blended learning experience
Also, consider using a blended learning experience offering various types of onboarding materials. Blended learning incorporates traditional and online learning materials in a holistic approach to onboarding.
Blended learning has become increasingly popular among many businesses, especially as they work to train employees both on-site and remotely as a work-from-home environment becomes more and more popular.
Some of your customers may value webinars and other online content, while others may prefer in-person and hands-on training. When you can offer a combination of both, you’ll benefit from the best of both worlds.
Consider implementing online functionalities like FAQs and a knowledge base with plenty of resources. At the same time, you might have live training sessions and events that further assist with onboarding through blended learning.
📚 Related: 10 of the best LMS platforms with a knowledge base [2024]
8. Determine what each new acquisition expects
Find out what your customer base expects from the onboarding experience. If you fail to meet customer expectations, you could find yourself losing new users more often than retaining them.
Consider your audience’s pain points and what you can do to overcome them in your onboarding program. What are competitors doing wrong that you can do right?
To help you develop the ideal experience based on customer expectations, consider testing different experiences or materials with A/B split testing. This type of testing involves creating two different versions of content to see which performs best. If one piece of content works better than another, you can drop the ineffective content or make changes to it to improve performance.
9. Keep the process moving
To reduce churn rates and keep people moving through their onboarding journey, moving the process along is another of the most important B2B customer onboarding best practices to follow.
As soon as someone engages with your brand and offering, you should start the onboarding process. Focus on building and maintaining momentum. For instance, sending a welcome email immediately after someone signs up on your website could bring people into the fold early on, encouraging them to continue along the customer journey.
As people progress through the onboarding experience, keep them going as they reach certain milestones, using automation to your advantage at this time. Also, using tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software and customer education solutions can further keep up the momentum and ultimately increase customer loyalty.
10. Measure your success
To get the best results from your onboarding program, another of the essential B2B customer onboarding best practices entails real-time measurement. You should consistently monitor your customer data and progress, tracking critical key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that accurately relay performance.
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There are certain key metrics to track based on the goals you set for your onboarding programs, including:
- Retention rates: This metric keeps track of how many customers your company keeps after initial acquisition. The higher your retention rate, the lower your churn rate, and the more you’re keeping your customers happy.
- Customer satisfaction: You can also conduct surveys to determine more accurately whether your customers are happy with the onboarding experience and your brand and offerings. Often, businesses have customers rank their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, asking whether the customer is likely to recommend an experience, company, or product.
- Adoption rates: How many people in your onboarding program actually use your product? Your onboarding won’t be very effective if people aren’t adopting your offerings as you’d hoped.
- Time to first value: One last metric to consider is time to first value (TTFV), which measures the time it takes to go from an introduction to your products to a satisfied customer. Customers want to see value from offerings quickly, so the shorter the TTFV, the better.
Measuring your progress will help you determine how well your programs are doing. This can inform your decisions as you streamline learning for better results. These results can also help you determine which B2B customer onboarding best practices to focus on in the future.
📚 Related: Top 4 Customer Education Metrics for CX Leaders to Track in 2024
Use the right LMS for successful customer onboarding
Now that you know more about B2B customer onboarding best practices, you may want to decide on the right tools to help you follow them. If you want to benefit from successful onboarding efforts, consider adopting a reliable LMS like Docebo.
Consider using Docebo, you can harness the power of learning management to educate new customers and turn them into loyal brand ambassadors with custom learning materials.