The Onboarding Journey
Is it the best is could possibly be?
At Seen&Read we live and breathe customer journeys. To be honest, these are usually journeys that involve marketing engagement and the crucial handover to sales, customer service or similar depending on whether it’s a B2B or B2C company. Recently, however, we’ve been working on the onboarding journey.
There are three specific things I love about the onboarding journey. Firstly, when you get it right the difference it can make for the business is clearly calculable because it creates happier customers and, crucially, creates the sort of customer behaviours you want. Retention will improve. Advocacy will increase. Your ability to cross-sell and up-sell will be greater. And all of these things can be benchmarked and measured.
The second thing I love about the onboarding journey is that it takes a cross-functional effort to get it right and that helps to break down silos. Depending on what your business does you will find marketing, sales, customer support, finance, legal and many other functions having to collaborate to create the best possible experience for the customer.
Finally, I love the fact that putting in place the perfect onboarding process involves a balanced blend of process, communications, content, channels and technology, all of which is built around the customer and achieving business success.
The questions every business should be asking are: does the service you offer or the products you sell require an onboarding process? If yes, do you have one documented and in place and, to steal a line from my children’s primary school, is it is the best that it could possibly be?
Having customers is all about taking them on journeys. Once the customer has purchased from you and actually become your customer, the experience in those first few weeks will frame their relationship with you forever. Can you afford for it to not be the best it could possibly be?