Success is the one thing every product owner/manager desires. And it is this desire that leads them to invest in comprehensive customer success departments because they know they can only succeed when their customers do.
Now, one of the first jobs of the customer success departments is to ensure a great user onboarding process. In this article, we will explain the role of user onboarding and what it really means in customer success.
What is Customer Success?
In the broadest sense, customer success is the state where your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company. If they can get what they require by using the product you offer, in a way that makes them feel successful, that means you’ve achieved customer success.
For a more detailed description of customer success, make sure you check out our article The Ultimate Guide to Understand Customer Success.
How Do You Achieve Customer Success?
Since today’s successful users will become your future promoters and advocates, if you put customer success into operation accordingly you can benefit from it as a growth engine.
In light of this information, a company’s mission has two essential layers;
- To understand what is required for its customers to be successful and make sure that’s possible,
- To orchestrate the process of moving them towards that success.
To be able to improve your customer success significantly, you must make sure you have completed all the tasks below.
- Know your customers & learn what their expectations are.
- Establish a solid communication channel with them to guide them during their product experience.
- Anticipate challenges and questions they might have throughout their time as your customers.
What is User Onboarding?
User onboarding is the process during which you help your new users experience the actual value of your product or to get to a point where they see the value potential first-hand.
Since this is the stage your users realize they can truly benefit from your product – that this is their "Aha!" moment, you should figure out what has to happen to get them there, to get them on board. Only then can you design this process and set them up for continued customer success.
That means your user onboarding design requires particular features to guide users from setup to experiencing their first “Aha!” moment.
Let’s see how each of them reinforces customer success in a particular way.
What is the Role of User Onboarding in Customer Success?
User onboarding is crucial to improve the overall success of your product. It increases activation, conversion, and retention while eliminating churn. It also plays a major role in customer success.
In order for your customers to succeed, they must learn what your product does, how it does it, and what problems of them it can solve; in short, they must be on board.
Therefore, user onboarding is one of the ways your customers succeed. By adopting a better user onboarding process, you can boost customer success.
User Onboarding Boosts Customer Success
Now that we have made the role of user onboarding in customer success clear, you know the best way to boost customer success is to design a smooth user onboarding process for them.
Making sure you onboard users the right way is the only way you can help your company to retain them - by building a long-lasting relationship.
1. Expectation
By onboarding your users, you set the tone for what to expect from your business throughout their time as your customer.
2. Impression
You should show users the value proposition of your product immediately. A successful onboarding process shortens your new users’ time to it. Only after their initial win can your users transform their first interaction with the product into a successful experience.
3. Interaction
An interactive process design drives users to take purposeful action to onboard autonomously while training them on how to use your product and understand its benefits. You can ensure the success of your customers by smoothing their experience.
4. Communication
Onboarding your users is a great way to delight them, get them familiar with your product and answer any questions. By making yourself available through every possible channel and by offering guidance, resource, and support, you can get them to succeed and activate faster.
5. Anticipation
User onboarding is a process where you anticipate user challenges and proactively provide solutions to those obstacles before they even arise. This is one of the fundamentals of your design and a forceful value proposition through which you guarantee your user’s success.
Summing Up
The best way to boost customer success with user onboarding is to design the best onboarding process possible.
Structuring a successful onboarding process is another case. You could spend hours of research, designing, coding, and testing to create the most optimal user onboarding flow for you, or you could adopt a 3rd party user onboarding tool to create one in minutes without coding.
