Top 4 Tools to Provide Ultimate Customer Onboarding Experience

A smart business always values payments over sign-ups. After all, any number of people can sign up on your platform – but turning visitors into paying customers is an entirely different ball game. So, what is it that helps to convert these sign-ups into actual sales?

The answer is value.

The greater the value perceived in your offering by the customer, the higher the chances that they will start paying for it. Although this sounds like a pretty simple and straightforward rule, it doesn’t usually pan out quickly in real life.

So what are successful platforms doing to convert their sign-ups into sales? 

Successful business people don’t merely stop selling to a potential client but actively stay with them even after they have come on to the platform to provide a holistic and supportive experience. As a result, they stop the leak of potential sales lost due to confusion, lack of sufficient information, lack of enough support, or other factors that lead the potential customer to lose interest simply. 

The above process is called customer onboarding. This system can significantly amplify your earnings by attracting curious visitors and turning them into paying customers. A study from the Harvard Business Review indicated better client retention when a company focuses on the onboarding experience.

During the sales process, you told the potential customer that the product has some value for them. With a great customer onboarding system, you will be showing it to them.

If you are looking at optimizing your sales with an effective customer onboarding system, you might want to look at these four-pointers.

Automate Your Workflow for Onboarding

Let’s face it – recurring activities can be a significant contributor to a waste of time and effort. If you wonder why your business is not registering more profits, you would want to look into where your resources are being spent. The chances are that many resources are getting used up in completing routine tasks instead of being channelized towards actually stimulating revenue. That is why automation is very important. 

Looking at automation as an expensive or effortful process is a wrong approach. Instead, think of it as an investment – once you automate your workflow, you will be better able to handle things you should focus on. For example, you can use automated billing tools to automate payments using any no code platforms so that you can spend more resources on addressing an urgent issue that a very important client has escalated to you.

Here are a few other reasons to consider workflow automation:

• Higher customer retention due to improved customer experience.
• Lower margin of errors.
• Quick and seamless collection of employee data.
• Customer onboarding has become more accessible and more efficient overall, thanks to streamlining.
• Oddities, exceptions, or even mistakes that would otherwise have gone unnoticed become more obvious.

Process Street is an excellent example of customer onboarding automation. Process Street allows you to create process checklists which you can then share with your teammates for collaborative work. 

Source: https://www.process.st/ 

Conditional Logic’ in Process Street can prove to be a real boon as it accommodates the various branches that an onboarding process can take.

Providing Effective Support to Enhance Onboarding Experience

Providing support to your potential clients at every step can prove to be a game-winner for your business. You are present with your customers who are browsing to guide them and prevent them from feeling lost. 

By co-browsing with your clients, you rely heavily on visual aids to guide your customers at each step and intervene if you notice that they have encountered a problem that needs your attention.

Providing effective support to your customers on your platform can also help reduce operating costs while increasing sales. How? Perhaps a real-life example can illustrate this point better.

Norman Alegria, Director of Guest Care at The Dufrense Group, an upscale retail home furnishing group wondered if there was a way that the company could cut down on its operational costs while not compromising on the quality of support they provided.

They were facing that prices on repairs were extremely high, especially because of their policy where a minimum of two visits to the customer’s place was required. That’s when he came across a customer support solution called Acquire Cobrowse.

Acquire Cobrowse enabled them to cut down on the visits by letting their professionals address issues that could be tackled through a video call. The result? Reduced visits to the customer’s home as well as reduced waiting time for the customer – a win-win for both.

Source: https://acquire.io/co-browsing/ 

But that’s not all.

The Covid-19 pandemic hit the next year, and Alegria was faced with a new dilemma – how can the group keep up the sales at a time when in-person shopping was not possible? He wondered if Acquire Cobrowse could be of help. He gave it a shot and directed the sales team to use Acquire as a platform to sell on. 

Algeria’s hunch was right!

In next to no time, Dufresne’s sales team found themselves handling 1000s of messages on Acquire’s chatbots. With Acquire, the group was able to perform the entire sales cycle virtually – from furniture tours over the video, to helping the customers with payments, answering questions and even talking about the returns policies. What’s more, Acquire’s chatbots are working 24×7, which to the group translates to lead generation almost every minute!

The Dufresne Group is a perfect example of how technology can be applied to businesses to simplify certain processes, while powerfully enhancing customer experience and driving sales.

Onboarding Sales Team with Right Knowledge

Every business owner is a salesman – and perhaps, the best one! And why not? After all, doesn’t s/he understand the product best and know what value it can deliver for the prospective client? Unfortunately, however, there eventually comes a time when the business owner will have to rely on others to do the sales for him/her. 

The biggest obstacle here is that the individuals hired as sales reps may simply not know enough about the product. And if they are themselves not convinced with the product, how can they be expected to convince prospective buyers? 

Needless to say, a lot of training and coaching needs to go into making the sales team fully able to close sales with their pitches. However, the common problem is that this kind of constant training requires a lot of time and effort – resources that may not always be there to spend. Platforms such as MindTickle have just the kind of solutions needed to address these challenges.

Source: https://www.mindtickle.com/ 

Think of MindTickle as a constant guide and companion bridging the gap between the company’s experienced old-timers and the new joiners. 

MindTickle enables constant coaching for the sales team across multiple touchpoints so that they can constantly improve based on data. The best part is that MindTickle highlights the gaps in each sales representative’s skill sets, and focuses on improving those areas where s/he is lagging behind. 

Gamify the Onboarding Experience:

The onboarding is often skipped because the users find it boring. Followed by silly mistakes that could have been avoided with better understanding.

Who is to be blamed for the ignorance?

Mostly, the dull and regular procedure is the reason customers lose interest.

So, what is the solution?

Gamification of the onboarding process has proven to be a game changer in not only bringing more customer engagement but also boosting conversion and increasing customer retention.  

Source: https://userpilot.com/blog/user-onboarding-gamification/

Duolingo – Language learning app, sets the best example when it comes to gamifying the user onboarding process. It begins with the optional account creation and ultimate hands-on experience with the product. 

Source: https://www.reallygoodux.io/blog/duolingo-user-onboarding 

Duolingo smartly delays the registration till the user gets hooked to a level where registration is finally needed. It also understands the user’s skills and needs and provides an onboarding experience accordingly. 

Bonus tool:

Seamless Check-out Experience

The pre-sale onboarding process that involves awareness and consideration ends when a user transacts and later comes the post-sale phases of Purchase, Retention and Advocacy. 

If the support and service are planned well during the onboarding phase according to the suggested tools above, there shouldn’t be an issue in retaining the customer and amplifying sales. However, to end the onboarding process smoothly, a seamless checkout process must be included as part of the onboarding process. 

The way industries are putting emphasis on enhancing the digital experience is undeniable in 2021. In Particular, firms are trying hard to smoothen their customer’s digital journey. 

PayKickstart, offers a seamless checkout experience. They help you handle payment processing, subscription management, taxes, affiliate management, billing management, and more. Billing shouldn’t be your concern anyways, leave that up to Paykickstart and spend your time growing.

Who doesn’t like to have options, Paykickstart also offers a lot of options to transact, and that works positively in bringing users who register for free trials and a tentative experience that helps them make a decision.

Below is a visual representation of how the onboarding process occurs on PayKickstart gradually for better understanding and effective results of the platform.

Once the onboarding process is completed you will receive an email notification letting you know that you and your team are ready to start selling:

Considerable reasons to choose PayKickstart for your checkout experience:

• Checkout Templates: Select from 50+ tested one-step and multi-step designs that boost conversion.
• Embeddable Checkout Forms: Build checkout forms or pop-up widgets that you can embed directly onto your landing pages.
• 1-click Upsells: Allows customers to enter their payment information only once and then purchase upsells with one click.
• and many other features that allow you to manage your products, subscriptions, affiliate management, customer retention, and much more.

Bonus Tip

Speed-up Your Onboarding With Knowledge Base

What if there was this one go-to repository of all information that you could need as a new joiner at a company or as a customer? Wouldn’t that make things a whole lot easier for you to settle in?

While training and coaching are definitely important in helping new members on the team to understand their role and to know the company better, they are not always enough. There can be a lot of topics or questions that cannot be covered in a routine onboarding or a training session. This is where a Knowledge Base can come in handy. 

A Knowledge Base is an ideal place to put up all information so that future employees (or even existing ones) can always easily access input on the various aspects of the business that they deal with. It is always advisable to have a knowledge base such as this and introduce every new employee to it as opposed to leaving them confused and too shy to ask.

It’s All About Becoming Smarter

The world is getting more and more complex by the day. Businesses can no longer afford to do the minimum for their customers or their employees and hope for optimum results. With the advance in technology, businesses must constantly reinvent themselves to not just stay relevant, but also thrive in today’s world.

Remember, simply being a great product is not enough anymore – you need to actually go that extra mile to make your customers feel that value too, and these tools we discussed are sure to help you do that best.

Dhruv Mehta

Dhruv Mehta is a Digital Marketing Professional who works at Acquire and provides solutions in the digital era. In his free time, he loves to write on tech and marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Tweak Your Biz. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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