5 Tips To Improve Your Customer Onboarding

Here’s the million dollar question for businesses in 2020: Can you make your customer onboarding faster, more efficient and convert prospects into customers? 

That’s not the million dollar question? You’re wondering why you should care about customer onboarding in the first place? Ok. Here are some stats that might get your attention:

• You’ll lose 75% of your new users within the first week
• 40 to 60% of free trial users will use your product once and never come back
• Happy customers become your top referral sources

Is that convincing enough? Your onboarding process can simultaneously become a sales and a retention funnel. It is one of the most important processes of your business as it is the first official point of interaction between your business and customers. 

Today, we will divulge five tips that can have immediate impact on your onboarding process.

Before we get into it, we want to state that we understand customer onboarding differs from business to business and it certainly differs depending on the industry your business operates in. 

This is exactly why our tips are carefully researched and thought out in order to be applicable for businesses of all types, sizes and industries. 

Let’s get right to it. 

Customer Onboarding Tip #1: Assess Your Current Customer Onboarding Process 

This is one of the simplest, yet most difficult steps in improving your customer onboarding process. Why? Because it involves detaching yourself from something you might have played a huge part in building. 

Being critical and unbiased is hard to pull off in business but it’s a true difference-maker for those who are able to pull it off. 

Take a step back, remove yourself from the position of the business trying to sell, and put yourself in the position of the customer trying to buy. 

When reviewing your current process, ask yourself the following question: 

• How long is the process taking, end-to-end? 
• As a customer, at what point of the process would you most likely quit and why?
• Are there unnecessary steps? 

By answering the following questions, you already have the blueprint of what you need to work on. The questions identify the same pain points that can drive a customer away from your business and into the sales funnel of a competitor. 

Customer Onboarding Tip #2: Display Progress To The Customer

Time is currency these days and people are very careful about how they spend it. 

This is exactly why you need to not only make the onboarding process as short and concise as possible, but you need to to give them a sense of how long it will take.  

The only thing that’s worse than offering customers a long, arduous onboarding process, is leaving them in the dark regarding its duration. 

There are many creative ways in achieving the desired result. 

Include a progress bar that loads as people move through required fields. Identify the steps they have covered and clearly display the remaining steps. Provide an approximate estimation of the time remaining until the completion of the process. 

Don’t let your customers walk in the dark. Show them the light at the end of the tunnel and above all, indicate the time it will take to get there. 

Customer Onboarding Tip #3: Optimize For Mobile

More than half of all web traffic is mobile. Whether you are building a website, an eCommerce store or an onboarding process, you are essentially addressing people using mobile devices. 

People are busy and on the go. They rarely have time to sit in front of desktops outside of work, in order to address their personal matters. Your onboarding process should factor that in. 

Use experience is key and if people are having trouble to load, navigate or make sense of the onboarding, they will probably move on to the next provider. 

Steps and call-to-actions should be clearly defined and the customer should be able to click, type and complete the process in a fast and efficient manner. 

Even though optimizing for mobile is an entirely independent project, it still falls under the assessment of your current process mentioned in tip #1. Try to access and go through your process from a mobile device, identify the loopholes and start improving it immediately. 

Customer Onboarding Tip #4: Authorize Social Sign-In

We know that this is not applicable for industries like banking and financial services but what if...it was? 

Social sign-in is a very popular method of speeding up proceedings for the customer, as they don’t need to re-enter their basic information from scratch. All they have to do is use their already built social profiles to create a new account with your company. 

Whilst that is ok for when creating a profile for an online clothing store, the same can not be said for opening a bank account. The bank needs a lot more information most notably, it needs to perform a thorough KYC check. 

How do we bridge the gap between the two? Social sign-in can be used to automatically populate the early stages/steps of the onboarding process, giving the customer a sense of speed and progress. 

With a simple click, they can find themselves on step 3 of the process, creating a different energy, a different dynamic between customer and company. 

In using social sign-in, customers see a feature they are familiar and accustomed with whilst you get them to start the process with a positive mindset. 

Customer Onboarding Tip #5: Simplify Password Creation & Recovery

Here are some interesting facts for you:

• A study from NordPass found that 30% of people find resetting passwords as stressful as the stress of retiring. 
• According to the same source, 67% of respondents agreed that losing passwords is as stressful as dismissal or changing jobs.
• A research conducted by HYPR in the last two and a half years all around the United States and Canada, shows that 78% of respondents required a password reset in their personal life within 90 days and 57% of respondents required a password reset in their work life within the same period. 

What’s the takeaway? People don’t remember passwords and helping them recover should be a critical part of your onboarding process. 

Security is crucial but setting too many parameters for customers when they are creating a password can prove to be detrimental for your conversions. 

Similarly, recovering a password should be a matter of a few clicks, helping the customer reduce stress and anxiety. 

Recap

Here you have it. Five tips that can uplift and revolutionize your onboarding process. 

Our team here at Identomat, is always at your disposal to discuss ways in which you can improve customer conversion and retention. 

Our state of the art proprietary technology can help you build on these tips, automate and digitize big parts of the customer onboarding process. 

We look forward to hearing from you!