Keep Your Onboarding Fresh: Pt 2

You’ve completed initial onboarding. Your customer knows how to use your product! It’s time for a pitcher of margaritas and a nap in the hammock. Oh, but wait…there’s so much more. (But you can bring the margaritas with you for the next leg of this journey.)

The onboarding party doesn’t stop

I’ve listed a few follow-up items you should keep in mind after you hang up the phone with your customer. This list can help you cement your relationship with customers and increase your efficiency. Let’s keep the good times rolling!

• Document successful customer stories: Share success stories with your marketing team and work with other teams to get feedback on ways that customers have become successful with your product. Share learned best practices internally and with your customers through blogs, webinars, conference sessions, and whitepapers.You are primed to be the best advocate for your customer and your product!

• Be a partner, not a vendor: A vendor provides technical ways to use a product. A vendor applies the tools within a product to serve a customer’s practical business needs. But, a partner can apply the technical tools of a product and impact a customer’s results. Providing data or analytics is great, but how will this help your customer reach his or her desired outcome? Think strategically.

• Track onboarding progress: Work with your customer to define initial goals that will help him or her achieve KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). I usually share a template with users. It provides some examples of use cases and what Pendo product features can help them solve a particular use case. Showing customers the finish line or end product can be a great motivator. (Sometimes it is easier to picture yourself in your new home when there is already furniture there.) It’s also a great way to allow your customer to visualize concepts, track items they want to start out with or choose items to skip over.

• Snackable onboarding: Think about dim-sum. If you tried to eat everything offered in one sitting, you wouldn’t enjoy it very much. It would all taste the same and you’d probably need serious elastic waist pants. Similarly, when you have a product offering that is very rich, it can be overwhelming. Target specific pieces of the product for customers to learn first in order to help meet their goals without additional stress.

• Virtual onboarding: This is a great way to nudge users along who want to work through an overview of the product independently and ask for an assist when needed. This method is great and allows you to spend more time with clients who may need an intensive engagement. Start out by creating mockups of a successful user journey and then use in-app messaging to guide users down a path to success.

• Personalize the experience: Start instilling habits by gamifying the process. Sometimes a progress indicator bar or some other reward system can help to initiate habits early on that will lead clients to a successful engagement. (This reward system also works on dogs, spouses, small children…)

• Leverage other forms of media: Did I mention video? Capturing the onboarding process in small, consumable video chunks not only frees you up to handle one-off issues, but it adds 24-hr consumable content to your resource library.

• Find success and replicate: Track what is working and repeat! Adding new processes to your already busy day is pointless unless you are tracking how well (or poorly) these methods perform. Set goals and a deadline for measuring, and if at the end of that deadline, you aren’t seeing progress—adjust or try something new. Don’t be married to a process that isn’t working because that’s the way it’s always been done. Embrace the discomfort of change and maybe you’ll find success with something new!

Alix Harris is Pendo’s Customer Success Maître D’ (and our own personal “Dear Abby”). Subscribe to our blog today and get new posts on customer success delivered right to your inbox.