Onboarding – Boost Your Client’s Experience
Peter B Butler
Web Design for Lead Generation Websites | Building Custom Websites That Get More Traffic, Convert & Get New Clients | CRM and Automation Specialist
When we land a new client it’s woohoo right?
But does your client go woohoo too?
What is your onboarding process like?
Are you consistent with sending the welcome email? The timing, the messaging? Requesting the relative information you might need?
Do you have follow up processes in place in case they don’t respond in a timely manner?
That initial ‘gush’ factor experience they have with you is important.
Why?
Apart from you wanting to look good, and that’s important, here are another few reasons.
You want to help them overcome ‘buyers remorse’ if they go through that.
Plus if it’s anything like my industry, there are things that can happen that might make you not look good, although it’s out of your control, so earning ‘brownie’ points early is good. (EG: Issues getting access to Domain Names, people blame us but hey, look in the mirror buddy, that old email no-one can access anymore is not our fault)
We pride ourselves on providing a good user experience right from the get-go. To the point, we even had a review once complimenting us on our onboarding and we’d only just started the gig.
Your onboarding process can also help you set client expectation, and outline how the process works, to define the goalposts.
People need to know what to expect, how things happen, who does what when and how best to communicate.
So mapping out everything in your onboarding process to make sure your client is duly impressed is important. Make sense?
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If you’re starting from scratch, I mean you do it but do it intuitively, then I find that scribbling notes down on paper easiest to get started.
We use great software with templated welcome emails, checks and steps and that’s great, but we didn’t start there. Pencil and paper are good to get started, quick and easy, then we migrated over to spreadsheets, worked a treat for ages.
But then as I wanted to free myself from the business, and evolve the process to a very high level, we need to invest in online software that could handle that.
The advantage of that is as you update a process, that improvement is then applied to all current projects, as well as new projects coming into the system.
Before you do what I normally do, off to see what software ‘toys’ I can buy, make sure you follow the steps below so you have a core framework and information ready to go.
Golden Rule:?Processes, and systems like this, are not set up for the persons tasked to the role. Sounds weird right? They SHOULD be set up for an outsider, or newbie to do, then you know you have a very high-level system in place. Otherwise what happens is people start to do things intuitively, which is nice that they’re efficient, but if they’re not updating and making sure that ALL the actions they do are in the system, they’re start to cut corners and in time the system will break. Make sense?
Smart Actions:
1) Define the part of the process you have someone to handle for you
2) Sketch up some of the core steps in that process
3) Document this in Excel or Word before you go off and get software
4) Work on refining the details in that process, constantly
Does someone say systems? Want to talk? Want to know what we use to fully automate our production?