Onboarding Tips - Week 29

Week 29 | Idea 29 | The Customer Effort Score

If you have a mature product, onboarding is hard especially because the customer may not have the maturity needed to use your product and you may be trying to set them up for too much too early.

While the customer may enjoy the benefits of a fully set up product, they may lose hope along the implementation journey if it feels like too much effort from their end, or a lot of learning and work before they start seeing any value. This is when they start ghosting you and tell their bosses or colleagues that your product set up demands too much of their time and they aren't able to get their other work done.

If you are hearing that the customer "got busy with other priorities", one of your takeaways should be that they couldn't multi-task and take your implementation to completion because it was too much effort.

Why is a high effort implementation bad?

• Churn: Customers may ghost you during implementation and churn
• Defensive CSM, Slow growth: Delayed implementations lead to your team being on the backfoot with the customer already, and also with slower ROI, lower confidence on engaging more with you. Also, you start recognising your revenues slower with more of it stuck in
• Limited expansion opportunities: Even if they get through it, they have a negative perception around your offering and dread engaging on such an exercise like this again - so they may not want to grow their use cases or engagement with your product
• Lower NPS: If you have a low friction implementation which feels like a breeze to the customer, they are going to talk about it to their industry peers. You just missed a great way to get great word of mouth!

How do you get better at this? Measure your Customer Effort Score!

Start measuring what the customer feels the level effort is for the onboarding, and try to understand which stages or steps they feel are highest effort from their end.

Send out a survey to all customers going through the implementation journey with you - to collect how customers score you 1 to 10 on how hard your implementation was for them, and then information on what specific phases or tasks were hardest to get past.

This way, you can figure out how to make those steps easier, such as:

• break them down into smaller pieces they can handle
• offer a more prescriptive approach
• provide help or educational content for those steps
• offer consulting services to bridge maturity gaps
• bring in partners for some parts of the implmentation
• make it a phased implementation

Every month you can reflect on the effort scores from your customers and identify key tasks, phases, or milestones that need a revamp to make it easy for the customer.

So try this out and share your learning! Also, tell us your stories with customer effort or reach out if you need help brainstorming on your customer journey. DM me!