Customer Onboarding Best Practice for Recurring Services Providers
The success of a recurring service brand can depend on a positive customer onboarding experience. This article investigates the most common obstacles of effective onboarding that lead to customer churn. It also provides best practices to enhance the onboarding. It then provides a solution that automatically integrates best practices into operations, ensuring an excellent and efficient customer onboarding experience.
In this article:
- Your Customer Onboarding Challenges
- Onboarding Best Practices
- Let Subscription Management Software Automate Best Practices for You
Customer onboarding is important because it kickstarts a subscription experience.
It’s also the first chance a customer has to watch a recurring service in action. It sets the tone for the customer relationship.
Because recurring revenue services feel pressure to deliver smooth onboarding, knowing best practice is invaluable.
This article explores the challenges of onboarding for your recurring service business. Then we’ll talk through the best practices, and how to action them easily.
Your Customer Onboarding Challenges
Onboarding consistently can be difficult when there are so many internal and external factors that can impact your process at any time.
The average onboarding time is 20-90 days
It involves at least 10 follow-ups
The cost averages between $20,000 and $30,000.
Delays can cost revenue losses as high as $25,000.
Do any of these challenges sound familiar?
The customer wants to change the terms of the contract just before they start – Last minute changes can cause delays that push onboarding back or make it more complex.
Finance didn’t get the contract and offering terms on time – Finance teams need vital information like contract terms from sales and customer service teams as fast as possible. This helps them set up the correct invoicing and payments. If the team is stuck chasing up information, that can severely delay onboarding.
The offering, the terms, or the onboarding are unclear – If customers aren’t sure about the subscription plans, pricing, features, invoicing, and payment methods, they can get frustrated and make the wrong choices. Then Customer Service then has to spend time and potentially offer discounts to keep them onside.
There’s an error in resource allocation – Your installation team or virtual engineers can be impacted by mistakes in resource allocation. That’s more delays.
The experience isn’t personalized – A generic customer onboarding experience can make customer satisfaction take a nosedive. Recurring services is an arena where ongoing loyalty is a must, so personalization must be part of it.
Scaling puts too much pressure on the process – A sudden surge in subscriptions can overpower your end-to-end operations, and delay things indefinitely until you’re caught up.
Any delays lead to customer unhappiness. And it’s expensive too.
Fortunately, there are actions you can take to reverse these challenges.
Onboarding Best Practices
There are best practices that will help you steer around onboarding problems:
- Proactive Communication Channels: Proactive anything might sound tough to deliver because your resources might already be stretched to the limit.
But giving customers multiple channels for support, guidance, or clarification can stop bigger problems down the road.
Try personalized emails, live chat support, tutorials available 24-7, and even a designated rep to sort out questions fast and build trust and reliability.
- Interactive Onboarding Resources: Resources that are interactive and gamify the process will help customers feel more involved and invested in the process.
Video tutorials, product demos, interactive apps, or guided tours can boost customer understanding and engagement.
- Continuous Feedback Loop: Customers should feel free to share their experiences, suggestions, and concerns.
Activity seeking their feedback via surveys, feedback forms, or follow-up calls/emails, gives valuable insight into their pain points so that you can adjust collectively and individually.
You also show your customers that you’re committed to improving and optimizing their experience. That’s a great way to start a relationship.
These best practices take time and resources. But what if you don’t have a lot of either?
Let Subscription Management Software Automate Best Practices for You
Subscription management software can take care of the best practices (and more!) for you with AI-driven automation.
Here’s what it does for your operations:
- Automates welcome sequences: You’ll be able to set up automated welcome sequences that give your new customer what they want, when they want it. Resources, next steps, constant communication and help all ensure smooth onboarding. It saves your teams untold hours and boosts engagement.
- Personalizes the customer onboarding journey: Data-driven personalization brings customer preferences, behaviors, and interactions into the onboarding experiences. The more tailored the content, notifications, recommendations, and journey, the happier the customers.
- Tracks and Optimizes Onboarding Metrics: Analytics and reporting tools will track your onboarding metrics (including activation rates, time to value, and user engagement). You’ll spot bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and better-informed decisions to improve the onboarding experience. It’s a chance to constantly make things better.
Conclusion
Customer onboarding sets the stage for great long-term relationships with your new customers.
That’s why it’s important to make the recurring service onboarding process as easy and enjoyable as possible. And not just for your customers; for you and your teams too.
Bringing in best practices and automating them so that nothing falls between the cracks saves time and money. It also boosts the customer experience.
Everyone wins.
Want to learn how subscription management software can change your customer onboarding experience? Book a free Discovery Call with our team today.
Let’s chat further.
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