My college soccer coach used to always tell us to “control the controllables” about ten times a week during the season (and ten is probably a conservative estimate).
Even though he sounded like a broken record at times, the message was clear. If you are going to lose, it should be because the other team is better than you not because you failed to do a good job at the things within your control.
The same wisdom applies to a startup company.
If you are going to fail, it shouldn’t be because of things that you can control. This brings us to the topic of new customer onboarding.
It is 100% within your control.
If I am working with a company that does a bad job at onboarding I want to explode.
It causes me to have a meltdown.
It is incomprehensible to me why anyone would not want to absolutely CRUSH this.
There are a few reasons why this is so so so so important.
You Can’t Take Back a First Impression
There is a reason it’s called a “first” impression. And you only have one shot.
This is your chance to frame how your future customer perceives you.
It’s very hard to shake a bad first impression no matter how great of a job you do afterwards.
But if you give off a great first impression, you’ve probably given yourself a little wiggle room in the future.
It’s truly a shame to do yourself the injustice of making any partnership an uphill battle from the first moment.
In my own life, I’ve experienced the difference a first impression can make and it’s major.
If you met me when I was 25, you’d probably think I was a drunken asshole and if you met me now (I hope) you’d think something much more positive.
It just makes things a lot easier when you aren’t exerting a ton of effort to prove people wrong.
It’s a classic example of putting in a little extra effort up front to spare yourself a ton of extra effort later.
Eliminate Buyers Remorse
Anytime someone buys something new (and especially something expensive), they will naturally second guess if they made the right decision.
If what they experience next is a steady hand and well choreographed process, this will quickly alleviate any concern.
But if they experience chaos and a lack of organization, they will probably start to have a panic attack.
And rightly so.
“Did they make the wrong decision?”, “Did they choose the wrong partner?”, “Do they not matter to you?”.
Then you can expect frantic phone calls and other unpleasant discussions headed your way.
Information Clarity
Another benefit of a well organized and standardized onboarding process is it ensures that key customer information won’t fall through the cracks.
We’ve probably all had an experience where we started working on something only to realize that we forgot to ask an essential question or get a key detail sorted out.
This can mean a lot of redundant work or spending a long time doing the wrong thing.
Ultimately this leads to frustration and lost profit.
Clarity and communication = positive outcomes.
Largely the costs and benefits of your onboarding experience are psychological.
They set the tone for the relationship you have with your customers and also play a role in how you and your brand are perceived.
Anyone who has worked with USAA or Alaska Airlines or Slack or has purchased a Peloton knows what it means to have this process done right.
It makes a world of difference in your attitude towards the organization.
If I stopped here, I’d just be talking shit without proposing any solutions for how to do a better job.
I don’t believe in doing that, so here are a few tips that can help improve your onboarding process.
Customer Journey Mapping, Knowledge Transfer & Complex Configuration
I have written about the value of customer journey maps for a bunch of use cases in other articles.
This is another one.
If you refer back to your customer journey diagram, you can identify moments in your customer flow that have a high likelihood for confusion because of a high volume of knowledge transfer or steps that involve configuration or integration of complex systems.
I would guess these are likely moments of onboarding pain for new customers in almost every business.
Once you’ve pinpointed them, you can start to design processes, checklists and documents to address them.
The Principle of Preemptive Action: Processes, Checklists and Documents
If you know a certain part of your onboarding process has the potential to become a mess (either from past experience or because you know it’s complicated), the smartest thing you can do is pre-empt the disaster by being prepared and sharing documents and checklists in advance with your prospective customer.
This will give them a chance to be thorough in what they provide to you and will also eliminate any phone calls or meetings where they become flustered or angry because it’s the first time they are hearing about what information they need to share with you and don’t have well thought out answers.
It will also give you more time to digest anything they’ve shared with you and prepare clarifying questions.
Breakdown Customer Onboarding Information Into Actionable Tasks
Once you’ve had a chance to digest any onboarding information that a prospective customer shares with you, it’s a very good practice to break it down into actionable tasks in a project management software like Trello, Jira or Asana in the form of user stories in your own words.
Do this before the next phone call or meeting with them.
One of biggest reasons for onboarding failure (from my experience) even if information is conveyed methodically and in detail is that both parties don’t interpret it the same way.
This step in the process is intended to solve the problem of misinterpretation.
When you go through the process of describing what you are planning to do with customer information you’ve been provided, it gives the new customer a chance to correct any elements you may have misinterpreted or gotten wrong.
Product Tours, Wizards, Support Videos, Analytics, User Testing, User Screen Recordings, NPS Scores
This doesn’t apply to all companies, but if you have a software product, everything in the title of this section can be used as a helpful tool or analysis method for improving your onboarding process.
I won’t go into too much detail about these things but when implemented in the right combinations they can highlight important product information for your customers and give you insights into how you can improve.
Some useful services to help with this are Inspectlet, HotJar, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, UserTesting.com, WalkMe, Delighted.
Team Roles
If you work in an organization that has multiple people communicating with a customer at various points in their journey, it’s essential to delineate responsibilities.
Who owns what part of the process, where do handoffs occur and who is the main point of contact for everything.
You do not want to require your customer to ask themselves which of their contacts they should be reaching out to and/or doing so and not getting a response.
I don’t like to think about accountability or ownership in terms of who should be blamed if something goes wrong… but in this case it can be a very clear way to think about it.
If a customer gets upset because your team has dropped the ball, whose fault is it?
The answer to this should be clear for each customer and step in the process.
Response Time Requirements
This one might be psychotic, but I’ll own it because I think it’s so important.
If you have a new customer and they reach out to a member of your team, there should be a universal understanding within your company that they must be replied to within 1 hour during working hours and within 8 hours on the weekend or at night (since eventually someone will be awake).
Even if this is just an acknowledgement that you received the message, it’s important.
Response time is in your control and a lack of response gives people anger and anxiety.
It also makes them feel unimportant.
Don’t do that.
Make Sure to Be on the Same Page Internally
Once you have all these practices in place, it’s important to make sure everyone in your company is aware of these policies, knows where to find any onboarding documentation, has access to all relevant customer specific information, has a chance to review it thoroughly and is held accountable for doing these things correctly.
It can be very frustrating if two members of a team join a customer call or meeting and one of them starts asking questions that have already been discussed or answered.
This is the result of a lack of preparation and makes you look very bad.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are very few things in your startup that you have complete control over.
But this happens to be one of them which means you really have no wiggle room to do a bad job.
It is the fastest way to build a great reputation or ruin one.
Please don’t overlook this because you are worrying about other things.
Just like anything else, getting onboarding right is an iterative process, so don’t beat yourself up if it isn’t perfect right away… but don’t ignore it either.