If your customers have a positive experience from the very beginning, they are going to stick with your product or service and continue to do business with you.

Customer onboarding is the nurturing process that gets new users and customers acquainted and comfortable with your product or service. A positive onboarding experience confirms to your customers that they made the right choice. It also helps you to retain them.

A good customer onboarding program can include step-by-step tutorials, guidance, support, and milestone celebrations when a customer achieves success through your product or service.

Creating a customer onboarding strategy is relatively easy. Start by creating a measurable key objective such as “get your new customers to use your product or service more than once a week for the first 10 weeks”.

In order to onboard them effectively, you need to really know your new customers. Some of the information that you gather about your customers during marketing and sales processes will carry over into the initial stages of onboarding. Try to understand the challenges and pain points that each new customer faces. You can then help them to create solutions to some of those challenges, through using your product or service.

Your sales process should set clear expectations so that customers are prepared to invest time in getting set up with your product or service. A good onboarding process should reiterate the value that your product or service provides to customers. You could include a personalised kick-off call, specialised training, or documentation to help your new customers get everything set up in order to address some of the pain points or challenges that they face.

Regular communication is important during the customer onboarding phase of a business relationship. An initial welcome message is a good place to start. Following the welcome message, you should spend some time with your new customers in order to help them set goals and KPIs that are unique to their business. Allow them to define success and help them to create measurable milestones.

Once you have agreed a set of goals you should continue to contact your new customers on a regular basis for the first couple of months in order to offer tutorials, guides and training, and to keep them on track with achieving their business objectives.