What is the best customer service experience you have ever had?
It doesn’t matter what company, or even what industry.
Just think back to one that really stands out to you. A time you started working with a company or provider and you were totally blown away by the experience you had with them.
That’s right. Not the transaction with them.
The experience.
The soup to nuts, A to Z experience you had when you became a customer or client.
How did they make you feel? What do you remember most about them? Would you choose to do business with them again? Do you still do business with them? Do you refer your friends, family and colleagues to them?
Most of us would say yes.
And most of us can remember exactly what it was that won us over.
Perhaps it was a handwritten note. Or the speed of getting things started. Maybe it was the welcoming phone call or gift basket that was delivered at kickoff.
It could have been the smooth process of getting and filling out all your paperwork to get started.
Maybe it was the quickness they scheduled your discovery call, or the delivery of the product/service itself.
Maybe you were lucky and it was a lot of these things!
Whatever the case, it created an experience in your mind that continues to stand out to you today.
Knowing that, wouldn’t it be great to be able to create a similar experience for your new clients and customers?
To cement your relationship early on and know, without question, that your new clients know how happy you are to be working with them?
You see, providing a stellar new client experience is one of the most invaluable things you can do for your clients.
The ROI is amazing, yet hard to measure.
That’s because they are already a new customer, so you can’t really attribute the sale to the onboarding experience.
There is no direct sale request during the onboarding process, so you can’t measure and track the sales from it.
Nevertheless, the onboarding experience you provide for new clients is what will make you stand apart from everyone else out there.
So, what kinds of things should be included in your onboarding process? What can you include, and how can you set it up so the manual work involved in it doesn’t drown you?
Segmented and personalized automated email messages average 46% higher open rates than traditional marketing messages
You can include anything!
For instance, if you get a new service client you want to make it as smooth a process as possible. You can include things like:
- Email out a proposal and payment link
- Sending a welcome email with intake forms to fill out to get the process started once initial payment is made and agreements are signed
- Send a welcome gift package in the email
- Schedule a meeting to kickoff working together
- Creating a task in your project management system
- Setting up billing in your payment processing system
- Create follow up tasks to provide amazing follow up
- Send a receipt for payment
- Schedule reminder emails to go out for things your new client must accomplish
Now that you’ve decided what you’d like to include in your onboarding process, the next question is what can you automate.
How can you set things up so you don’t have to hire a full time employee to execute all the steps listed above?
You can do several things to make this process smooth and hands off, ensuring a consistent experience for your new clients and a manageable process for you and your team.
For projects like this I usually start with first determining who my providers will be.
By that I mean who will I be using for my CRM/marketing automation, to fulfill any gifts/swag I’d like to send out, what platform will I use for kickoff meetings, forms to collect initial data and all the other steps involved in a powerful onboarding process.
Once I have made those decisions I talk with their support about built in integration options. How well do they work with my existing systems and processes, do they natively connect with my other systems, can they help me with any of the connections to make this run smoothly?
Once those questions are answered it’s time to answer the final questions and use any third party software for my connections that may be necessary.
I usually use Zapier to connect any systems whose connections aren’t native.
“Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Now it’s time to have some fun!
Now you get to set up and build your onboarding process. While the design phase is exciting, I always love the set up because I can see things starting to take shape.
I can not only envision how the process will work, I can also see the steps being built and set up to take place.
To me it’s the most fun part of the process!
Once you have your onboarding process automation set up make sure you test it before you make it live. It’s amazing the little things that can go wrong or not work the way you imagined them.
And one additional step I always encourage is to test it with a small group of people first.
Even though you tested it yourself, real people behave differently. They don’t always click a link, or they click it more than once…
Whatever the case once you are working with live clients for onboarding things will inevitably need to be tweaked.
And finally, be prepared for a few bumps along the way.
Whether it’s things not working quite right, or actions you’d like to change and have behave differently, or a part of the experience that, when you see it play out, you decide you’d like to look a little different…
“As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.”
Be patient with the process.
Very little in life is perfect the first time.
And as a living, breathing process, this will be updated as you go. Just like your SOPs get reviewed and updated periodically, your automations should also be reviewed and updated regularly.
Once you have this in place, and you are regularly wowing your new clients, you will be amazed at how it impacts your business, and how many of your clients begin to refer people to you.
And it will all happen while you are doing the things you love in your business!
