Leading customers through a successful onboarding process is always a top-of-mind priority for Customer Success Managers (CSMs). But onboarding can be a complex process.
Done correctly, you expertly usher new customers into your business, introducing them to your brand, and enticing them to adopt your products and/or services. Done wrong, however, you can cause customers to disengage, turn away, and give up on your business.
How can you know if you’re staying on the right track when it comes to onboarding?
For CSMs, here’s what you should keep an eye on to measure the effectiveness of your onboarding programs:
Number of Days to Onboard a New Customer
One of the first things to turn to when measuring the effectiveness of your customer onboarding process is length of time: More specifically, on average, how long does it take for a new customer to complete your entire onboarding program?
Of course, there is no one ideal length of time or number of days when it comes to onboarding. It’s different for every brand—and may even be different for each product or service you offer.
What you can do, though, is pay attention to your average rates over time.
For example, suppose in Q1 the average time for a customer to finish onboarding was four days—but in the last month, that number changed to seven days.
This could be an indication that there are new roadblocks popping up in your onboarding process that are causing friction and slowing down your time to onboard completion.
Number of Customer Interactions During Onboarding Process
Throughout your onboarding process, there are likely a number of specific actions that you want your customers to take. For instance, this could be adopting a certain feature or scheduling a call.
Paying attention to this number of customer interactions will also be a good indicator of the effectiveness of your onboarding programs.
For example, the more frequently your customer interacts with your brand throughout the process, the more likely they are to stick around and complete the entire onboarding program to continue to learn about and adopt your products and/or services.
Above all, your onboarding process should make it convenient and easy for customers to interact with your brand. If you’re not hitting your goal number of customer interactions during onboarding, this could be an indication of a problem in your process.
Number of Days to Achieve Key Milestones
Similarly, as you pay attention to the average number of customer interactions, consider the proportion of days spent in onboarding to the number of key interactions, or milestones.
Over the course of your onboarding process, you likely built in key milestones or checkpoints that you want your customers to reach. One could be, for example, upgrading to the next level of service. If it’s taking a long time for your customers to progress through each of these checkpoints, it’s a sign that something in your onboarding process is making them sluggish.
By tracking the average number of days between each achieved milestone or checkpoint, you can better identify the weak spots in your onboarding program and where you need to make a change.
How to Improve Your Onboarding Programs with AirDeck
Mastering onboarding is a fundamental part of your business’s overall success. If your customers don’t complete the process, you lose out on building a loyal customer base that will stay with you throughout the years.
That’s why AirDeck is helping teams take the kinks out of onboarding programs so they can see improved results with less work.
Make It Personalized
An all-in-one document narration platform, one of the chief benefits of AirDeck is its unique audio and video narration capabilities.
Making it fast and easy to add voice and video to any of the 210+ supported file formats (e.g., Microsoft Word, Google Docs, PowerPoint, etc.), AirDeck helps teams add new levels of personality to their onboarding content.
An audio- or video-enhanced presentation keeps a firmer hold on your customers’ attention, delighting them with 1:1 personalized content that helps them more easily understand complex ideas or documents.
Make It Convenient
Another major paint point in most onboarding programs is time.
As the CSM, you have scores of new customers to guide through onboarding—and only limited time to do it all. As for the customers, receiving another invitation for a meeting, a Zoom conference, or a phone call has quickly become a sure-fire way to zap enthusiasm.
AirDeck makes onboarding more convenient by giving your customers the power to view your content on their own time, wherever they are.
When you create a presentation in AirDeck, you can share on-demand access to your customer with a secure custom link. It’s a win-win. It makes it more convenient for CSMs to send content at scale, and it makes it more convenient for customers to receive and consume content on their own terms.
Make It Intelligent
One thing that’s sorely lacking in many teams’ onboarding processes is customer insight.
In most cases, once you send a presentation to a customer, it can kind of be like sending it off into the void. Unless your customer explicitly gives you feedback, it can be hard to know how they’re responding to your content.
This is where AirDeck makes onboarding different by making it intelligent.
With in-depth analytics and tracking capabilities, AirDeck allows you to track every second of every view for every document you send—in real time.
This gives you a more profound understanding of customer engagement and sentiment that you just can’t get with basic PowerPoint slides or Keynote presentations.
And once you’re empowered to truly see and measure the effectiveness of your onboarding efforts, you can identify your weak points and then make changes as needed to improve your programs.
Successful onboarding sets the foundation for long-term, fruitful relationships with your customers—and you only get one shot to get it right. AirDeck puts you in the prime position to nail onboarding every time.
