Maximizing Customer Retention: The Power of Re-Onboarding

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, acquiring new customers can be expensive and challenging. However, many companies often need to pay more attention to the significant potential for growth and profitability within their existing customer base.

In a recent webinar, Donna Weber, author of Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions, and Sunny Harmon, TaskRay’s Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Support, discussed the concept of customer re-onboarding and its crucial role in driving customer loyalty and long-term success. This article aims to summarize the key insights shared during the webinar, offering valuable strategies to keep your customers coming back for more.

Understanding the Value of Customer Re-Onboarding

Donna and Sunny emphasized that growth happens after the initial sale, highlighting the need to shift focus from solely acquiring new customers to maximizing the potential of existing ones. Re-onboarding customers involves engaging with them beyond the initial onboarding process, guiding them to dive deeper into the product, derive more value, and transform their businesses. By providing ongoing support and showcasing new features, companies can optimize customer usage and drive product adoption, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The Cost of Customer Acquisition and Onboarding

Acquiring new customers comes with significant costs, including sales and marketing expenses. However, companies must often consider the additional costs associated with onboarding customers. The webinar introduced two essential metrics: Cost of Customer Onboarding (COCO) and Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA).

It became apparent that many companies spend as much, if not more, on onboarding as customers spend on their products or services in the first year. This extends the break-even point, delaying profitability and reducing the compounding effect of recurring revenue. Organizations must ensure that onboarding fees cover the actual costs and prevent sales representatives from discounting those fees.

The Benefits of Re-Onboarding

Re-onboarding offers several benefits that contribute to customer success and business growth. It helps familiarize new contacts with the product’s value, compensating for the loss of a champion. Re-onboarding facilitates increased product adoption and usage, paving the way for future expansion opportunities. By continually optimizing customers’ experiences and driving value, companies enhance customer satisfaction, increase net revenue retention, and lay the foundation for enduring relationships.

Developing a Re-Onboarding Strategy

Four key areas were highlighted during the webinar as potential starting points for re-onboarding efforts. These include:

1. Turn It Around: It’s never too late to turn around ailing customers and build these relationships to re-engage them.
2. Build New Relationships: Teams are constantly changing. As such, getting more people in an organization involved is important to gain different levels of relationships.
3. New Goals & Directions: Organizations have also changed significantly over the last few years. What their goals and objectives are now may be very different than when they were initially onboarded a few years ago. How can your product and features be a part of their solution?
4. New Products & Features : As your product and platform evolve and grow, your existing customers need to be made aware through customer enablement training and customer marketing to drive usage to new areas.

Each area presents opportunities for companies to optimize their customers’ experiences and ensure long-term success.

Ownership and Collaboration:

The discussion also touched on the critical question of who should own the re-onboarding process within an organization. While customer success teams typically handle expansion and renewal efforts, re-onboarding requires cross-functional collaboration. Sales, customer success, and product teams must work together to identify customer needs, align onboarding strategies, and continuously improve the overall customer experience.

To view the full webinar replay, click here.