Onboarding is unequivocally the most decisive stage in a customer’s journey. It’s no secret that churn rates are the highest when onboarding is insufficient, nor is it that churn is bad for business. In fact, research shows that “for every 1 percentage point increase in revenue retention, a SaaS company’s value increases by 12% after five years” (SaaS Capital).
So why is it that the same business rigor that is applied to other divisions, such as marketing and sales, isn’t also applied to understanding your customer onboarding? Just as marketing automation provides insights, reporting, and analysis for marketers, accessing an aggregate view of customer onboarding data provides crucial and otherwise untapped opportunities to a pivotal aspect of your business.
Customer onboarding is more important than ever to a company’s health, but applying the same level of business discipline and technical capabilities to this process has too long been overlooked. Here are three reasons to stop overlooking the importance of aggregate customer onboarding data and start utilizing executive-level insights for your company’s gain.
Customer onboarding is, in many ways, the beating heart of your company. Your business’ success is presumably contingent on your customer’s success, and customer success is dependent upon the success of the onboarding process. The significant ROI from focusing on onboarding has been proven time and time again.
A Harvard Business Review study found that 63 percent of companies that prioritized customer onboarding were able to better anticipate higher-level customer needs, compared to 30 percent of companies that didn’t prioritize an understanding of onboarding. Without visibility into data around customer onboarding and implementations, there is no way of pinpointing your company’s performance at any given time, including important performance metrics such as drop-off points in the onboarding process. This vital data provides improvement opportunities as well as feedback on successful initiatives.
Mitigate risks by tracking the effectiveness of your onboarding process in real-time.
In customer onboarding, the currency is time. And if your business is like most others, you have no idea if your current onboardings are performing to standards or have much advance notice of potential issues ballooning into major problems. Many teams are operating blind, only receiving feedback through customer churn.
With executive-level insights, business users can monitor processes on a summary level, exposing issues before they become larger problems. Head off potential lost business by analyzing churn rates at each step of the onboarding process and addressing those weak points. Mitigate the risks of customer onboarding by tracking the effectiveness of your onboarding process in real-time through a comprehensive view of this data.
The easiest way to proactively drive your company’s growth is to focus on onboarding. Increasing the visibility of your customer onboarding data, and using it strategically, can be transformative for your company’s trajectory. Access to high-level insights into your existing onboarding program helps teams to uncover both strengths and inadequacies—both of which are essential to sustainable growth.
B2B and B2C relationships can be complex–which is exactly why, in order to strengthen ties and propel growth, it is crucial to start with a positive first impression during the onboarding process. Build a solid foundation for your customers and use the insights you get along the way to create a complete picture of your successes, failures, and what both are telling you.