Improve customer adoption and onboarding with continuous feedback
By Jasper Lipton, Alchemer Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Vanessa Bagnato, Alchemer Director of Product Marketing
Successfully onboarding a new customer has long term impacts on your business, and can improve adoption, reduce churn, and increase revenue. With the ability to automate manual steps and customize the Alchemer Platform to fit your onboarding needs and business, you can collect the information you need to help customers adopt your products and stay with you long term.
Why do most onboarding programs fail?
Problem 1: You can’t demonstrate immediate product value to your customers
According to Userpilot, 63% of customers think onboarding is key to deciding to subscribe to a product. And 74% of potential customers will switch to other solutions if the onboarding process is complicated. However, 86% of the customers say they will remain loyal if onboarding and continuous education are provided.
Low product adoption is primarily attributed to customer confusion and slow initial usage.
Complex products make it harder for customers to realize all of the functionality they just bought. They don’t know where to start, and what to do next. If you offer a complex product or service, you want customers to start using it right away. The more people use the product or service, the more likely they are to embrace it and begin to depend upon it.
Often with customer onboarding, there is insufficient follow-up to ensure customers have received adequate training and realizing value. With no way to ask for more targeted training, they try to figure it out but eventually give up, resulting in increased churn during renewals.
Problem 2: Your onboarding program is one-size-fits-all
Onboarding needs to be tailored to each customer and their business model, which means it needs to be flexible.
Onboarding Teams need to understand the customer’s challenges, goals, and use cases before they can conduct effective sessions. However, onboarding teams receive information inconsistently from the sales team, resulting in generic onboarding sessions that don’t resonate with or apply to most customers.
The success of your onboarding team depends on the input they receive before they begin. Ensuring that they start with the right information, so they can adapt their approach requires an onboarding process that is flexible enough to adapt to a variety of needs—from standard product onboarding to completely custom calls that walk the customer through the process of making the product work perfectly in their environment.
How Alchemer helps you drive customer adoption, retention, and loyalty
Alchemer helps sales and onboarding teams quickly and easily collect information from customers across the entire sales and onboarding process to keep more detailed and accurate customer records in their CRM. Much of this data collection and transfer of details can be automated to improve the onboarding process and to improve the efficiency and quality of their customer onboarding program.
Collect meaningful, contextual feedback from your customers
After a new customer purchases an onboarding package or qualifies for onboarding services, the Alchemer Platform automatically sends a survey to the sales team and customer to gather the new customer’s use cases, environment, and objectives. Once completed, these use cases and customer details are automatically sent to the onboarding team. Simultaneously, a welcome email is dispatched to the customer from the onboarding team, followed by session scheduling, including additional sessions tailored to their product tier and add-ons.
Once the onboarding sessions conclude, customers are prompted to provide feedback. The Alchemer platform automates all of these processes while enriching the CRM with new data, enhancing efficiency and providing the team with the information necessary to deliver a personalized and more relevant onboarding experience.
Turn new customers into advocates with higher product adoption
Successful onboarding leads to a rapid deployment of use cases and transforms new customers into product advocates, driving product usage. When software becomes shelfware, it becomes one of the first budget cuts, even when budgets aren’t shrinking. Additionally, with more people using your product in more ways, you can collect more feedback that you can use to prioritize your product roadmap or find and fix bugs.
Reduce your churn with faster time-to-value
Effective onboarding also facilitates post-session product scaling within the customer’s account. Additionally, it deepens each customer’s understanding of the software’s value in helping them get their job done on a day-to-day basis. This understanding, plus increased adoption, dramatically aids in reducing long-term churn and increasing customer renewal rates.
Create upsell opportunities based on strong relationships
Collecting customer needs prior to and during onboarding not only helps the onboarding team, but also provides clarity on future sales opportunities with that customer. Additionally, once onboarding shows a customer what they can do with your product and how it can affect their daily life, they are more positively disposed when sales proposes additional services, integrations, or features, because they’ve seen the value. This provides both long-term and short-term sales opportunities and growth in ARR.
How it all comes together
Here’s an example of how Alchemer’s suite of products helps you improve your onboarding sessions and results—automatically:
- Alchemer integrates with your CRM—at which point it listens for sales stage changes and onboarding purchases.
- As soon as a customer requests onboarding, Alchemer automatically sends a targeted survey to the customer, requesting insights into their systems and needs.
- Alchemer automatically routes the feedback to the relevant teams—onboarding, sales, and account teams, for example.
- Alchemer instantly updates the account records in your CRM, so you can analyze your data all in one place.
- From there, you can easily dig into feedback, identify the best growth options to follow up on, and understand what more you can do to keep your customer happy.
With survey distribution and data collection on autopilot, you get an immediate, holistic view of what the customer needs in onboarding, how they felt about the onboarding, and what else you can do to keep them happy.
The result: higher adoption rates, lower churn, and increased
Onboarding isn’t just a one-time event, it can happen as objectives and groups change, or as new products are added. Collecting the most relevant customer feedback in real time helps make onboarding much smoother, faster, and more relevant to the customer. With happy customers, you’re more likely to secure recurring revenue.
Already an Alchemer customer? Here’s how to set up this workflow.
Not a customer yet? Request a demo here.
