Are you happy with your customer retention rate? Do you know what’s causing customer churn? Are you tracking the right customer success metrics for onboarding new clients? Are you able to trigger communications and tasks? In this article discover tips to improve the customer experience.
Onboarding Customers
Successfully onboarding new customers is arguably the most important stage of a customer relationship. In the onboarding stage, customers begin to gain value from the product or service. Generally, customers view the value gained by asking themselves three broad questions about the product / service:
Is it usable? – The product is easy to learn, operate, and maintain
Is it useful? – The product increases productivity, revenue, profitability
Is it used? – Users embrace the product and utilize it often
If the onboarding experience answers these questions sufficiently, the new customer is likely to consider it successful and continue the relationship.
By way of example, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company needs to proactively track and manage their onboarding process in four areas. Critical to their success is the ability to integrate customer success metrics data from multiple systems to trigger alerts, emails, and CSR task assignments when red flags arise. For example:
Product Implementation – When a customer doesn’t complete the base setup within the first three days, trigger an email offering assistance. Assign a task to the corresponding customer success manager to call the customer two days later if the setup remains incomplete.
Product Training – Monitor the self-help pages and training video platform. Identify users that are not accessed these resources, and aren’t utilizing the software as expected. Use a drip email campaign on the value to be gained from using the software, and provide user tips and techniques. Implement tips and self-guided tutorials within the software application.
Product Usage / Consumption – Monitor the number of daily sessions, features used, and session lengths. Trigger proactive outreach when these metrics fall below a threshold.
Customer Service and Support – Monitor the customer service and support systems as well as social media and forums. Track the number of tickets, time to response, time to resolution, number of interactions to resolution, and Net Promoter Score survey responses, and trigger proactive CSR outreach when these metrics break a threshold. Address questions and concerns as they appear on social media/forum platforms.
Customer Success Metrics – Analytics
Aggregating, correlating and analyzing process data from multiple systems provides valuable insights. With these insights, processes can be improved, and trigger threshold ranges narrowed. As a result, Customer Success is able to retain more clients and provide executives with accurate renewal and upgrade forecasts for clients in the onboarding stage.
