Your customers and clients are some of the most important pieces of your business. How you interact with that and communicate with them helps build relationships that can help you create long-term relationships and earn your company repeat business.
What is the client onboarding process?
Client onboarding isn’t essential to every business, but it can’t be overlooked for many organizations. This is especially true of B2B businesses, but B2C companies can enhance their customer relationships by their own form of onboarding. For them, it might look like an introductory email that welcomes customers to a new subscription service or offers a tutorial on how to use a recently ordered product.
For B2B companies or companies that work to maintain lifelong business relationships like investment firms, your clients need to know what the experience of working with your organization will be like and businesses need an opportunity to get to know their clients better.
How can your business improve the client onboarding process?
Onboarding processes help accomplish these things and provide a better customer experience. Whether you’re a marketing agency, financial institution, real estate agent, or other client-facing business, there are a few things to focus on when developing your client onboarding process.
1. Understand your client’s current needs
What is your client expecting from you and your business? What do they need your business to accomplish for them? It’s important to understand specific details so that you can meet their needs.
2. Understand the client’s goals
When do they need their projects completed? What is their timeline? What metrics need to move in order for you to be viewed as a successful vendor or business partner?
3. Communicate with your team and stakeholders
Once a project manager or account manager welcomes a client onboard and assesses their needs and goals, it’s important that the team that will be working with that customer has an understanding of the expectations and is acquainted with the important members of the client team. Your organization’s team will need to be able to answer questions and follow up on deadlines.
4. Check-in
You need to follow up with your clients to ensure that your business is meeting expectations. Onboarding doesn’t stop after the client’s project begins and ends – part of excellent service and maintaining good relationships is following up to get feedback.
What are the client onboarding tools available to your business? There are a lot of client onboarding software solutions available to help you create and implement a process that will create a positive relationship with clients and give them an overall better client experience. Some of the software options available for enhancing the client onboarding process are:
- Tallyfy: Tallyfy enables you to create workflows, such as the ones that guide client onboarding. You can use this to spot gaps in your process and solve problems with client relationships.
- Nickelled: Nickelled helps you identify the problem areas of your client onboarding process and create a better user experience that includes customer education. They also offer a 14-day trial to help you understand if it’s the best solution for your business.
- Pega: This software helps you strengthen customer relationships from the very beginning. It can help you streamline account setup, contract management, correspondence generation, and other important facets of establishing a customer foundation.
Effective client onboarding is a crucial part of developing a positive business reputation. Refining this process is an important step for all businesses in providing excellent customer service and increasing the likelihood of repeat businesses. Providing a great product or service is necessary to be successful, but to keep customers coming back, client onboarding is key. Investing in a solution to help improve that process is a smart move for businesses everywhere.
