What are the most effective customer onboarding and engagement tools and platforms that you use or recommend?

The onboarding is one of the most crucial moments-of-truth of every new customer. The main goal of the onboarding process is to ensure that the customer realizes the value of your product or service. And ideally, as fast as possible. Therefore, the main KPIs should be: 1. Adoption of the most important feature based on that specific customer's goal. 2. Time-to-value, because you need them to perceive value as soon as possible.

One of the goals for onboarding new customers is to set them up for success for using your products and services, maximising the value they're going to get from what they've signed up for / bought.

Customer onboarding is the most critical stage and is the foundation and stepping stone to ensure long term relationship : - 1. Customers are most motivated during the start of the project and it is crucial to keep the momentum going 2. Ensure to understand & define customer value, while this can be changed and adjusted as we move forward 3. Ensure 80%-90% progress in the project by keeping the track of the progress and sharing best practices 4. End user engagement will also help during this early stage to ensure adoption 5. If customer gets and understands the success mantra during the launch phase, they are set for success for a longer time 6. Build trust and become a loyal advisor for your customer

It's important to define the success criteria for the onboarding process, i.e., how will we know that the onboarding was successful? For each company these criteria would be different and depend on their product and the typical product usage. For example, if your platform creates and schedules social media campaigns, then the onboarding success criteria could be 1. The customer was able to create 3 campaigns on his own. 2. The customer launched 3 campaigns on his own 3. The customer edited 2 campaigns based on platform recommendations, etc. Think of the kind of usage behavior you would like to see that would indicate to you that onboarding was truly successfully completed.

Onboarding is one of the most critical aspects of the customer journey. When customers feel like they valued and welcomed, they feel confident in the approach and become confident they are in the right place. One of the best strategies for onboarding is to give your customers the ownership experience. When they are able to reflect on their current state, imagine life when they reach their goal, and identify their own personal obstacles they may have along the path. This gives them ownership over their journey. This increases their engagement and commitment to their own success so they show up, engage and do the work. This is one of the places I love to start in an onboarding experience.

For involved customer onboarding projects that take 2+ weeks to complete typically, it helps to use purpose-built customer onboarding software platforms (such as Rocketlane), which are designed to create the right experience internally, and the right visibility and engagement capabilities to keep customers accountable with ease.

This is where CPaas Platforms come in, with all the channels integrated with journey orchestration. This allows businesses to engage customers where they feel comfortable. Every customer has their preference. Having the right solution which allows you to be where your customer is, truly matters. There are many solutions like Digital Connect by ocean, Infobip, MessageBird, Wati and many more.

Depending on your product, market, and customer profile, it's essential to utilize various channels and formats for effective onboarding and engagement. Some customers may favor self-service options like online tutorials, FAQs, or chatbots for convenience, while others might benefit more from personalized support through phone calls, emails, or webinars. Additionally, certain customers may respond positively to gamified elements such as badges, rewards, or leaderboards, while others might prefer informative content like case studies, testimonials, or white papers. By selecting the appropriate channels and formats, you can tailor your onboarding and engagement strategies to align with your customers' preferences and learning style.

Some of the tools additionally can help could be :- 1. A CRM software like Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot etc 2. Onboarding tools for customer learning and guiding them to use the product & features 3. CSM tools like Gainsight, Churnzero, Churn360 etc. 4. Communication & collaboration tools to ensure proactive response to customer queries 5. Data analytics tools like Looker 6. Feedback and survey tools to track NPS, CSAT etc during early stages and to capture the experience during onboarding

Automation in onboarding tools can also ensure that your client facing teams deliver professional experiences with ease - through standardized playbooks, dashboards, automated status emails, and more.

Automating whatever you can frees up resources to investing in providing the human touch at key parts of the customer journey. More complex queries should be handled by human beings.

The secret formula for automating and streamlining your onboarding experience is to be clear on the customer journey map. A successful onboarding experience is to help someone navigate through the experience, and set the stage for success.

Completely agree to continuously stay up to date regarding best practices but also innovations. Every brand should deliver the best practice standards of its industry as this is what customers expect. However, to truly impress customers and innovate, it's important to get inspiration from brands outside of your own industry. The success lies in how this innovation is applied to the own brand while making sure it aligns with the brand values and positioning.

Not all your product users are the same. You might have a product that can be used by sales agents, revenue operations managers, customer success managers etc, who will use your product differently and will therefore need a specific onboarding plan tailored to their type of usage of your product. Another way your product users may differ is roles and permissions - some users might be super users, administrators or editors, and some users might be viewers. Their onboarding should also differ based on their usage, and you can determine based on usage metrics what types of roles and permissions are worth tailoring the onboarding experience for.

Onboarding never ends with just one person or champion on the customer's side. There will always be more people to onboard to your platform, and it's important to recognize the need to train and onboard each new team member, tailor the right onboarding for each type of user and develop a "Train the trainer" program where your champion trains additional team members.

Onboarding isn't a one time event. You may need to onboard your customers multiple times along their journey when something new is happening in the environment you are using with your customers. The more automated the experience, the more onboarding becomes essential. Be consciously looking for ways to support the success of your customers throughout their customer journey.