All Sizzle and No Steak: How Weak Customer Onboarding Can Cost You

Imagine you are grilling the perfect steak. 
You spend significant time and money seeking the ideal cut of meat – Grass-fed excellence.
You carefully manage the grill heat, achieving a splendid sear – Mouthwatering smoke fills the air.
You painstakingly plate the steak for a flawless presentation -- Grill Masters have nothing on you.
Now just before you serve your meat masterpiece … you dump it in the garbage. 

This hunger-inducing metaphor sums up the way some businesses onboard—or rather don’t onboard—their customers. 

Prevent the Costly Post-Sale Letdown

Often sales reps attempt to dazzle and jump through hoops during the courtship phase of a sale. When the sweat equity proves effective and a lead becomes a customer, then it’s fine to ease up on the hard sell. However, customer nurturing and customer care should actually kick up a notch. 

If the level of customer support drops sharply after the sale, or the onboarding process is unorganized or disjointed, then the budding new customer/company relationship can sour quickly. Customers feel duped when care and service fall off after they’ve written their check.
If your company fails to deliver a solid customer onboarding experience, then your reputation and bottom line can take a hit in the following ways:

• Lost Loyalty – During onboarding, the customer/company relationship is shaped. If onboarding goes smoothly, then customer loyalty can form. If it’s a bumpy process, then customer confidence begins to waver, and that does not inspire loyalty. 
• Collapsed Cross-sells – Nearly 75% of cross-sell opportunities occur within the first 90 days after gaining a customer. In other words, if your onboarding isn’t on point, it could cost you valuable cross-selling revenue. Customers who struggle with their original purchase certainly won’t opt in for more. 
• Ruined Renewals and Referrals – If you have delivered a poor onboarding process, then your customer is probably not going to recommend you to someone else. Getting up and running can be the hardest part of buying a new product or service. Your business must make this as easy as possible if you want your new customer to stick around. 

Maintain Positive Momentum

To prove your value proposition is more than an empty promise, you must deliver a grade A, top-quality product, served on bed of superior customer service and support.

Providing a strong customer onboarding experience is the first step. To do this, you need a well-mapped customer journey as well as the right technology. 
You can’t rely on outdated, manual processes of the past if you want consistent, high-quality onboarding. Your business needs to modernize in the forms of cloud integration and automation. 

Data Integration

During the high-touch onboarding phase, it’s crucial that all customer-facing team members have up-to-date, comprehensive customer data. Many businesses have this customer data stored among several different applications and systems that don’t natively communicate. Using an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), you can centralize your data by creating connections among systems such as a Salesforce integration or Netsuite integration, among others. 

Automation

If your customer onboarding process relies heavily on manual processes, then you are at risk for mistakes and inconsistencies. A low-code iPaaS provides ways to easily automate several components of your onboarding process, including the customer hand-off, task assignments, and communication. Connect core systems like Salesforce and Workfront or synch Workfront with JIRA. Through increased connectivity, you will be able to automate more processes and further improve your process monitoring.