There’s a lot more to setting your customers up for success than what meets the eye. Beyond the work your sales team puts in to explain the value of your services, your onboarding team also needs to make sure your clients know how to use them correctly. Then, your customer success team ensures that everything they learned during implementation and onboarding continues to be useful afterwards.
The transition from client onboarding to customer success is one of the most challenging aspects of implementation because it can be easy to overlook. Once you’ve onboarded your client, that’s all you need, right? Well, it’s not quite that easy. You need to continue building a strong relationship with your clients even after onboarding to ensure they get the most out of your partnership as possible.
So, how can you provide the best transition from onboarding to customer success? Let’s explore four important steps you should take after onboarding to drive high levels of customer satisfaction.
Fine-Tune the Handoff Process
The handoff from onboarding to customer success is one of the most important steps of client acquisition, as it will make your customers feel valued and comfortable enough to reach out with any problems. Without proper handoff during transitions, clients could find themselves repeating the same processes over and over, leading to dissatisfaction and frustration.
To foster a better handoff process, provide as much visibility as possible. One way to do this is to schedule regular meetings between your internal team and clients where you can check in, review important information, and address any complications. You could also use a system that allows you to share information seamlessly among team members, like a client onboarding software.
Set Deadlines and Expectations Early in the Process
It’s also important to provide visibility into the entire process by setting deadlines and expectations early on. Create a schedule, share it with your team and clients, and stick to it. Not only will this help your team and clients transition to next steps, but your customers will also appreciate being involved in what is going on. With these deadlines, you’ll be able to keep everyone on the same page and hold them accountable.
Your goal is to keep things as transparent as possible, so remember to send consistent updates to your clients. Setting expectations early will also ensure you are keeping your customers satisfied and following through on everything you promise.
Outline Your Post-Onboarding Process
Transitions are also difficult because it can be hard to keep track of so many moving parts, especially if you are onboarding multiple clients at once. To combat this, create an outline of your post-onboarding workflow that details how you will pass on clients to your customer success team. And remember to follow up with clients to answer last-minute questions before sending them to the next stage of the process.
Another alternative is to use a client onboarding software that allows you to assign crucial tasks, keep track of data and processes, and provide that transparency that is so necessary to customer satisfaction and success. Automating these responsibilities can allow you to focus more on other things you need to do to satisfy your clients.
Identify Challenges, Evaluate, and Improve
The last step of any effective process is to continue evaluating and improving. Once you complete the official handoff from onboarding to customer success, collect and measure information about how it went. Meet with your teams to discuss challenges and celebrate successes. Brainstorm new solutions that will help with your next onboarding process. As long as you are open to improving and growing, you will.
The transition from onboarding to your customer success team is one of the most important parts of the client implementation process. Don’t turn a blind eye to its importance by following these four important steps to create the best customer experience possible.