6 Costly Onboarding Mistakes

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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM delivering more value for your customers and revenue for your company every week.

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Customer Onboarding is still misunderstood by many companies. Its purpose is not as simple as introducing your customers to your product.

Acquiring new customers is meaningless if they are not going to stay. The goal of your customer onboarding is to verify your customers’ purchase decisions.

It’s to give them proof of value to earn their buy-in and commitment for the long run. None is going to invest a serious amount of money, energy, and time if they don’t see things running in the right direction.

Working with customers in the long term happens in days and weeks. But if you have only 30 days to make a lasting impression, you have to think and work in minutes and hours. Consequently, there’s little room for mistakes.

In today’s post, I’m sharing 6 costly onboarding mistakes you need to avoid.

1. Focus on features

Do you have a great product? One that’s a true game-changer? I get it, you want to make your customers see how awesome it is. But here’s the problem: Your customers don’t see it like you do.

For them, it’s just a vehicle, a tool that helps them get what they really care about. Introducing your customers to feature after feature is the path to quickly drive them away. Of course, they need to understand how your product works but you need to put it into the right context.

Creating lengthy tutorials to show customers all 87 customization options of every feature does not have one. What you need to do instead is to show them in 2-3 minutes how to use a specific feature to create an outcome they care about.

Customer onboarding does not live in a vacuum. It’s the first part of the customer success journey. If you are breaking it down, accomplishing your customers’ goals is to complete a series of smaller achievements.

If you help them to accomplish a small/partial goal within 30 days, they will be confident that you are also able to guide them toward their desired outcomes.

2. Lack of onboarding goal

Ok, we have now established that you need to stop dumping features and start delivering outcomes. But do you know what your customers want? If your company is offering more than one single clearly defined outcome you need to figure it out.

Guessing and assuming are only acceptable if you can’t get reliable information. That does not include customers who don’t know what they want to accomplish. In this case, it’s your responsibility as a CSM to help them figure it out.

Make qualified suggestions based on analyzing your customers’ business combined with your expertise and experience. You and your customers alike need clarity and accountability. You need to establish goals whose achievement can be objectively verified.

It’s an ongoing debate about where onboarding ends and whether it even does. This is the answer. The customer onboarding ends when the goal is accomplished (or when customers leave before).

3. No customization

Your customers might be sharing the same goals. But that does not mean they have the same journey ahead. They can have entirely different problems to solve. Most certainly, they don’t have the same level of skills, knowledge, and experience.

Both require a different set of inputs. Pushing customers through a one-size-fits-all-eat-or-die onboarding sequence does not work. On paper, it does not look so bad because it means you’ve covered all eventualities.

But here’s the reality. Customers don’t want to sift through irrelevant stuff to get what matters to them. They want to get there on a straight path.

One thing I find particularly annoying is when I receive a recommendation of 20-30 articles from the knowledge base. It screams that you don’t care about my needs and I have to find out what I need myself.

If I’m on a free plan I might turn a blind eye but definitely not when I’m on a paid plan already. Segment your customers and provide them with the content and services they need precisely.

4. Overwhelming customers

You might understand your product insight but your customers are new to it. There’s only so much information that they can process at a time. Customer onboarding is not the time to impress customers with everything you’ve got to offer.

If you are overwhelming your customers they’ll get nothing done, become frustrated, and leave. Without ever coming back. Customer onboarding needs to happen in drip mode. Split your program into small and digestible pieces.

Where customers can easily process the inputs you provide and turn them into small accomplishments. Giving customers a series of small victories is how you’ll keep them engaged. It’s how you make them want to see more and hook them in.

5. Tracking the wrong metrics

Your customers care about outcomes. They don’t care about your adoption goals and usage statistics. It doesn’t matter how many (different) buttons your customers click and how often they log into your product.

Worse, they might give you a false sense of security. You need to track your customers’ progress and results with the metrics they care about. That means you have to clearly define them, together with your customers, before the start.

Your overall onboarding performance is determined by two metrics:

1. Accuracy - % of customers who have achieved their onboarding goal within the defined period (e.g. 30 days)

2. Time to value - the time it takes (on average) to accomplish the customer onboarding goal

6. Not getting feedback

When you have only 30 days to leave a lasting (positive) impression on your customers there’s little room for errors. That includes customers

• not getting started as planned

• moving in the wrong direction

• getting stuck in their journey

If that happens you need to identify and resolve issues in real-time. You need to install a tight net of touchpoints within short time intervals. Follow up with customers within 1-2 days, depending on the tasks they need to complete.

The worst thing you can do is to wait for your customers to reach out if they have a problem. Research shows that they never do. Counting on it during the onboarding, where you haven’t built any relationship at all, is utopian.