Customer onboarding is happening at your organization, whether or not you have a formal program in place. Each new customer spends time getting acclimated with your platform or services. The question is: Are you making their onboarding experience easier and more helpful?
In “Your Guide to Creating a Customer Onboarding Program,” we walk through a simple three-step process to ensure a successful onboarding program for your customers. Download the guide here or read on for an overview.
Three Steps to Creating a Customer Onboarding Program
1. Assess What You Have and What You Need
Before you dive into the details of creating an onboarding program, it’s important to take inventory of what you currently have in place and what content needs to be developed. To evaluate the current state of your onboarding program, consider:
- What barriers to success are your customers facing today?
- How are you currently delivering content to your customers?
- What process improvements can be made?
Our onboarding guide walks you through how to uncover gaps for each question.
2. Develop Your Program Structure
After completing your needs assessment, the next step is to build the right onboarding program for your customers. Here are a few questions to help you determine your program structure:
- What are your customers’ paths to success?
- Which of your current technologies support onboarding?
- How can you drive customers to your onboarding program?
- How will you measure success?
3. Design Your New Content
An onboarding program can’t exist without content to support it. But it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start. One strategy is to map out all possible types of content you already have, and what you could easily create, including:
- Knowledge base or help center articles
- On-demand courses
- Live webinars
- Recorded videos
- Recorded audio
- PDF guides
- Quizzes
The list goes on! Our guide walks you through how to prioritize your content needs and get started creating streamlined onboarding content for your customers.
This three-step process —1) assessing needs, 2) developing a program, and 3) designing new content — will help you build the onboarding program that’s most helpful to your customers.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2018, and has been updated in 2021.
