Episode 2 of 5 in “Sweet Customer Life Cycle” series
Welcome back to the “Sweet Customer Life Cycle” series!
This is the second episode of the series in 5 part where we will dig deeper into the stage of Onboarding new customers. Did you miss part 1? Find it here. While it may seem as simple as adding a new customer to your CRM, onboarding is a complex and crucial step that requires finesse.
The journey begins with sparking curiosity, capturing needs, and building a buying desire. As we bridge this phase with onboarding, envision a seamless transition where the customer’s initial attraction transforms into a concrete commitment during onboarding.
Onboarding is a crucial and very, let us say it again – very, important step. Throughout the years we’ve learned from our customer just how complex it can be, and how important the tools behind it are to make it successful for all counterparts. Before we dive into onboarding, let’s quickly recap the five phases of the Sweet Customer Life Cycle:
The 5 phases of the customer life cycle
- Attracting and converting potential customers
Attracting and converting potential customers is all about creating curiosity, capturing needs or building a buying desire. Conversions often involve recurring, manual actions—ideal for optimization through automation.
- Onboarding: Laying the foundation
Onboarding sets the foundation for the customer relationship. A successful onboarding ensures a warm welcome, provides the necessary tools to start, gives you the information you need, and leaves the customer confident in their decision.
- Engage and develop
In the engage/develop phase, seize opportunities for upselling and ensure active product or service usage. Responsive attention helps identify signals of customer satisfaction. The longer you retain the customer in this phase, the higher the chance of a lasting relationship with growing engagement.
- Retain: Building and expanding customer relationships
After successful engagement and development, comes the retain phase. The customer is pretty stable and self-sufficient, but ongoing maintenance is crucial for retention. Stay attentive to buying signals or unusual patterns that may indicate a potential exit.
- Off-board/Win Back: Waving goodbye, or getting a second chance
In the off-board/win back stage, there’s a final chance to either win back the customer or part ways positively, leaving room for a return. Humility and understanding play crucial roles in this process. Listen and comprehend the reasons for the exit to potentially adjust future actions. This stage often provides valuable insights.
What is onboarding and why is it important?
Onboarding is the process of converting potential customers into actual customers. Based on the nature of the service or product you offer, onboarding gets more important the more complex the service or product is, and the higher the level of engagement it requires to become a customer. The optimal onboarding should start as soon as the decision-making process has landed in a “yes” and you’re aware of it. Before it’s done deal your potential client is in a volatile place where you have an important role of ensuring, re-assuring, and convincing them they’re in safe hands.
A personalized onboarding experience: Tailoring to diverse needs
Every customer is unique, and so are their needs during the onboarding process. Whether it’s a financial service, insurance, or a tech-driven solution, the nature of the purchase shapes the onboarding experience. We’ll explore the diverse landscapes of onboarding, offering insights into tailoring these experiences to specific industries and purchases.
Navigating compliance waters
In regulated industries such as banking and finance, onboarding often involves navigating complex compliance and regulatory checks. Discover how Sweet’s adaptive features efficiently automate these processes, ensuring accuracy and compliance with industry standards. By creating rules in Sweet’s solutions instead of hard coding them in code, it’s easy to change the rules when regulations evolve.
How Sweet solves the challenges and obstacles of Onboarding
When it comes to onboarding new customers, Sweet offers a powerful solution to streamline the entire process. The combination of the data capturing and forms tool Sweet Forms, powered with the rules – automations – and integrations engine Sweet Automation, you can design a fully digital onboarding process that collects crucial customer data efficiently and help you create rules and journeys. Here’s how it works:
Customized process: Sweet allows you to define the entire onboarding process according to your needs. You have full control over the information you’re asking for or share, the workflow, the integrations and the data you get back. You define what’s automated and where you need a human touch, per process, result or segment. This allows you to make rule-based decisions automatically, decreasing the need for administrative resources and increasing the time to market. By digitalizing the process you can increase accessibility and offer the option to onboard wherever and whenever.
Effortless data gathering: Utilize Sweet Forms capabilities to gather information seamlessly. Either from another systems of yours through integration, from your website, your lead sources or maybe an external information provider. With your sources gathered in one place – the rest is easy. By using known information you can speed up the process without loosing reliability.
Seal the deal: Onboarding often requires some kind of agreement. A formal agreement if effectively finished off with a digital signature, we offer solutions for e-signing through our partner providers. Digital agreements, secured with your requested level of security for authentication, validation of information and signing will decrease lead-time and increase efficiency a lot.
Compliance and regulations: Depending on the industry, there may be compliance and regulatory checks needed. This too can be managed with a rule-based process and automated to ensure accuracy and compliance. The best examples we have are when “easy” customers are converted within seconds based on given, or publicly available information, and “complex” customer are managed in a structured manner in another process.
Conclusion: Orchestrating Success in Customer Onboarding
As we wrap up this episode in the Sweet Customer Life Cycle series, we invite you to envision onboarding not just as a step but as a strategic orchestration that sets the tone for enduring customer relationships. Join us on this journey of innovation and discover how Sweet Automation can be your maestro in the symphony of customer onboarding.
Stay tuned for the upcoming episodes in our series, where we’ll explore the dynamics of engagement, retention, and the art of gracefully bidding farewell or extending a warm welcome back. The Sweet Customer Life Cycle continues, and we’re thrilled to have you on this exciting voyage!
