5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Onboarding Experience
By: Vishakha Laumas
Tags: User Interface, Customer Onboarding, Customer Journey, User Experience, Digital Onboarding

Customer Onboarding Experience

A user’s first experience with a product is a decisive moment in their customer journey, so making a good impression is imperative. What’s the most important part of the user’s first impression? The onboarding process. If customers have to resolve or work around a variety of problems during their onboarding, they’ll either become a customer with pre-built in frustration about the product, or they’ll drop off during the process. Ensuring a smooth and user-friendly customer onboarding experience is a must for any high quality product, and follows industry best practices. Here are five simple tips that can help you provide a better user onboarding journey today.

1. Break Complex Steps Into Simpler Ones

Onboarding processes are a lot of work for a potential customer, as a large amount of information needs to be collected for compliance purposes. To make the process simpler, faster, and easier on the user, break it down into small steps. Let’s say you need the customer to upload multiple documents- don’t ask them to input them all in one go, as it can be tedious or confusing to work through the process. Instead, ask them to upload each document separately in delineated steps within the onboarding flow.

2. Insert Proper Tutorials and Tooltips

Having proper tutorials is a no-brainer when it comes to implementing and facilitating a smooth onboarding experience. Onboarding should be guided with practical tutorials sprinkled throughout the steps of the process. Video tutorials work the best as people tend to process information more quickly through videos than written text. Ensure you create a tooltip for every important element like a button, setting, or feature so that users don’t get stuck on a particular step. Also, consider making tutorials skippable for the convenience of users who have already gone through and are familiar with the process.

3. Show a Progress Bar

Display a progress bar that indicates the percentage of the onboarding process that has been completed so your users know how far they have left to go. By setting an end goal you’re mitigating risk of user drop-off by preventing the process from feeling endless or indefinite.

4. Ask for Minimal Information

Don’t overwhelm the customer by asking for all their information immediately. If an email address will suffice for the initial signup, wait to ask for additional info until they’re a customer and within your ecosystem. Asking for a lot of information during onboarding makes the process cumbersome and lengthy, resulting in an increased customer drop-off rate. Give your users some time to get comfortable using your product and ask for other details as and when required.

5. Follow Up and Customize

Asking for feedback is one of the most effective ways to improve a customer onboarding experience. Allowing the customer to share issues they faced while being onboarded both makes them feel valued and heard while simultaneously providing valuable information about pain points you can work to resolve. One other factor to take into account is that not all clients are the same, and neither are their individual needs. Creating customizable options for a diverse range of potential customers ensures each person will go through the onboarding process in a conducive manner.

By implementing these 5 simple tips you can enhance your customer onboarding process overnight. User experiences make or break your product or service, so making each step of the customer journey smooth and efficient is your key to success. At Invoid we provide a variety of tailored, customizable, digital onboarding solutions that can help onboard 5x more customers remotely. Book a demo with us now to find out more about creating a streamlined, safe, and user friendly onboarding experience!