Carlton Retland, Principal Solutions Engineer at Applause details how brands can successfully identify and remove barriers for new customers.

Poor customer onboarding hurts your bottom line, increasing customer acquisition costs and driving down customer lifetime value. Fortunately, testing your new customer journeys provides insight into the friction points that occur during the process.

Attracting and retaining new customers is critical to business success. Yet all too often, customers get discouraged during their initial attempt to buy from a company or create an account. This trend was brought into sharp focus by a recent survey that revealed nearly two-thirds of consumers have abandoned an account setup journey or online purchase because the sign-up process was too difficult.

We live in an age where people’s expectations are high and they expect nothing less than a seamless customer experience, digital or otherwise. The only way to truly guarantee a satisfactory customer journey is to apply a testing methodology where testers interact with every digital and physical touchpoint within the customer journey, beginning with the onboarding and activation process. These testers can travel through your new customer journeys and offer detailed feedback on the overall process.

Consumer brands can only get so far by testing the customer journey in a lab. There are real-world conditions that cannot be replicated in a lab, nor do internal testing/QA teams fully represent the demographic of the customers interacting with your brand. They need a community of testers that represent their customer profiles in terms of their age, gender, ethnic background and the types of devices they use. Global brands require a larger and more diverse community of testers that accommodates different languages and cultures. These testers can venture out into “the wild” and execute customer journeys in-store/restaurant (BOPIS, curbside pickup, mobile order ahead, contactless payments), at home (OTT with different SmartTVs), in a hotel (mobile-key, mobile check-in) on a flight (in-flight access entertainment with different device types) and more.

Common friction points for new customers 

It’s important for brands to understand the common barriers for new customers and how to remove them. The survey respondents shed light on this by reporting they had difficulty opening a new account. They identified the five most common challenges in the sign-up process:

• Too many steps/took too long
• Process was unclear
• Functional bugs – something didn’t work right
• Account activation issues
• Hard to enter the information requested (unclear what data or format a form requires)

Other common issues that customers encounter include problems with using their preferred payment source, linking credit cards or third party accounts for payments or misunderstanding how to complete the process. Security concerns can also lead to onboarding problems. Customers aren’t willing to reveal sensitive information without trusting that it will be safe and understanding how it will be used. So, for instance, if a company fails to mask personal data in application forms, customers may see this as a red flag and abandon the sign-up process. Finally, failing to set expectations regarding:

• Timelines – how long it takes to get approval for an online credit card application, the customer’s first food order taking longer than expected, or products are delivered later than promised
• Technical requirements – undocumented requirements for setting up a DIY Smart Home services, or unstated need to download/install additional software/firmware
• Unsupported payment methods

Customers want to fully understand upfront all requirements, how long it takes, and ultimately what they will get.

While many brands focus exclusively on functional testing, this approach doesn’t ensure a seamless experience. Even if everything in your app works as designed, customers may still get frustrated if it doesn’t operate in the ways they anticipate. In the worst-case scenario, poor onboarding can lead customers to delete your app, return a purchase, and engage with one of your competitors. Consumer product testing can also help better understand such problems.

User feedback is key to shaping customer journeys 

Friction points and customer expectations vary across different channels and even different industries. As previously mentioned, the best way to test your onboarding experience is to use a community of testers, spanning a range of demographics, that can provide critical feedback. Defining the journey then mapping out steps in the process and the channel where each one occurs, allows you to conduct thorough testing that identifies friction points and offers clear guidance on how to remove that friction.

Using this approach, a major international bank was able to discern that promotional offers for new account holders weren’t working correctly and to quickly rectify the problem. The makers of a home surveillance system learned that 45% of buyers were likely to return the system due to difficulty setting up the cameras, Wi-Fi and app. The company also got insight into what information it could provide to help customers to do these tasks successfully.

Why getting onboarding right matters 

As interactions between brands and their customers rely more and more on quality digital experiences, it’s imperative to make sure new users get off on the right foot. There’s intense competition for customers, with people now comparing sign-up experiences regardless of industry. Customers accustomed to an easy experience with one brand expect the same ease in their interactions with other brands. Smooth onboarding for new customers has become a priority, and that’s why it’s important to rely on real world feedback to help remove friction from the onboarding process and give new customers a smooth start.

About the Author

Carlton Retland is the Principal Solutions Engineer for Applause’s Customer Journey Testing solution. Carlton works closely with organizations in retail, financial services, and hospitality to understand their customer journeys and how Applause can help them test their customer journeys across multiple touchpoints. Carlton is based in Washington D.C. and has been with Applause since 2016.

According to popular American advertising advocate, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, the average customer goes through four distinct stages before they make a purchase. While this theory was popular through most parts of the twentieth century, experts in recent times agree that a customer journey ought to include customer satisfaction after the purchase of the product as well.

One of the most effective ways to satisfy a newly acquired customer is through effective onboarding. According to a study published by the Harvard Business Review, providing short tutorials to new customers can alone bring down churn by as much as six percent. In addition to tutorials, customer onboarding can include a number of other techniques like classroom lessons, coach marks, elearning and so on.

What Customers Expect from Onboarding

Your onboarding strategy is determined by a couple of factors. To begin with, your industry plays a major role in determining the type of onboarding lessons you can impart. Consumer electrical products (like refrigerators and ovens) usually include a manual and tech-specs sheet that provide the consumer with all the ‘how-to’s related to the product. Some of these products also include CDs that go with the manual.

The trouble with such onboarding lessons is that it is not customized to a user’s unique requirements. To minimize churn, businesses must work out onboarding strategies that can be personalized according to the needs of each customer. While personalized onboarding lessons may work for some industries (like in the case of enterprise B2B industries), it is not easily scalable in other consumer-focused industries.

Onboarding Strategies

Here are a few examples of how consumer-targeted onboarding lessons can be imparted at scale to improve customer satisfaction.

Learning Management Systems: These are online software applications that allow businesses to organize their onboarding lessons into discrete chapters. Modern LMS applications come with in-built tools to host video tutorials and live conferencing as well. This allows businesses to organize onboarding workshops for all their new customers online. LMS tools also come with a number of other features to increase learning retention. You may, for instance, set up quizzes that let customers test themselves on the onboarding lessons. Gamified lessons also help make the onboarding lessons fun and interesting to the new customer.

YouTube Videos: According to a report published by Forrester Research, people are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or web articles. If you are a consumer-focused business with thousands, or even millions of customers, then YouTube provides your business with the platform to disseminate onboarding lessons to thousands of new customers at once. One advantage of using YouTube as an onboarding platform is that the content can be organized into multiple playlists (categories) to reach all kinds of customers.

Impact on Customer Satisfaction

There are multiple ways to measure the impact of customer onboarding on satisfaction. One of the most reliable metric is NPS (Net Promoter Score). In one study, McKinsey & Company measured a customer’s satisfaction with the onboarding strategies with the help of a 10-point NPS scale. They found that for every single digit improvement in this NPS reading, there was a three percent increase in customer revenue. In other words, onboarding drives customer satisfaction which, in turn, drives business revenue.

The corollary is also true. Poor onboarding strategies can bring down satisfaction and this can cause higher churn and lower revenues. As a business, it is extremely important to create a structured onboarding process and enable your customers with the right tools to deliver effective onboarding lessons on time.

This is the only way to not only retain them, but also create happy customers who help you grow your business over time.

About the Author

Anand Srinivasan is a marketing consultant. You may reach him at: anand_srinivasan@writerzone.net.