We’ve all been there — on hold for hours, waiting for a human voice, increasingly frustrated with getting help or information from a company. Even when the issue isn’t that big of a deal, a lack of communication means that fixable problems and misunderstandings quickly become the reason why customers move on to another provider.
According to ZenDesk’s 2022 Customer Experience Trends Report, 61 percent of respondents across the United States said that they would switch to a company’s competitor after just one bad customer service experience. On the company side, 72 percent of business leaders stated that their organization views customer service and success as a critical business priority.
Four Colorado companies are going back to the beginning of their customer onboarding process to end this cycle of inconsistent service leading to churn.
Emily McEvoy, manager of strategic account management at web design platform Duda, said that after looking into her company’s onboarding systems, it became clear that the lack of a smooth plan was causing a domino effect of negative consequences. “When evaluating where our process was broken, we discovered that all of our teams weren’t working collaboratively pre-sale, which led to redundancies and knowledge gaps both internally and on the customer’s side,” she explained. “This decreased confidence and began to create disengagement as soon as the customer signed the contract.”
Michael Janner, an onboarding account manager at website building platform Wix, described how important the relationship between company and client is from the beginning. “Rather than make our users feel like we’re passing the buck, we make sure they feel comfortable and taken care of, and work to reduce any confusion along the way.”
Increasing customer retention and forming loyal relationships are an essential part of any company’s success, but where should organizations focus their efforts for long-term improvements? Built In Colorado sat down with four local industry leaders to discuss the most impactful changes they’ve made to their customer onboarding processes — as well how their users responded.
What is the single most impactful change you’ve made to your customer onboarding process and why was it successful?
Our account management and customer success teams are constantly evolving to meet our users’ needs. As the frontline teams working with users, we make it a priority to identify trends, needs and pain points so we can make impactful changes that will best serve them.
A few months into my role, I noticed the handoff between onboarding and customer success wasn’t doing our users justice. The next steps weren’t clearly defined and users often didn’t know what happened once they were passed to the new team. Those left in this limbo state sometimes ended up turning off the tools we onboarded them for or let the tools languish, not using the products to their full potential.
To create a better experience, I proposed creating streamlined processes and defined criteria so our internal teams could work with users more effectively. This meant building warmer hand offs, creating SLAs for the customer success managers to connect with users faster and sharing clear expectations with the users about how we can help them succeed going forward. Getting users engaged and excited about the next steps helped them see results a lot faster.
What was your biggest challenge implementing this change?
The biggest challenge to this change was initial user adoption. Sometimes users would still reach out to me after the handoff rather than their customer success manager. To overcome this, I made sure my response looped the CSM into the conversation to get them reconnected — or I’d schedule calls with all three of us.
The goal is to always keep the handoffs warm and engaging. Our users trust us with their businesses, so we want to make sure they know we’re genuinely on their side.
Internally, it was important to frame why this change mattered. Some of our other AM teams have goals that are tied to revenue and this new process didn’t seem to tie directly to their KPIs. To get them on board, I showed them how this service was a value-add prop for them when selling to users. If users understand they have a team there for them to support their goals, they’re more excited to invest in our products. This gave our AMs an advantage, shortening and benefiting the sales cycle. When they saw it like that, they realized how good of a selling point it was.
The world is moving more towards automation and bots, but Wix is really focused on providing that personal level of care.”
What do your users say that they love most about your product?
There are a lot of things our users appreciate about our products, but the thing I hear about most is this service we offer through account management and customer success. They have a dedicated person supporting them every step of the way and that matters a lot to them. They’re always ready to leave a good review or ask if they can email my managers directly about how much they appreciate knowing they can get in touch with a live person whenever they need.
The world is moving more towards automation and bots, but Wix is really focused on providing that personal level of care. We don’t try to redirect them to a bunch of support documents or make them jump through hoops to find an answer. That process is not only frustrating, but it’s time consuming. Our users don’t have a minute to spare.
With Wix, users have a direct line of communication and can jump on a call or shoot us an email. We don’t rush them off the phone as quickly as possible. We’re there to really listen and act as a consultant, making sure they get the help they need now and for the long term. They’ve been very happy about getting that support and how it has made things better for them. That makes me really proud.
What is the single most impactful change you’ve made to your customer onboarding process and why was it successful?
We recently made a change to our overall business philosophy to re-focus company efforts on our core customers. This has allowed us to really drill down on their needs and how to best support them, which has affected not only the stickiness of the customer over time, but also their ability to use our platform to its full potential to help them expand their businesses.
We performed a deep dive into our data and found that there was a breakdown in our process — 52 percent of the customers who left our platform after the first year did so because they didn’t fully understand the technical requirements of implementation and were never able to fully adopt our product.
As a solution, we introduced several key teams into the late stages of the sales process to begin to form and strengthen relationships, and increase confidence in our solution and the team that would be supporting them. This also helped the AM begin to craft strong next steps for the onboarding path of the account, while still ensuring there was a strong focus on the customer’s upcoming business needs and priorities. We then created a handoff process between the sales and account management teams that allowed for a smooth transfer of knowledge, contacts and technical next steps. This ensured that the customer’s transition and experience were seamless, which instilled confidence in our team and platform. These changes have led to a 23 percent decrease in the time spent from onboarding to adoption, as well as an increase in product usage and overall customer satisfaction.
What was your biggest challenge implementing this change?
Involving more people into a process in the age of “solve it with software” seems counterintuitive, but we realized our platform was so versatile that it really helped to have our most knowledgeable people involved. Our goal is to help the customer better flesh out their plans and start to use and get ingrained in the platform.
While we had some initial internal push-back on the process and some considered that it might become a barrier to fast or run-of-the-mill sales, we quickly realized that it was pushing our most promising and growing accounts forward and setting them up for success. It also had the effect of funneling out accounts that weren’t quite monetarily ready for our largest plan or required custom development to meet the business needs before launch — these accounts were worked into a longer sales cycle or offered a lower priced, non-managed plan. Once everyone was bought-in, natural cohesion began to form which allowed all of our teams to iterate on the process and continually refine it to help continue to pinpoint the specific needs of our customers.
We really want to empower small businesses to empower other small businesses.”
What do your users say that they love most about your product?
While our platform has a myriad of features that allow our customers to create fast, responsive websites, the editor itself is incredibly easy to use right out of the box. For a digital agency who wants to make basic websites for small local businesses, our platform allows them to do just that, quickly and easily. We provide them with all of the tools they need to support their business, including a white-labeled editor experience for their clients, a white-labeled support portal, marketing materials, sales training, education materials and so much more. We really want to empower small businesses to empower other small businesses and working with them to create something cool and unique is why the people at Duda get up in the morning.
What is the single most impactful change you’ve made to your customer onboarding process and why was it successful?
We separated out the onboarding role a few years ago, recognizing this as a critical moment in the customer’s journey. We’ve seen the revenue impact of this — we beat our 2021 churn forecast each quarter. Further, having a distinct role and function for onboarding supports a more agile approach for continuous iteration and evolution of this critical work. The most recent version of this for us has been revamping our onboarding program to create a consultative and directive onboarding playbook to hyperfocus on the one most important use case for the customer’s needs. Our goal is to increase user adoption and realize first value faster. So far, we’ve seen our customer’s usage increase by 16 percent quarter over quarter since launching this new program. We’ve seen an increase in NPS and CSAT too, where our customers are mentioning the superior onboarding experience.
What was your biggest challenge implementing this change?
There are obvious challenges to advocating for new roles, as well as proving their value, creating the budget and then hiring. We were able to model a few ROI outcomes that supported the decision and we’ve seen the payoff!
The biggest challenge to revamping our onboarding program to be more consultative and directive has been time. We approached this work as a group, collaboratively ideating and building upon each other to refine our goals and needs into a unified approach. Creating the space for the team to think and conversate was just as important as the outcome. Additionally, the freedom to try changes with clients and see how they play has been crucial to the iteration of ideas in this process. This approach, though more time intensive, was critical to building clarity and alignment within our team, resulting in significantly improved customer experience, as evidenced in our customer surveys and feedback.
Creating the space for the team to think and conversate was just as important as the outcome.”
What do your users say that they love most about your product?
We consistently hear from our customers about our in-depth and high-quality service, the ease and fun of use, the value of tracking to see engagement and the ability to humanize communications at scale.
Effective video messaging is a skill and growing confidence can be challenging for us all. We have the unique honor of guiding our customers through their video messaging journey in a way that highlights the importance of the individual and human-centered communication to support business relationships, strategies and results.
What is the single most impactful change you’ve made to your customer onboarding process and why was it successful?
The most impactful change to our onboarding process was practicing what we preach and implementing a streamlined process guided by one person on the A2Z Sync team. A fundamental element to the success of our clients is our sales training, which teaches how one person can be empowered to handle the entire car buying process, eliminating the need for multiple people to be involved. We realized we could apply that same thought process to how we onboard our clients and have achieved great success as a result. In addition to accelerating the timeline of the process by 50 percent, we are able to eliminate one of the most common hurdles experienced during a very difficult and detailed setup — miscommunication.
Our clients are never unsure of what’s next and our expectations of them are very clear. Each side is held accountable through regular weekly calls, establishing a routine that is easily maintained for post-launch support calls. Speed and efficiency aren’t the only benefits of the new process. Not only does this step-by-step structure enable A2Z Sync to more easily hire and train individuals, but it also creates raving fans out of our clients.
Our clients are never unsure of what’s next and our expectations of them are very clear.”
What was your biggest challenge implementing this change?
One of our biggest challenges was how to collect the 2,000-plus points of data from each new client, as well as organizing and storing it so that it’s manageable for one person. In order to ensure a successful implementation, we need our clients to collect information from anywhere between five to seven disparate systems and the combination of systems varies from one client to the next. The challenge gets even more complex when you factor in that we’re onboarding multiple new clients simultaneously, creating considerably more opportunities for information to get lost or misplaced and for deadlines to be missed.
One of the best decisions I made was to utilize monday.com, which has allowed me to create specific project plans to stay organized as we continue to scale. The concept of unity runs deep in our DNA at A2Z Sync, so it’s fitting that we use a tool like monday.com that acts as one central place to track multiple projects and keep everyone on the same page. Although I’m the face of the project to the client, I have a robust team assisting me and we needed a way for everyone to have visibility into all aspects of the onboarding process.
What do your users say that they love most about your product?
The most common feedback we hear from our clients is that it has been the easiest software launch they have ever done. A2Z Sync takes great pride in being an automotive software that was built by a diverse group of automotive industry veterans who have been in the same trenches as our clients. We understand the challenges they face and the reasons why they need a software solution like ours. This fuels our desire to continually improve and exceed their expectations. There is no shortage of research that shows how a strong onboarding process directly influences a consumer’s loyalty and product utilization. We keep this in mind at all times because we’ll never get tired of our clients telling us how happy they are with our product!
