Author: Amol Shinde

Best Customer Retention Tactics [Mini Guide + Checklist]

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date June 14, 2022
No Comments on Best Customer Retention Tactics [Mini Guide + Checklist]

As a business owner, have you ever thought about what could be better than gaining a new customer? You might be wondering if anything could be better than this.

Well, the answer is customer retention.

Gaining new customers is alluring but retaining customers comes at a lower cost and has the potential to provide a higher return on investments.

So the question that now arises is how can businesses retain their customers for longer terms.

To do this, you will have to form a strategy for retaining customers that allows them to stay engaged and content.

In this blog, we will be sharing some of the best customer retention tactics. Best Customer Retention Tactics [Mini Guide + Checklist] will help you to retain your customers. What’s more, we will also discuss how to use software for the same.

So, let us get started…

What is Customer Retention?

“If a customer cannot be retained, then to what extent can you keep acquiring novel customers and let your business go on? “

As the term suggests, customer retention denotes businesses’ actions and activities to retain the maximum number of customers. This is commonly done through brand loyalty and customer loyalty initiatives.

When we talk about customer retention, the process begins from the first time a customer makes contact with the company and goes on throughout the whole period of the relationship. Overall aids the companies in reducing the total customer defections.

The key aim of customer retention is to engage current customers to continue purchasing services or products from businesses.

The best strategies for customer retention allow a business to form long-lasting relationships with customers. Their loyalty to the brand may even result in mouth publicity, further increasing brand awareness and building customers.

What is the Importance of Customer Retention for SaaS Companies?

SaaS companies spend money on raising brand awareness through various means, like social media, and thus, acquire new customers. This means that gaining novel consumers is expensive, due to the number of investments involved.

Moreover, if these customers are not retained, the ROI will also be lower.

Why SaaS Businesses Must Retain Customers?

Customer Loyalty

Customers that are retained tend to spend more and purchase more often as compared to novel customers. This is because the retained consumers understand the value of a service or product and continue to visit repetitively.

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

One of the most effective ways of increasing brand awareness is through word-of-mouth advertising. When customers share their satisfactory experiences with their friends and relatives, there is a higher chance these people give the products or services a try.

Through this kind of advertising, the companies acquire new consumers, and that too, without spending.

Higher Return on Investment

Companies that have high customer retention have greater ROIs. If you are thinking about the extent to which this can increase company revenues, here is your answer:

“5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.” –Fred Reichheld

The major reason for such high returns is that return customers tend to purchase more products from a business over time.

Concerning the profitability of SaaS companies, the expected revenue generation is even higher. Based on research by Swagata Kumar, “Boosting B2B customer retention by 5% increases profits by up to 95%.”

More Affordable

As stated earlier, acquiring novel consumers requires high investments in advertising, which is an expensive process. On the other hand, retaining an existing customer requires lesser expenditure. If you do not believe this, let’s see what Kate Silver said:

“Most of the research shows that it costs between 6 to 7 times more to get a new customer vs. keeping the customers you already have.”

Higher CLTV

CLTV or Customer Lifetime Value refers to the overall revenue that an organization expects to earn from every customer.

Since return customers are likely to avail of more services from a company due to their love for the services and hands-on experience, a company with a higher customer retention rate is likely to have greater CLTV.

Customer Retention Process

To retain your customers, there is an entire process that you must follow:

Step 1: Categorize Your Customers.

The first step to retaining customers is through categorizing them based on the following aspects:

Which customers are driven by prices?
Which customers seek value?
Which customers are loyal to the brand?

Once you have categorized your customers, you will know which approach should be used for which customer. For instance, a customer who has a good relationship will require an approach that is less salty.

Step 2: Your Service: ABSOLUTE!

When your services are top-notch, no customer would be willing to leave. Even though they might consider stepping back due to high prices, it would still be difficult for them to leave your company.

So one of the most crucial steps in customer retention is ensuring that your services are as good as you think they are. If you are not sure, conduct surveys and ask for feedback from your customers.

Another essential part of good services is talking the customer into availing services but not forcing them so much that they get irritated. A customer will only return if you keep him content.

Step 3: Remember, Automate it!

Make sure that the systems you use are working for your company. This may include the following:

A good system for contacting customers
Automated mailers for season sales including CTAs.
Reward systems for loyal customers

When you have your systems in place, you can stay in touch with your customers and they are likely to return, considering their liking and loyalty to your brand.

Step 4: Update Your Oldies.

Oftentimes, companies think that they do not need to sell their services or products to old customers and that being a salesman is necessary only for new consumers.

Other times, organizations fear that pressurizing or trying to sell to old customers can make them lose their relationship with them. However, this is not the case.

Even return consumers look for companies to bring them novel offers and ideas. So, as a business owner, you must ensure that you continue to sell to your customers to retain them.

Best Customer Retention Tactics to Ace Your Customer Retention Management

Before we share with you some of the successful techniques of customer retention management, let us first understand what it is.

In the simplest terms, customer retention management refers to the process through which customer satisfaction and customer experience are managed by a company. The key aim of this process is to acquire and retain as many consumers as possible.

The process of customer retention management is led by techniques and strategies that vary from one company to another, based on their segmentation and customer experience goals.

Customer Retention Management Techniques

Implementing a Feedback Loop

Several companies believe that they serve their customers well but sometimes, this is not the case. It is not necessary that the customers feel the same. So to ensure their retention, it is crucial to understand what they think about your company’s services so you have some scope for improvement.

To do this, you must start getting customer feedback and share the same information with the members of the organization. Through a customer feedback loop, you can collect, analyze, and distribute surveys and reviews that customers undergo.

Maintain a Calendar for Consumer Communication

Irrespective of the responses of your customers, your company must continue to communicate with them. In case you haven’t heard from them in a while, you must reach out to them and try re-establishing your relationship.

Since you may lose track of days, a customer communication calendar can help you see when a customer last interacted with you.

You can also consider sending them an email regarding the new offers in the store and adding a call to action.

Encourage Your Customers with a Mission

Not every brand needs to inspire their customers’ loyalty through systems and tactics – some may even inspire through mission, such as TOMS.

The business model of TOMS is entirely based on making the world a better place, which is why several people are loyal to the brand.

Consumers tend to be focused on the environment as well as the impacts of their purchasing habits. This means that doing good is also essential to them, which clearly explains their relationship with TOMS.

Why Should You Use Customer Training Software?

Customer training refers to how the customers are educated regarding the successful utilization of company services and products. This includes providing them with information and materials they need to meet the company’s objectives.

The Four Major Aims that a Customer Training Software can Accomplish are as follows.

Increasing the impact of your products and services.
Enhancing customer experience
Augmenting the value of products and services
Acquiring and retaining customers at each phase of the consumer lifecycle

If you are still not sure why you should use customer training software, the research report by Brandon Hall Group may convince you.

According to the Extended Enterprise Learning 2020 report, 45% of people surveyed claimed that they offer training to the customers actively. 49% of them agreed that it is capable of enhancing client relationships.

Why Should You Use Customer Training Software?

Enhance the overall consumer experience
Produce recurring and extra revenue
Reduce expenses invested in acquiring novel customers
Enhance client relationships
Develop brand awareness
Enhance the value of products and services
Lowering costs involved in customer support

How to Retain Customers Quickly Using Customer Training Software?

Do the tactics used by your company for customer retention encourage the long-term growth of your business and build trust? Do your products and services receive word-of-mouth advertising?

If the answer to the above questions is not a confident “Yes!”, then you should consider opting for an LMS for customer training to quickly retain them.

A learning management system or LMS aids in the creation of targeted training for customers to enhance the rates of retention. This is because their pain points can be rapidly identified and resolved, which leads to satisfaction among customers.

Key Points to Focus to Implement the Retention Tactics with the Use of an LMS

Emphasize Your Customers’ Needs

Attract attention to how your services address the pain points of customers. You may use facts, testimonials, infographics, or case studies for the same.

Monitor Engagement Levels

Through an LMS, you can track and analyze the engagement of consumers. This will further provide you with an understanding of what your customers want the most and how you can engage them further.

Make Video Tutorials

The key aim of customer retention tactics must be the increment of customers’ knowledge to increase the value of products and services. Thus, through video tutorials, they can engage and understand better the innovative usages.

Why Opt for CXcherry as a Customer Retention Software?

When it comes to choosing an LMS for customer training, CXcherry is extremely beneficial in retaining customers, as well as for the overall ROI of companies.

Adaptive Customer Onboarding

Help your novel customers to comprehend your products and services and adapt to them more quickly after a customized onboarding.

Enhance Upsell

Enhance upselling by allowing your clients to realize the actual value of your services and products and hence, obtain a higher return on investments.

Brand Advocacy

Through an LMS, customers will become brand advocates due to their level of satisfaction.

Reduce Support Tickets

By educating and informing the buyers with the necessary details about the products and services, you will receive lesser support tickets.

Boosts Service Adoption Rate

CXcherry helps in boosting service adoption by delivering trackable, comprehensive, consistent, and updated training.

Congratulation!!! You’ve reached here.

Several businesses tend to hesitate when it comes to opting for new software or strategies for better overall functioning. However, it is crucial to understand that stepping out of your comfort zone can sometimes be highly beneficial.

In this case, adopting CXcherry for customer retention can reduce expenses to a great extent along with giving high ROIs.

Blog Customer Training

Best Practices to Measure Impact of Customer Training Program (Intuitive Method + Templates + Tools)

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date April 20, 2022
No Comments on Best Practices to Measure Impact of Customer Training Program (Intuitive Method + Templates + Tools)

Best Practices to Measure Impact of Customer Training Program (Intuitive Method + Templates + Tools)

Learning & Development (L&D) isn’t about what you can remember, it is fundamentally how you apply what you learned to improve your life.

Once you understand that what you are learning are simple tools to operate your complex task without putting extra effort – your interest grows & exercises your will to learn even more.

That’s how your customer should feel about your training program. But how would you know, if they are already in that phase of curiosity? Or maybe they’re excited but clueless to narrow it down. It is better to know best practices to measure impact of customer training program before implementing customer training.

Again, how would you know which part of your training is making a change? Through KPIs, or feedback starters?

Know more about the best practices to measure impact of customer training program.

Fundamental Questions You Need to Focus to Evaluate Which Part of Your Customer Training is Making a Change.

Did they like it?
Did they learn?
Are they able to apply what they learned?
Is training improving their goals in their organization?

Yes, there are countless measuring metrics to analyze your customer response & satisfaction rate during training, but, just think about it for once!

Your self-paced learning program – capable of delivering diverse content according to diverse needs – establishes a personalized benchmark for your diverse audience.

Such a diverse paradigm of training and you decide to limit your evaluation to just tools?

Your training evaluation may find customer pain points & improvement insights through analytical meters.

But, you need an intuitive method to evaluate your training and to establish your success meters.

Yes, we know, it’s not that exciting part though, but by intuitive evaluation, you can easily figure out if your training works and how to improve it.

Kirkpatrick’s model of learning is meant to be the most widely used method to evaluate the results of training and learning programs. Although, this model has been an effective benchmark to evaluate employee training programs, but has shown even more successful results when it comes to customer training.

Donald Kirkpatrick (1924-1950) was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. He developed the four levels of evaluation model in the mid-1950s as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. And, his vision of L&D training evaluation has now been used for over 30yrs by many different companies as a major system for training evaluation.

Kirkpatrick Model – Four Levels of Learning Evaluation

Reaction.
Learning Evaluation.
Knowledge gain.
Results.

Level #1: How Are They Reacting?

There are good chances that you already taking a survey after customers’ first learning session. The fundamental idea to evaluate right after the first session is to gain insight into the training experience from the learner’s perspective.

Ideally, most B2B companies limit their first survey to just collect basic responses from customers because of many reasons like “They might churn off customers soon”, “They are overpopulating after the first signup onboarding emails.

The problem here is, they are focussing on just a customer response. They need the right questions to pinpoint the accuracy of the first survey:

Smile Sheets

A smile sheet is simply a form consisting of a series of questions combined, asking your customers about their satisfaction.

In a recent survey, many B2B organizations were asked about the smile sheet effectiveness, and most responded that “they don’t understand how to bring improvement in training through just good or bad customer responses”.

We understand it can get hard to find precise pain points to improve when scalability is of a wide range. And, we accumulate such common limitations that smile sheets may have:

Limitations

Data is basic.
It doesn’t necessarily correlate with actual learning or customer behavior.
It is hard to scale.

Now you might be confused that whether to use smile sheets? Are there any evaluating benefits? Whether to infuse a smile sheet in evaluating your training or not?

Well! There’s always a good and a bad side to any tool. All you have to do is to find the right way of using it.

Benefits of Smile Sheets

It demonstrates respect for customers thoughts & concerns.
It provides early satisfaction results.
It gives you insights about your training’s valuable side & not so valuable.

Smile Sheets doesn’t limit to the “Just asking for your feedback” tool, you can employ it as a performance-focused evaluation for your customers during training sessions.

Performance-Focused Evaluation

E.g. Writing a TPS Report.

Instead of asking your customer, “How are you liking the course/training?”

Focus on their progression towards set goals, “How well are you able to imply the reporting skills in the practice of your job?”

On a learner scale your feedback to get customer reaction must be of some accuracy, to understand specifically about the customer experience, here’s an example of how you can touch down customer’s understanding:

Are you able to apply what you learned in the training?

I am not able to apply these concepts.
I have some understanding but require additional training.
I can apply the concepts but require support.
I believe I have competency.
I know I can perform to an expert level.

Level #2: Are They Learning?

This phase of evaluating your training programs focuses on measuring the customers’ knowledge, skills, and mindset developed as a result of your training program.

Here we want to ensure that your customers are learning what they are supposed to have learned. Take an example of how Hubspot evaluates their customer knowledge & skills acquired during their delivered training.

Quick Quiz: Few questions to ensure customer retention level.

Hubspot Academy’s – Know Yourself Quiz

Hubspot ensures that its customers are understanding the concept and also, they provide further assistance by providing helpful resources to make it easy for customers to catch up on what they learned, later on.

Resources (to Provide & Understand What Audience Needs)

Slides.
Transcripts.
Goal calculator.
Knowledge Base.
Templates.
Ebooks.
Blog Post.
Reports.
Website.

2. Free Certification: Presenting a Learning Win to Grow for Customers.

3. Hand-on Surveys & Assignments: To Assess Customer Retention Rate by Providing Assignments Right After Each Training Session.

Hubspot Academy’s – Survey Assessment

They assess their customer’s demographics and improvement scale after they are done with the course. Perfect CTA!

Two Major Benefits for Post-Training Session Assessment

The customer is still in the learning mode, high response rate.
Customers want to exercise their choice after learning, future improvement in training required would be answered precisely.

They appreciate customer learning efforts & acknowledge their time, so to improve significantly – They choose accuracy to deliver value. It simply means, “Knowing your customer”.

Level #3: Are They Applying What They Learned?

“One of the reasons why most SaaS companies are failing in customer success program is because their program is driven by cost, not value”- Glide Consulting (Customer Success Expert)

Customers who can achieve success with your product on their own do result in reduced support cost but such consequence becomes your value when you see your customers value in it too.

So, level 3 is all about evaluation based on, “Are you customers applying what they learned or not?”

You can further segment this evaluation into 3 steps:

Monitor customer’s performance.
Offer support.
Measure the results.

How to Monitor Your Customers’ Performance?

Firstly, find a natural data point to monitor your customers’ before and after training performance. Are they improving in any areas of their applied work? Is there any issue they are facing while applying it?

You can develop a demographic survey (one like given above) to understand the basic needs of your customer before you develop a working environment for them.

Secondly, you may have noticed your customers feedback filled up this survey form real quick. You can use a start and stop time to measure the accuracy and pace of answered value. This way you will see if there are any errors customers while answering due to limited time.

After your trainers assessing those errors closely, combine this data with the above data points to understand where the customers are getting that error and offer performance-focused support to customers to improve.

How to Measure Your Customers’ Results From the Training Provided?

Okay, Let’s continue with the above TPS reporting example. Let suppose your manager tells your customer to complete 10 TPS report.

Before training when you delivered this task, customers were able to complete 5 per hour with only 60% accuracy. But after baseline training sessions, your customers can complete 11 TPS reports per hour with 80% accuracy.

Knowing your customers’ improvement gives you direction to assess your level 1 and level 2 training evaluation accordingly to let your customer keep exceeding the benchmark.

Level #4: Is There Any Training Impact on Their Organizational Goals?

In level 4, you assess whether the training program was accomplished? Have they achieved their effective goal?

Now, to evaluate level 4, you need result-oriented data that provides a comparative measure.

Let’s take an example of a company that spends 20 % of their workweek time in team meetings to structure & plan out things accordingly.

Is there any Training Impact on their Organizational Goals

They plan to infuse training with their work environment to reduce team meeting time as a result. And, they found that after employing training for each employee, they successfully reduced their time spent for meeting & whiteboard sessions.

Similarly, you can map data points considering your before and after training results for customer’s in their working areas.

Well, as every L&D experiences this most in their life that no training program ensures perfect results, as there is consideration for using with Kirkpatrick model as well:

Considering Using Kirkpatrick Model

It works best if training results are relatively isolated (It means there are no depending factors that rely on training results apart from customers’ growth itself.)
Degree of accuracy (There are chances that your customer already knows best to be assessed for a basic training test. So, to deliver training, in that case, won’t be necessary.)

4 SaaS Customer Success Metrics (Tools to Evaluate)

Product/Services Usage Rate: The more customers use your product, the more valuable is the product for them. Your customer support team can easily track the product use frequency by customers and create a scale for the ideal growth rate.
Active Customers: As a SaaS company, your goal is to land up recurring customers. Measuring daily, weekly, and monthly active users will provide you access to short-term activity time & long-term customer active time.
Free Trial Conversion Rate: Free-trail conversion metric is a must-have in SaaS recurring business model to identify how well your customers are switching from freemium – to – premium services while monitoring churn rate too.
Average Time Spent on Platform: Evaluating the average time will provide you with a detailed story as to how much time your customers are integrated with your software.

We hope that you understand about best practices to measure impact of customer training program.

Conclusion:

As a SaaS company, you may come across a lot of measuring metrics and perfect training evaluation tools to infuse for results. But, eventually, your customers are changing goals on daily basis – So, it becomes an adaptive practice to employ intuitive methods to evaluate your training program. Also, ensure you are using effective L&D strategies to evaluate your training up to the current market benchmark.

Tags Customer Education, Customer Training

Blog Customer Education

5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date February 16, 2022
No Comments on 5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

Customer Education is the Most Powerful Weapon to Survive in the Market.

Irrespective of the business you run or the product or service you want to deliver, the goal is to add value to the customer base. Any business that wants to survive in the market continually strives to develop a product or service that meets the needs of the customers. They want to solve the pain points that the customers may have before using the product.

In this hyper-competitive market, where products are becoming complex and advancing technology, it is vital to keep the customers knowledgeable. But how do you keep them educated about these factors? The best way is to launch the right customer training program. It ensures that your product is successful in the market when customers adopt the training.

What is a Customer Training Program?

When you launch a program, product, or service, a set of programs are developed to offer the consumers and stakeholders the required skills, information, and abilities to use the product to its maximum capacity. The aim is to arm customers with the resources and tools they need to become more informed consumers or buyers of the service or product.

With the help of customer education, a company can engage, onboard, and retain existing and new customers. By developing the customer education program, you are helping to exist and potential customers recognize the product’s value. The customer training program intends to offer a positive experience for the consumers.

As a part of the process, it is often conducted in two phases, pre-sales assistance, and after-sale education. In the pre-sale, the program helps consumers to know about the various features of the product. The process also helps the company know whether the service/product meets the consumer’s needs. The after-sale customer education program focuses on techniques and knowledge for optimum usage of the product/service.

The Customer Training Program Course Can Offer the Knowledge to the Consumers in Several Forms and Formats, Which Can Range From the Following.

Written material like purpose and focused blogs.
Multimedia, which can have video content focusing on skills.
Interactive knowledge bases with the help of AI chatbots.
Webinars for a live session group instruction process.
Interactive assessments to monitor and help consumers to track their progress with quizzes and tests.
Contacting the consumers with your customer service reps.

It is quite likely that you can find all these in the content marketing of your business. If that’s the case, it’s wonderful because you already have the base for creating a customer training program. However, customer education takes this training a step further, where resources are offered to consumers to better tackle product/service-oriented concerns. Moreover, while providing the training, the program also equips the consumer with enhanced insights with methods and tools that they can apply to resolve broader challenges on their own.

The topics covered in a customer training program are more than just help-desk topics. Its core focus is on developing self-service while having an always scalable approach even when there are n numbers of users of your product/service.

Given that proper customer education helps with scaling the business, there are few more benefits that the training offers. The next section discusses five of the key benefits of using the right customer education program.

5 Key Benefits of Right Customer Education Program

It has been witnessed that customer education programs can create a practical and positive experience not only for the consumers but also for employees dealing with the customers. Here are five top benefits of implementing the right customer training program portal.

1. Scale & Educate Every Customer

Many companies are now employing dedicated customer success managers to help with the onboarding of customers and train them with the products. The job, however, often becomes problematic when each customer manager has to assist many of the customers per day.

With the customer training program online, the customer success manager will only be required to help those who need the extra layer. Only when a customer finds certain factors confusing or not finding the answers in the training program will the customer-facing employee be required to engage.

The process automatically frees the customer service employees to tackle more pressing issues than troubleshooting mundane problems. This enables better scaling of the program or service while facilitating the education.

2. The Same Level of Learning for Every Customer

All customers want to feel special. Without a customer training program, the chances are one consumer can get through training while the other just the basics. This can result in having dissatisfied customers. There is no chance of a lack of consistency across the customer training with a customer training program.

This hence ensures each customer has a similar onboarding experience. The opportunity to access the same material and similarly navigate the product. It allows the consumer to feel confident that everyone gets the same information from the company.

3. Increase Cost-Efficiency

Often the job of customer service employees is tedious with answering the same old questions of the customers. This often results in employee churning; thus you have to hire and train the new ones. The training cost is quite expensive for the companies.

Additionally, if you are one of those who offers 24/7 customer service, you have to hire people round the clock, which is once again expensive. With a customer training program, you can cut through all these by reducing the churning, hiring people for shorter periods while ensuring your customers get a valuable and satisfying experience. Overall you reduce your overall expense to keep the customers satisfied.

4. Increasing Customer Trust

Customers want to be taken seriously, and they want to solve the problem by themselves instead of running to the company all the time. When you educate them, this builds the customer’s confidence; in return, they start trusting your company more.

So, if you are afraid that by educating your customer, they will choose your competitor, you are wrong. Your customer-centric attitude will help in creating the loyalty that you seek from your customers.

5. Product Development Made Easy

With a customer training program, you get constant feedback from the users. You can use these as actionable data to develop your product or service better. So, when you develop a product that connects with your customer, you will find a natural marketing ally of your product. They will advocate your brand, and customer recommendations work wonders for any business.

Final Thoughts.

Customer education programs offer a host of benefits while helping you to develop a community of loyal customers who will help you increase your ROI. So, if you haven’t started your customer education program yet, consider developing one now. Visit the best customer training platform to learn more.

Blog Customer Onboarding

Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Onboarding for Saas Companies

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date November 26, 2021
No Comments on Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Onboarding for Saas Companies

The Following Are the Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Customer Onboarding for Saas Companies.

As a SaaS company, there is nothing more exciting than putting the final touches on your upcoming product and seeing your vision come to life.

It is overwhelming, but sometimes, it can become a trap! Spending all your time wooing and polishing your product, you might be missing out to focus on the crucial part of your product’s success – the onboarding process.

You might have heard or experienced the same mistakes – that most SaaS companies committing while onboarding their customers and resulting in customer churn and even sign off.

So, keep these mistakes in mind before you onboard your new customers, or if you’re facing the issues – then this blog is specially made for you.

Let us onboard.

1. Trying to Convince.

Even the most skeptical customers know the worth of valuable experience. It is the over-promising benefits that churn them off. So, when you’re onboarding new customers, remember, it is not about introducing your features or the benefits they are getting. It is about how easily they are getting to use your product.

It is easy to get carried away when writing about your product with adjectives like “breathtaking”, “groundbreaking”, etc. But avoid falling into this trap – your customers might not see the value of your product, how you have imagined it throughout.

So, be straightforward & precise about what all customers are getting out from using your product. Make them have a vision about their future wins.

Avoid using too many marketing lines in the initial stage of Saas customer onboarding. Try to stick with real-time customer assistance, know-how are they experiencing the product use, and figure out if there are friction points.

For example, HelloBonsai makes it fun for freelancers managing it all! One of the many struggles that freelancers often face is management. Bonsai is very peculiar about how new customers are relating to their product and identifying the rights knots?

Customers always imagine how your proposed solution can transform the problem they are facing. It is more of a being in that future self for customers. Bonsai shows their new customers a bigger picture.

Acknowledgment of Issue – Unstructured Work Ethics.
An All-in-one Solution-based process. (From Proposal to Tax Season)

Your onboarding does not have to focus on the benefits the customers might get from using your product. Once you understand your customer – show them the map, the journey, their first win! It is always a better option than relying on your feature to become a convincing output.

2. Assuming Customer’s Win.

You have all the information it takes – the demographics of customer behavior – the analytics-based predictions, and even the graphs to prove first success. But what if your customer has no idea what he wants?

Your customer knows how to sign-up, use your product, or even if – it is a happy one, then spread the word about your company. But he had no idea what is his winning situation is going to be. He knows the solution he gets from your product by experiencing it but is he imagining it while using it?

It is the bridge that enables imagination & desires! Your information is as good as their clueless desire about how it would be with your product.

So, what is your customers’ win?

When any new customer gets an idea about your product – It essentially means that they know how to use it. But still, it is not enough for them to start thinking.

It’s in the environment – the thoughts that generate – the mindset, the emotional balance that sets off the imagination.

No stressful or even relieved mind ever thinks about any software or the attractive UX once they had done using it. It is the relaxed state of mind that reminds them of how their experience was with your product.

Then they start to imagine – how extra burdening would it be without your product – how things went in the flow – how they succeed in something else because your product saved that extra effort.

That is the stage of acknowledgment!

When you onboard your customers, it gets crucial to identify individual user success. Some might get fulfilled with basic, and some require a premium to achieve their goal.

Road Map to Your Customer’s First Win.

Your onboarding must focus on how to enable different customers according to their wins:

Segment them!
Create a Personalized Environment.
Set Goals. (Daily, weekly, and monthly)
Curate your specific content. (Show them what they want)
Give away rewards. (Gamification – trophies, stars, even benefits)
Assist them. (Train customer support & employ technology)
Ask again & Improve. (Reach out via mails or calls)

3. Over-Automating Support.

When your customers face issues while using your product – they are probably looking out on google to assist with suitable solutions – Surrounded by tons of different opinions and methods to solve one problem – they are inevitably confused about whom to choose.

But why did they choose to google it rather than relying on the experts (you) to solve it?

In a recent analysis done by Microsoft, it came out that few reasons are causing this customer frustration to another level:

Source: Microsoft

Let us take an example. Your customer is a salesperson – an information digger, an analytical mind, and a soccer player. He employs CRM Software to reach his potential customers & engage across networks. While using CRM, he experienced issues regarding email services – Responsible for n number of emails per day – he hurries & reaches out to the IT guy. When things went too stretchy for him – he chose to tackle on his own.

It is not that few glitches must stop you from employing technology in customer support – it is about keeping your customers urgency in the loop to identify the suitable assistant.

Relying too much on automated customer support makes your customers think:

You treat them all like the same.
You aren’t following up with them to learn about their experience.
Your team and channels work in silos, preventing you from creating a seamless experience for them.
You’re using email as a predominant channel.
You are unable to predict when they are likely to churn.
You’re measuring and optimizing the omnichannel customer experience.

4. Ignoring the Slow Load Times.

According to the Radware case study – even just a 2-sec delay in the load time can lead to a page abandonment rate of up to 87% approx. The faster your load time is – the happier your customer gets as they can solve their problem without any unnecessary wait time.

In your perspective, when you optimize your web page’s load time, you can expect to see an improvement in your user’s experience (UX), conversion rate, and ultimately, sales revenue.

You can always use external 3rd party tools to monitor your application and webpage performance – here are a few frontend performances monitoring cloud-based technology that you can use:

5. Unable to Follow Up.

You have onboarded your customers successfully – prepared the needed environment, enabled them initially in ‘how-to’ product tour, even managed to show them their first win. Still, after some time – they lose interest, that long-sighted vision that once compelled them to keep progressing with your product – vanished – why?

A study by Harvard Business Review found that 56% of customers complain about poor customer follow-up.

Because of poor customer follow-up – your customers are feeling left behind in a clueless pit of information. That once they used to imagine it as a resource – has now become a task.

To keep your customers intact with their choice of experience, it is a must that you constantly stick with them while they are progressing each day. It gives them two things:

You are working with your customers.
Interactive customers experience.

To help you get along with your customers and create an effective follow-up process, here are few email templates that you can use for your customers:

1. How Did We Do?

Each time your customers reach out to your support team regarding their queries, they expect a quick, reliable, and empathetic response. Once you have resolved their queries – you can use this template to assure your customer satisfaction.

Make sure you create an easy-to-reach backchannel (Customer care contact or 24/7 responsive mail) for customers to feel they have reliable support.

2. Survey – Slack, Follow Up.

A follow email with a rating is a great way to be in touch with customers in volume. But, if you are looking for more detailed feedback or customers response, you need a survey within the follow-up email.

It will depend on the type of questions you ask your customer to understand your areas of improvement or valuable part of your product.

If you are unsure what to ask your customers, here are a few sets of generalized survey questions for you to start with:

Are you happy with the services that we are providing?
Were your queries resolved quickly?
What is that one thing that we can do better?
Was the service helpful?
Did we meet your expectations?

Remember to create questions regarding what you need to know from a customer perspective. The only reason why your customer will respond to your survey is that they find that you mean it intentionally.

6. Delayed Response to Queries

If you are in a client meeting, waiting for that one last industrial report to arrive that you forgot at your desk in the morning while hurrying up, each second seems like hours, right?

That’s how your customers feel when they raise any query or request- mailing all those points & just waiting! And then a response that might churn them away or soften them up.

If there is already a delay in responsiveness, then the customers are likely to frustrate. Expect a high no of tickets raised or even a loss of customers.

Communication is like a tool in SaaS onboarding – new customers or even old customers rely entirely on your quick & reliable support.

If you are having trouble calculating your average response time, here’s a quick calculative formula:

Remember, It is not only about quick but also on empathy grounds, so make sure you keep training your customer support in these areas (keep a checklist!):

Listening to complaints sympathetically.
Always using a polite and empathetic tone.
Suggest a suitable solution & reassure immediate action.
After rectifying through appropriate action, do a follow-up!
Let them know that their contribution is valuable.

7. Abandoning Customers into Information Pit.

One of the most common mistakes – that most SaaS companies commit – overwhelming their customer with silos of information. Imagine a welcome screen is full of do’s & don’ts – what do you think your customer will do?

He will minimize each pop-up and will try to find his way in on his own, but, meanwhile, when he struggles to captivate his attention to work out for a solution – he is not enjoying the process at all.

Within 8 Seconds, you can win or lose your customers:-

The same fundamentals apply to you as well. If your customer support team is not well-trained to tackle different sorts of customers issues – more tickets are raised, not an enjoyable process.

So, keeping your onboarding program aligned with different customer expectations & needs will help you curate your content specifically. It will also help customers to focus only on a handful of steps to progress & improve.

How To Ensure You Are Keeping It Light On Customers?

You keep it simple! Don’t overpopulate their screen. Here’s an example – how you can go about like Dropbox, a modern workspace storage design tool – Allows customers to share and save their work, cloud-backed up.

Dropbox uses the white space on the screen like a wingman. It keeps the customer in the loop with the precision of what he might be searching for a solution.

Dropbox Onboarding

Maintain your customer’s attention with specific content that engages them to accomplish their expectations. Also, remember, to keep this below checklist to curate your content that must:

Not be generic concerning every customer.
Not be complex to understand for the customer.
Focus on individual customer goals.
Be engage enough to feed imaginations and desires.
Be natural that customers feel they’re familiar with the tone.

So, when your customer success team or marketing team strategize your onboarding content deliverables, make sure to keep the checklist along to discuss the to & fro of customer experience.

8. Missing Out Feedback Since the Start.

Feedback is the only tool that will get your onboarding program on a scalable track to improve. It happens with most SaaS companies – They don’t collect customer feedback since the initial onboarding.

And there are two reasons that SaaS companies might shy away from asking for feedback:

Thinking they might churn off their customer with the extra effort initially.
Thinking they might deliver value first, then ask for results.

What do your customers say about feedbacks? (Online reviews – Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Tripadvisor)

94% of consumers say that a bad review has convinced them to avoid a business.
53% of customers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week. But 63% admit that some companies have never responded to their feedback review.
45% of consumers admit that they are likely to visit a business that responds to negative reviews.

Customer feedback is a process – when you initiate your customers with a habit of engaging in a result-driven environment in which you want to work hard – customers appreciate & put in their trust.

So, when you think about onboarding new customers, make sure to include an engaging way of asking for feedback from your customers.

9. Unable to Monitor the Onboarding Process.

If your customer success team fails to identify the customer’s churn during the ongoing onboarding – there are high chances to witness a rise in customer support tickets.

Your customers, since the initial stage, depending on your support, imagine their comfort while using your product. But, the moment customers face issues, they lose their comfort and begin to search for a better option.

So, to reduce customer churn rate and increase LTV, you can use onboarding metrics to track:

Customer login frequency
Used time per session
Features they like or dislike

Establishing a tracking process for your onboarding will allow you to understand customers completion rate, usage time, daily active customers, churn rate, and time to value.

Once you know where the friction points are, you will be able to resolve & improve your onboarding.

10. Unable to Demonstrate a Long-term Vision.

The global software as a service (SaaS) market, expected to grow up to $272.49 billion by the end of 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.8%.

(Source: GlobalNewsWire, 2021)

Annually, the software is about rain-like options over customers. What is the one thing that will keep your customer loyal to your product?

Considering a customer sign-up for your overall win might give you the satisfaction of lead conversion. But, essentially, a successful conversion rate won’t be a revenue-generating asset in the upcoming future.

So, your customer loyalty and how long-sighted your customer is will decide your company’s revenue. So, every SaaS company must demonstrate a long-term vision in their onboarding – Not for just financial growth (Intention is the key!) – Not for just customer benefits (They need more than a solution) – All for customer experience.

Conclusion:

Customer onboarding is the oldest art form of business. In ancient days, Indian street artists and vendors initiated the ‘technique of customer knowledge’ – Introducing origin, characteristics, and the taste created a curiosity to try out the product. Back then, word of mouth marketing was a tool to measure customer experience – the more famous vendor – the more activated customer – loyalty.

So, now, when too many options are letting us consider researching customer success – You must employ this ‘how-to’ guide to avoid making mistakes while planning your SaaS customer onboarding.

Blog Customer Education

Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date June 29, 2021
No Comments on Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Customer education is a very important part of every company. Every company must use a customer education strategy.

Here Are the Top 5 Effective Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Often in businesses, one’s worst enemy is itself. This is mostly true when a new product is launched in the market and is foreign to the users. With teams and members knowing the product/service almost inside out since they spend weeks, months, or years designing and developing it, they often forget that the consumer has no or very little idea about it.

In such an instance, customer education becomes vital. Without offering the consumers the right customer education platform, the chances of the product failing to make its mark is exponentially high. In this article, we will discuss the customer education program, the 5 effective key reasons to invest in Customer Education, and the benefits it.

What is Customer Education?

The processor discipline in which a company teaches its customers ways to find value and use the product is customer education. Even before sales, now companies are investing in customer education to equip the buyers about the product. The process ensures that the customer gets the most value of the product/service over time.

In the present day, the technology for customer education has become a central factor in which the materials are delivered through webinars, chats, chatbots, virtual classroom sessions, etc. But it is not about the specific action you take on how you educate your customer. It does involve all these, along with the overall progress of your brand and business.

The next section will discuss 5 effective key reasons businesses should invest in customer education strategy.

5 Effective Key Reasons to Invest in Customer Education

Historically it has been witnessed that companies who offer average and middle-of-the-pack products and services are hesitant in educating customers. Of many reasons, the most often misnomer is that a knowledgeable consumer will look for different options and leave the product you are offering.

Customer Education Training

On the contrary, when you offer to educate the customers on the products/services you offer, the consumer is more likely to trust the company. Studies have shown there is enough evidence in which customer education strategy influences the customer’s buying decision while decreasing the customer churn.

You should invest in customer education for several reasons if you want to have a future-ready business. 5 effective key reasons to invest in Customer Education are the strategies which you should drive in the customer education marketing and forming a platform for it is as follows:

1. Increased Brand Loyalty

Despite the belief that educating the customers makes them less loyal to your brand, nothing could be farther from the truth. When you empower your customer with the knowledge on how to use your service/product, give them insight, you are adding value to the product.

They will be equipped to utilize the product/service to its full potential and draw them towards it instead of pushing them away. By educating the consumer and increasing their knowledge, a company is building something vital, which cannot be made or bought, i.e., trust.

According to the researchers, trust is the key differentiator that helps a brand or company stand apart and edge over its competitors.

2. Increase the Purchase Rate

Researches have proved a link between an increase in product/service purchase and customer education substantially. An article titled Consumer Education Produced High ROI revealed that consumers who got the consumer training are:

94% more satisfied with the purchases they make
93% likely more to refer the product and share their experience about it with associates
29 times more to buy the product than those who got the information from the media ads alone
5 times more likely to buy the service/product rather than when reached by direct marketing alone.

The figures itself reveals that investing in customer education platform prove to be quite beneficial for a company.

3. Forging Long-Term Relationship

When you have the loyalty and trust of your customers, you have built a strong relationship with them. With a customer education program, you offer an additional service or value that the customer will appreciate. This will also allow them to open up to you about their pain points about the service/product, thus becoming a key contributor to your improvement.

So, when you engage with them with customer training service and keep them updated with the latest information, you are building the loyalty and trust to support them and hear them. This eventually leads to less churn and easy onboarding of customers.

4. Position Yourself as Market Leader

By engaging your customers with a customer training program, you are willing to showcase your expertise while maintaining transparency. This leads to you having the ability to create a large consumer base. You share the industry-specific knowledge, where you offer guidance and advice that can convert visitors to consumers.

As a result, you can position yourself as the market leader in the industry with a strong follower base.

5. Increase Cost-Efficiency & Quality

When you invest in the technology for customer education, you are offering proactive solutions and training. This can help the customer support team to work on complex issues rather than mundane troubleshooting ones.

With the customers contacting the customer services less, your frontline customer care staff is free to work through the feedback loops that can help in improving the product/service. The process eventually increases the quality of work and product while making the service cost-efficient.

With any business having customer satisfaction in the center to become a successful one, investing in customer education strategy and empowering them will not only increase the loyalty, engagement, satisfaction, and trust in the product/service but eventually the ROI of the business. Thus companies must invest in customer education training programs.

Benefits of Customer Education

It would help if you also were mindful of creating a solid customer education program. It can be achieved when you invest in the content, offer hands-on training, and understand what your customer wants. Play on your strengths and work on your weakness when developing and investing in a customer education program. Some of the purpose build software like CXcherry can be used to deliver successful customer training organization-wide.

I sincerely hope you find our blog post on “5 effective key reasons to invest in customer education” useful.

Final Words

When one implements the customer education program, the company must ensure the material and training are understandable, easily accessible, and available when needed by the consumer. It is the product/service training that can make or break the product by enhancing the user experience.

Tags Customer Education, reasons to invest in customer eduction

Blog Customer Onboarding

A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding

Post author By Amol Shinde
Post date June 10, 2021
No Comments on A Quick Guide to Successful Customer Onboarding

In this blog, you will learn how to retain and delight customers by creating a successful customer onboarding program for your organization and also about a quick guide to successful customer onboarding.

Also, the factors about how crucial onboarding strategy is to your goals & customer overall experience.

Have a Look at Some Customer Training Best Practices in Brief

Use the table of content to navigate the guide.

What Is Customer Onboarding?
How To Create A Successful Customer Onboarding Strategy?
Importance Of Customer Onboarding Process.
Successful Customer Onboarding Examples.
Effective Use Of Technology In Customer Onboarding.
7 Best Practices to Successful Customer Onboarding.
Measure the Impact of your Customer Onboarding Training.

Tip 1: What is Customer Onboarding?

Customer Onboarding is creating an intuitive space to enhance your post-purchase customers’ experience & support their aligned goals for your product use.

Your customers are clueless about the extensive use of your product. They might be addressing minor issues via random YouTube product demonstration videos or raising queries to your customer support team.

And even after such aids are there, they still churn it out to tackling major issues.

In short, customer’s situation is like they are already trekking hill while using the basic features, and the marketing team is wondering why products’ advanced features are less in use.

Customer Onboarding Tactics

Allow User-friendly Progress
Employ Content Value
Design Specific Goals (Customer-Centric)
Acknowledge Desired Team

Customer boarding is the anchor to hold (retain) your ship (existing & new customers) to the port (product-use) until that ship propels in the direction of the wind (customer expectations), then bon voyage!

Tip 2: Importance of Customer Onboarding Process

There was a time when buying any product if people face complexities or trouble to grip the guidebook instructions, they’d figure it out by their little tricks & twists.

Because people had time and patience back then compared to our modern generation, time is a limited window & choices are available excessively! In such a condition, expecting customers to know your product’s value is demanding.

To understand why your organization needs a customer onboarding program, here are a few stats and reports that addressed this major buyer’s persona shift.

Why Your Organization needs Customer Onboarding?

Getting new customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining the existing ones. (Invespcro)
Customers with a high engagement rate buy 90% more frequently. (GrooveHQ)
Your website is likely to have 74% more revisits if your platform is user-friendly. (Think with Google)
66% of adults think valuing their time is vital that a company can offer as a customer experience. (Forrester)
Organizations with an initiative to improve their customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average. (McKinsey & Company)

Tip 3: Create a Successful Customer Onboarding Strategy.

Positive Customer-Onboarding confirms that your customer is likely to be a loyal one. There are major two setbacks that increase churns of the customers:

If they don’t find a higher scope of product use.
If they don’t see any value.

In both cases, customers are likely to drive over to competitions. To minimize churn of customer experience and provide value according to their expectations.

You need onboarding training to improve customer onboarding that’s transparent & responsive. Moreover, a strategy that focuses – set, create, manage, employ, measure, and respond your training program according to customer needs.

How To Create an Onboarding Strategy that Retains & Delight More Customers?

1. Set Your Goals.

Firstly, setting smart goals for your customer onboarding will allow you some working space where you can easily monitor individual customers’ progress & provide specific value to their needs from content.

Secondly, the learning space evolves dramatically in terms of customer experience & employee ease.

2. Points To Remember While Setting Your Goals.

Your platform must communicate & collaborate with customers.
Include user-friendly training tools.
Address to diverse but be content-specific.
Your program is to simplify the customer experience.
Employ technology for intuitiveness.

Keep these points in your sticky notes while your L&D team and the project manager are setting onboarding program goals.

3. Gather Your Team.

Saas (software as a service) must employ a customer success manager (CSM) who bridges the gap between the sales and support teams.

In contrast to this gap, CSM doesn’t necessarily get into the depth of day-to-day product usage but instead optimizes towards the customer goal attainment by focusing on strategic conversation.

More customer-centric team, more frictionless the onboarding program will run. Moreover, having a CSM along with a project manager will allow your onboarding strategy to drift smoothly even if your program needs changes during the initial stages.

You might be steering responsibilities yourself as well, making sure the flow is maintained. You can address such matter into Subject Matter Expert (SME) like your product selling champ.

4. Time for Whiteboard Strategy.

Align Instructional designers with project managers and SMEs to sketch a customer onboarding journey. From the sign-up stage to the learning progress, segment stages into milestones.

It becomes easy to deploy valuable resources & tools while each customer’s progress to their set of milestones, and you can update their progress consistently.

5. Preparing Your Content.

Once done with the strategy, it is time to designate a content designer (graphics designer preferable).

Convert your learning course into graphics (quizzes, challenges, and other content authoring tools).

6. Right LMS Is A Must.

Invest in the right LMS that can upload & support your e-learning courses. Your e-learning courses might contain content in different mediums like video, image, and text.

So, better invest in LMS that integrates with your learning content.

7. Ready For Testing?

Your testing is your way to validate the efforts you have implied in your onboarding program. Use your beta testers such as top customers or create a community and aware of your new training program. Aware customers are likely to engage as it beeps their mind that it is a known ground.

8. Launch It Live.

Bon Voyage! Use your awareness of pre-launch before making your onboarding program live. Bring a seamless onboarding experience amidst existing ones and acquire feedback from trusted users.

Tip 4: Few Examples of Successful Customer Onboarding

Until now, it’s crystal clear that if you don’t steer your onboarding training consistently, it can flow in any direction. So let’s understand through few successful customer onboarding best practices examples:

1. Canva

Canva provides users a freemium feel for designing & sharing where ever they want. Canva is known for its user-friendly dashboard & personalized brand kit. It offers a library of 2 Million photos, images, icons, and different templates.

2. Duolingo

Duolingo allows every new customer to get aware of their platform through their animated walk-through. They even introduced step-by-step guidance for new users to avoid fussy initially.

3. DropBox

DropBox has an intuitive-based welcoming tool where a set of questions are there for new users to understand & plan their personalization according. It also helps them create a more user-friendly & adaptable platform.

Tip 5: Effective Use of Technology for Customer Onboarding.

Before your customer success manager or team, your customer expects ready-to-assist onboarding support available to them.

It is your time to put technology to work! Deploy multi-channel automated support (AI chatbots and supports suits)

Tip 6: 7 Best Practices to Customer Onboarding

1. Read Your Customer’s Mind

Avoid analyzing through scalable metrics! First, address their behavior, situations, challenges, and personal goals. Customers have to feel successful with their product use.

Over-analysis demands customer participation to provide data that increase customer churn. Be gentle in understanding their needs & set your future strategies accordingly.

2. Show A Clear Picture Of What They Get.

Don’t over-deliver your product value. Customer’s expectations must set as a strategically planned picture. When customers are aware of their end goal with your product, they stay calm witnessing the daily progress & even rely on the advanced features to pace up.

3. Provide Value.

Design your content according to what requires on the customer’s dish. Each customer is having a different outlook of your product. Providing solutions through specifically generated content is valuable.

4. Set Customer-Friendly Goals.

Your Customer Onboarding Strategies must align with progressing customers. Data imports help create an adaptable program ready to re-create, edit and provide customer-centric goals a free hand.

5. Communication Is Your Modern Key.

Use training tools, user-friendly KPI dashboards, and email communication templates to help reduce customer’s churn during onboarding and enable direct communication with your customer
success manager.

6. Fix Setbacks Instantly.

During the initial stage of customer onboarding, there might be various setbacks in communication, the learning process, and even a basic understanding of product use. Train your dedicated support team ready to improvise & enable their system intuitive technology so that they address the issue beforehand.

7. Measure Metrics.

Your saas onboarding best practices is the key benefit to your business goals too. Identify pain points and KPI’s through tracking metrics:

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Churn Rate
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Engagement Rate (CER)

Tip 7: Measure the Impact of Customer Onboarding training!

The moment you exercise these customer training best practices in your onboarding program, you will realize how crucial it gets to measure the impact of detailing you mapped to improve your customer experience.

In the initial stage, in the context of two crucial milestones to measure:

The moment the new customer signs up for your product.
And the moment they attain their first success with your product.

This analysis will help your onboarding training program to boost customers’ retention rate. And through a time-to-time update on customer engagement levels.

Conclusion:

Onboarding is a success when you employ customer-centric tools & a seamless onboarding experience for customers.

Friction is likely to happen in every training program. Setbacks are a predictable reality, but re-creating through proper customer-involved strategy will evolve your whole business module.

To address your SMART training goals and help create an intuitive program, we act as a tool to hammer & shape your business strategies. Employ the pioneering in learning technology to retain & delight your customers now.