Want Your Product To Succeed? Get Customer Onboarding Right!
Great customer onboarding is the key to sustained profitability.
Customer onboarding has gone a long way in the past thirty years! I remember the hours I spent setting up my first PC back in the eighties with some form of nostalgia. The hardware felt like a Meccano game that could go wrong in so many ways! And in those pre-Internet days, unless you had a Mac, you needed to know your MS-DOS commands to do anything with your computer.
Nowadays, with pervasive computing and always-on connectivity, the culture of instant gratification prevails, and tech companies have become obsessed with optimizing their customer onboarding experience. I don’t blame them. Research repeatedly shows that customer acquisition can cost up to seven times more than selling to existing customers. So, you’d better cherish your customers once they’re in and do everything to delight them so they stick with you in the long term.
As a product leader, I’ve caught that bug too and spent a disproportionate amount of energy optimizing the out-of-box experience (OOBE) and customer onboarding in general. It’s well worth it, and here are a few of the critical lessons I’ve learned along the way.
#1 — Successful customer onboarding = profit
Successful companies know a proper customer onboarding can make the difference between a profitable business and a cash-bleeding operation doomed to fail. But, let’s get some adequate definition out of the way:
Customer onboarding is about introducing your product to your customer. The best onboarding…
