Hi r/startups!

I've been doing a deep dive into customer onboarding. My hope is to use this step as an opportunity to build a strong foundation with each of my customers. Continue reading to learn my process and strategy. Cheers!

Overall Goal:

• Build an experience that's going to engage customers right off the bat!

To bring this goal to life, I want my customers to:

• Get motivated to take action
• Become activated
• End up loving and referring

Let's break it down –

Motivate customers to take action

I want my customers to start with their goal in mind, to have a clear vision and excitement for what they are going to achieve through working with my business. This way they will want to get started right away and have the motivation to do what it takes to get their desired results.

Here are my ideas for motivating customers:

• Highlight the outcome – ask what their goal is and what achieving it will mean to them
• Preview the steps – explain the path to make it feel doable and build anticipation
• Point to the pain – address the customers current pain points and how those will be solved

Activate customers

Next, I want to identify 3 actions for customers to take and guide them through doing those things.

The idea here is to fast-track experiences that will deliver the core value of the business to the customer as quickly as possible. If the desired outcome will take some time, I want to get the customer to experience small wins and feel they are already on their way to their goal.

I realized this may look a little different for each customer. The 3 actions may differ a bit because customers arrive at various levels of preparedness. I don't want to frustrate a customer by taking them through a step they've already taken on their own and instead we'll want to jump to the next logical step for where they are at.

Get customers to love and refer

Hopefully, at this point I will have a motivated and satisfied customer that is making progress toward their goal. But here is where I think an amazing onboarding experience can really knock it out of the park.

I want my new customer to feel like they need to turn around and tell somebody what a great experience they just had and how much they love my business!

So here are my ideas to take it to the next level:

• Always Be Celebrating – cheer on the customer for taking action, highlight small wins
• Anticipate friction – have solutions available for problems that may be encountered, be present and proactive in offering help
• Guide through next steps – make suggestions for what to do next, keep the path unfolding
• Add even more value – how-to guides, checklists, strategy, ways to solve related issues

Final considerations for designing and building the parts of the onboarding process:

1. Welcome – set the tone for the relationship and value of the business with a warm welcome
2. Context – provide specific info/help based on the actions the customer is taking
3. Personalization – align info/help with the customer's specific role, use case or goal
4. Milestones – reinforce progress with checklists and celebrations of success
5. Communications – be responsive and proactive

That's the plan! Thanks for reading. What onboarding tips do you have?