Picture this: Your favorite chef has just started their own cooking channel on YouTube. You have loved everything they’ve ever created, and you can’t wait to replicate their best in your own kitchen. You open their cooking videos with a lot of anticipation. Everything is perfect — how they explain the recipes, the duration every step would need, etc. You’re making notes, and then they say something that makes you pause: “Salt to taste.”

That’s an innocuous instruction that confounds a lot of people. Many interpret it as an instruction to add the quantity of salt required to taste good to them. Experts will tell you salt is about enhancing the flavor and aroma of other ingredients in the dish you’re making. And it takes a while to figure out the right quantity of salt.

Customer onboarding can be a lot like cooking: You need different ingredients (delight, ease, etc.) and tools (files, data, project management tools) to deliver a successful onboarding. You’re probably wondering what the salt could be. It’s customer experience, of course! 

Compared to cooking, though, with customer onboarding, it's easier to figure this ingredient out. All you have to do is look at your customer data.

Retention begins at onboarding

When speaking to people involved in the onboarding, implementation and customer success functions of different organizations, we find that most businesses have a common approach to retention: They see it as a problem for the post-onboarding phase in the customer lifecycle.

You will find that customer success teams have a good understanding of what metrics to track, what those metrics all mean, and how they fit into the bigger picture. Where you don’t find that level of obsession is in tracking and understanding customer onboarding data.

Acquiring a new customer costs five times more than it does to retain an existing customer. It’s a good idea, then, to emphasize retention. While we look at best practices and data used by a company's post-onboarding functions, we find that the onboarding function itself doesn’t have retention through value delivery as a goal.

Retention begins at onboarding. Onboarding is, after all, the first real partnership between your customers and you. It’s when you lay the foundation for trust and reliability. And customers who trust you and your brand are more likely to renew: 81%, to be precise. 

You can use the available customer data to better understand your customers and make sure they are getting the best possible experience with your company. You can use data intelligence in all aspects of customer onboarding — from the data you collect and how you collect it to how you use it.

When you don’t proactively look at customer onboarding data, the onboarding process itself tends to be reactive. You are mostly operating based on gut feelings. Other unfavorable consequences include a lack of visibility into onboarding performance and customer sentiments during the phase, which in turn leads to a less-than-ideal customer experience during onboarding. 

If you track relevant data, on the other hand, you gain a 360-degree view of the onboarding. You are able to pre-empt any risks and delays and make sure the project is on track; draw patterns from across onboarding projects your team has executed; understand your team’s performance; and use this information to come up with a game plan to improve your onboarding and by extension your renewal rate.

If read right, customer data provides insights into what exactly your customers want. And when you give your customers what they want, i.e., fulfill their expectations, they’re likely to extend their loyalty to you.

How you can use customer onboarding metrics 

While there are many metrics you can use to gain insights into customer satisfaction and experience, here are some that you can track during your onboarding process and the problems they can help you address.

Course-correct ongoing projects

Tracking certain data points helps you snap out of reactivity and get proactive about your onboarding experience. They help you spot the iceberg well in advance so you can prevent your ship from colliding with it.

      Improve product experience

      A huge part of customer onboarding is helping your customer learn how to use your product or service, and eventually become an expert user. The onboarding phase is when they’ll have their first hands-on experience. Use these metrics to understand how user-friendly your product is, and how you can improve the experience for them.

            Understand and improve team performance

            Customer experience also includes how your team executes on the processes. Track these metrics to understand where they’re doing well, and what needs to be improved.

                  Future-proofing your revenues

                  As noted above, acquiring a new customer costs five times more than it does to retain an existing customer. One way to ensure customer retention is customer satisfaction. And to ensure satisfaction, we need to meet customer expectations and deliver the value they seek. 

                  Your customers are constantly indicating their experiences to you overtly (NPS, CSAT, escalations, etc.) and subtly (product adoption, usage, etc.). All we need to do is listen.

                  Srikrishnan (Sri) Ganesan is the cofounder & CEO of Rocketlane



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