The process of integrating new customers and providing customer support are critical to a successful business. But are the customer onboarding and support processes aligned in your organization?
In this article, you’ll see how these two departments, when well coordinated, optimize teamwork and improve customer experience.
What is onboarding and its importance for customer satisfaction
Customer onboarding is about teaching new customers the value of the product or service they’ve purchased. It takes place immediately after a product or service is purchased and can be performed by the sales or CS (Customer Success) team.
Its main objective is to provide information, answer questions, and explain how to get the most out of your product or service. However, it requires the alignment of different areas, such as product, marketing, sales, and others.
With this multidisciplinary approach, it’s possible to define the benefits that your products or services can provide. As a result, the customer onboarding process can create a unique perception of value for your customers.
Among the customer onboarding strategies, we can mention the creation of a tutorial video on how to get started and a series of emails with usage tips and success stories from other customers, which facilitate customer adaptation.
Difference between customer onboarding, CS, and support
Customer onboarding, customer success (CS), and customer support service are three essential pillars to ensure a complete and satisfactory experience. However, each of them plays a different role throughout the customer journey.
This is because onboarding focuses on the customer’s initial integration with the company or product. In other words, it refers to the process of helping consumers become comfortable and familiar with the product or service.
Customer success (CS) aims to ensure continuous customer satisfaction. Therefore, CS involves proactivity, regular monitoring, identification of growth opportunities, and resolution of problems before they impact the buying experience.
Finally, customer support is the department that helps customers with a company’s products and services. For example, the customer support team resolves problems and answers questions related to the use of the product or service. Therefore, it’s directly related to your company’s after-sales strategies.
How can onboarding impact the support department?
The primary objective of onboarding and support is to ensure that customers get the most out of the product or service they’ve purchased. According to the Wyzowl report, 55% of consumers have returned a product simply because they didn’t understand how to use it properly.
It shows how important it is to guide customers well. And when it doesn’t happen, basic questions or issues can overwhelm the technical support team, affecting the productivity of agents, who could be handling more complex requests.
Onboarding challenges
While the onboarding process is critical to the success of your business, it has its own challenges. They deserve attention because they can affect the customer experience and team efficiency.
Therefore, some of the key challenges of customer onboarding are:
- Learning curve: failure to ensure that customers quickly understand the product, especially for complex solutions;
- Lack of personalization: problems to adapt the process to the specific needs of each customer;
- Excessive or inadequate communication: providing too much information at once or insufficient support, leading to confusion or lack of confidence;
- Success measurement: lack of clear metrics to assess the impact and effectiveness of customer onboarding;
- Alignment between teams: challenges in integrating different departments (sales, support, CS) in a cohesive and efficient way.
Overcoming these challenges requires a strategic approach with a focus on personalization, clear communication, consistent metrics, and collaboration between teams. This way, it’s possible to create an onboarding process that accelerates customer success and promotes long-term loyalty.
Key impacts of an overloaded support team
An overloaded customer support team can have several negative effects on your business. According to a survey published in the Espaço Vital blog, 57% of customers hang up the phone after waiting a long time for support. In addition, 75% of customers feel extremely irritated when it happens.
Some of the consequences of an overloaded support team include:
- Decrease in service quality;
- Customer dissatisfaction;
- Increased turnover;
- Employees with health problems;
- Damaged organizational climate;
- Reduced productivity.
That’s why it’s important to align the customer onboarding and support teams to avoid excessive requests that could have been resolved earlier.
Strategies for onboarding and support teams to work together
Are you wondering how to effectively integrate onboarding and support? Well, clear communication between the teams of these departments is essential to ensure successful collaboration, especially to coordinate requests received by the support service that could have been avoided during customer onboarding. In addition, using a service platform, such as Milvus that offers different services, can bring many benefits.
The Milvus platform stores the history of customer interactions and provides access to service metrics. It helps you identify the origin of the request and whether it could have been avoided.
Finally, it’s important to provide training so that support teams can understand the onboarding process and vice versa, ensuring a better collaboration between them and allowing them to anticipate potential issues that customers may have after onboarding.
Then, by working in an integrated manner, the customer onboarding and support teams will promote a better and more consistent experience.
How to measure the integration between onboarding and support teams
Once you’ve created a collaborative approach between customer onboarding and support teams, it’s important to measure whether it’s working well. You can analyze indicators such as:
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Number of tickets created after onboarding
A reduction in the number of tickets created after the onboarding process indicates that the customer is able to use the product or service without support and understands the features well.
Therefore, if the integration between onboarding and support is successful, customers should have fewer questions or technical problems. But be careful! If the number of tickets increases or remains high, it may indicate gaps in onboarding or in the transition to support.
2. Customer satisfaction survey
Customer satisfaction surveys provide direct feedback on how customers rate the onboarding process and the support they receive. Some of the most common tools are the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
High scores indicate that customers are satisfied. On the other hand, a drop in scores indicates problems, such as lack of continuity or inconsistency in service.
3. Agent productivity
The productivity of support agents is also an important indicator of success. When onboarding is efficient, customers understand the product better. As a result, support agents handle fewer basic or repetitive requests. It allows them to focus on more complex cases and add more value to the service. Then, increased productivity can be a sign that onboarding is working well, while overloaded agents can indicate potential flaws in the process.
