Consumers today expect near-instant gratification when it comes to buying products and services, so your customer onboarding will need to follow suit. In a world with same-day deliveries, on-demand provisioning, and massive libraries of streamable content, businesses have to satisfy new customers quickly. 

Those who sell digital products, especially, can’t drag out the post-sales onboarding process. People have access to more purchasing options than ever before, giving them the power to walk away from service providers who don’t meet their near-term expectations.

Fortunately, there are ways to optimize the onboarding process through strategic digital product development. In this post, we’ll discuss three approaches we’ve used with clients to help them eliminate onboarding friction and accelerate time-to-value for customers. 

UX Research And Design in Customer Onboarding

The first way to facilitate a smooth customer onboarding process is to conduct UX research to ensure you design products that your prospective buyers actually need. Leaders too often have incorrect perceptions about what most customers want, and many fall in love with their solutions rather than solve real problems in the marketplace.

UX research and design prevent this from happening. Before jumping into development, interview your target customers, test design hypotheses, and find low-cost ways to explore different ideas. Doing so helps you discover your customers’ deepest needs. And these are the things you need to deliver in the early minutes, hours, and days of your onboarding process.  

By creating time and space for UX research upfront, you increase your chances of delighting customers as soon as they make a financial commitment to your company. 

Source Medium: Example of Mobile App Analytics UX PlanetExample of progression from low fidelity to final design

At Daitan, we worked with an organization that was having trouble pitching its product in sales demonstrations. Whenever prospective buyers asked to see custom data views or dashboards, sales engineers wouldn’t always know how to deliver in real time. 

Before moving forward with a specific technical solution, Daitan spent time learning what the company’s buyers wanted to see in product demos. Daitan observed the client’s sales engineers at live demonstrations and conducted ample user research. Our team then designed and validated UI high fidelity wireframes with prospective customers. 

By implementing a thorough UX research and design process, Daitan was able to implement a refactoring plan that addressed end user needs and eliminated friction from the sales and onboarding process. The client now knows what is most important to potential buyers and can optimize its sales and onboarding processes accordingly.

Data-driven Optimization

The second way to optimize your onboarding process is through post-launch data-driven optimization. This approach studies how customers engage with your digital products and services, even after they’ve been released, and identifies potential pain points that detract from the overall user experience. 

You want your customers to feel like they made a great purchasing decision right after handing over their payment information. By tracking certain metrics, you can validate whether you deliver on your promises and create loyal long-term customers. 

For instance, you could track the proportion of first-time customers that become repeat buyers or use heatmaps to observe how people interact with your website. You could also conduct surveys or interviews and ask users what causes them frustration when using your products. These types of activities enable you to supplement hypotheses with substantive evidence. 

Source: Notify Visitors

For instance, we worked with a business in the cloud computing and virtualization space that wanted to boost user engagement and qualify sales leads through a revamped frontend demo portal. We upgraded the backend infrastructure and redesigned the frontend UI, implementing single sign-on (SSO) access and an automated chatbot along the way. Most importantly, we tracked results that would help us understand the effectiveness of our solution.

After deploying the new demo portal, we studied how our interventions affected engagement and sales. We also identified key features and functionality that resonated with potential buyers, always trusting in data to point us in the right direction. Our work increased demo site traffic by 400% and led to 10x growth in user enrollment through the portal, proving the value of using data to optimize the onboarding process. 

Custom Software Development

A third way to optimize the customer onboarding process is to build custom software that addresses specific needs you know customers will have as soon as they purchase your digital product or service. 

For example, if you know most of your potential customers use Salesforce as their CRM, you could build an integration between your product and Salesforce that is available to users as soon as they become paying customers. 

You could also create tools to automate onboarding processes that would otherwise take lots of time and manual effort. For instance, if you need to collect certain information from new customers, you could build an online form that streamlines the intake process. You could also create a “guided tour” of your web application or offer drag-and-drop windows for uploading important information. 

Investing in custom software packages, integrations, and features can go a long way towards enhancing the onboarding experience for your customers. 

We provided this type of technical support for a large communications equipment provider in Canada. Our team built a workflow automation program capable of reconciling IP addresses with newly deployed routers. The solution we created cut human effort by 98% and increased throughput by 856%, enabling the communications company to accelerate router deployments and get buyers online much more quickly. 

By knowing what our client’s customers needed and what roadblocks existed, we were able to create an ad-hoc software solution that eliminated pain points for all involved. 

Optimize The Customer Onboarding Process With Daitan

Many organizations today overlook the importance of the customer onboarding process. But with the right technical expertise and understanding of digital product development, you can design an onboarding process that delivers value to customers quickly, enhances long-term retention, and reduces costs along the way.

For those in need of specialized support, Daitan brings years of experience implementing solutions across each of the areas described above. Contact us today to discuss your customer onboarding goals and challenges.