Improving Your Onboarding and Customer Retention With Measurement

An effective onboarding strategy requires measurement.

Many businesses have established a customer onboarding process, but not all of them are tracking metrics and performance to understand the success of their process. In a 2019 Customer Onboarding Success survey, only 66% of respondents suggested that they track or plan to track customer onboarding metrics.

That means that 34 percent of companies aren’t measuring the success of onboarding. If your company is looking to improve its customer onboarding experience, a good first step is to establish onboarding measurement. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. A great onboarding process is a crucial component of a great customer experience and all of the downstream impacts of happy clients—higher retention and more revenue.

Getting started is usually the toughest part, so below are two approaches to establishing metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your customer onboarding strategy.

Approach One: Segmentation and Investigation

The first question to ask yourself is, “What is our onboarding goal?” Possible answers might be:

• ​Decrease the number of support tickets/requests
• ​Improve customer satisfaction scores
• ​Reduce customer churn
• ​Upgrade and expand services in existing client accounts

The challenge with these goals is that the outcomes are influenced by many different factors, not just your onboarding experience. User segmentation can help you get a clearer understanding of these measures. Segment your users by stage in the onboarding cycle, engagement with onboarding content, and/or product usage.

Review the patterns in the selected segment(s):

• ​Are there common behaviors you see among customers who churn? What are they and what are the leading indicators you can measure to identify possible problems before they happen?
• ​What are the behaviors of the customers who report high levels of satisfaction? Do they use a specific area of your product more regularly than less satisfied clients?
• ​Do clients who stick around for a long time have similar experiences? What are the experiences and what can you measure to ensure consistency across clients?

These are just a few paths of inquiry to figure out your own personalized scorecard. This is a great way to get started. Another path to consider is using a tool that measures the onboarding experience for you.

Approach Two: Customer Onboarding Score

At TaskRay, a Customer Onboarding Score has been established. The score is based on a calculation that takes into account the onboarding project satisfaction and completion. Here are the factors that the calculation considers:

• ​Project Satisfaction
  • ​Internal Sentiment
  • ​External Sentiment
• ​Project Completion
  • ​Initial Projected Duration
  • ​Actual Duration
  • ​% Behind Schedule

By centralizing and combining your onboarding data, you can create a score that reflects the success of your onboarding strategy. This score provides an instant view across accounts to highlight those in need of proactive attention.

If you’re looking for more guidance, TaskRay offers webinars covering mistakes companies make in their onboarding strategy and shares performance metrics tracked to improve onboarding strategies.