You’ve converted a new lead into a potential client. They finally make the buying decision and choose you over your competitors.
What’s next?
The real challenge starts once you get an official commitment from your new prospects. You now have to organize their onboarding and make sure that you and your sales team is fully prepared to deliver your service and kick off the actual client’s project.
But it is not an easy task – onboarding new customers is challenging for most businesses.
However, client onboarding is the heart of your business. An exceptional onboarding process will help you build a strong relationship with your customers and reduce churn during this initial phase of the business relationship.
In this post, I’ll explain what makes a successful step of the onboarding process and how to set it up very easily in your organization. You can implement these steps in your company to provide an exceptional onboarding experience to your clients and meet their set expectations. Here are the steps below:
Onboarding new clients is a relationship-building process. For a strong relationship, you need to make your client feel like you care about them.
Since a welcome message is the first step in client onboarding, it is a great opportunity to engage first-time customers with your brand.
Welcome your clients before you begin working on any projects. Send them a personalized welcome message to do so.
With Clustdoc’s secure messaging system, you can send customized welcome messages from the client application page.
You can also use our messaging system to mention your legal team members and keep them in the loop with the client queries or any project management information.
To design an onboarding plan that matches the customer, you should gather as much information as possible.
You’ll know what your client’s requirements are if you have accurate information in front of you.
For this, you can create a client information sheet to collect important information about client needs, business tools they use, and login credentials to their platforms.
Make sure the client has no doubt about your services and the actions they must follow during the onboarding process.
For example, they might not know where to find contracts to sign or where to find your product description list.
The majority of your first-time clients have inquiries regarding your services.
You can make it simple for people to contact you with queries using the Clustdoc messaging feature as well as create a communication schedule using the appointment booking module.
You can also efficiently respond to their questions using the Clustdoc interface. This gesture will make your client feel like they are your priority.
On Clustdoc, you can also ask your clients to fill forms or upload files from one interface.
Your clients can easily upload the files at any moment without having to send you an email.
Share with your clients a list of tasks that they must complete during the onboarding process. Doing so will help your project team to set up the client account, collect necessary information, and prepare for the project.
If you use a digital onboarding software, you can put all the specific tasks that a client needs to complete in one section.
Both you and your client need to sign master service agreements and other legal papers.
Having legal documents signed by both parties will provide both client and you with a sense of security.
On the onboarding portal, you can quickly share files with your clients and issue reminders. Using Clustdoc, clients can add e-signature to documents without needing to use a third-party application. The signed contracts are safe and secure on the cloud storage space of your choice.
Create a step-by-step checklist on how to onboard a customer and provide a seamless onboarding flow.
An onboarding checklist is a list of activities to be done by the customer throughout the onboarding process.
With Clustdoc as your client onboarding platform, you can choose from custom checklist templates tailored to your company’s needs.
At Clustdoc, we’ve helped thousands of agencies automate their routine client workflows with professional client onboarding checklists that they can run remotely.
I am going to walk you through what should be included in a client onboarding checklist for more success.
To begin, we highly recommend adding your client to your digital onboarding platform. There are plenty of systems that allow you to systemize your client onboarding checklist, but Clustdoc is one of the leading platforms for doing this without hassle.
Using our system, you’ll be able to track in a more efficient way your various digital onboarding checklists. In order to properly welcome new clients, you’ll need to create a one-page welcome document with your project and company details.
With Clustdoc, you can write a custom welcome message that every new client will see, once you run your onboarding checklist with them.
Share all the onboarding papers and any brochure that may help your client to learn more about your company to ensure that the client thoroughly understands the scope of the project.
Then, you’ll make sure you also capture initial information from your client such as:
For this part, you can simply use an online form which you’ll use repeatedly with each new client.
Clustdoc online form module allows you to capture such data directly from your onboarding checklist.
If any legal documents need to be collected or signed, have them available ahead of time and include them in the client onboarding checklist.
Most projects commonly require legal documents like NDAs and contracts. Both the client and the project plan manager should have a copy of the legal papers.
You can add your legal documents to the checklist and send reminders to the client to sign them on time using Clustdoc’s digital onboarding process.
You can also get your proposals, contracts and other documents signed on Clustdoc with the e-signature feature.
It’s now time to prepare yourself for the actual project.
Before you start, make sure you list all supporting necessary materials, important documents and files you need to receive and review in order to better qualify your client.
Depending on the type of service you provide, you should organize your document checklist accordingly: for example, if you’re onboarding a borrower, you’ll request a different type of documents from when you’re onboarding a client for marketing services.
With Clustdoc, you can easily create these different lists and save them in your account for your team.
What makes a client onboarding checklist hard to manage is usually the list of things that a client must complete in a timely manner.
Usually, when these crucial tasks fall behind, your client’s payment can also be delayed, putting the entire project schedule at risk.
A good way to avoid that is inserting directly into your onboarding checklist all the tasks that must be completed by a new client in order to help you and your team get started.
These basic tasks including the payment methods and terms can automatically be added to your Clustdoc onboarding checklist, preventing you from using additional apps to run this piece of your onboarding.
Depending on the customer, you can include a variety of different items in your checklist.
These checklist items are, nevertheless, the most typical elements to add to your client onboarding checklist:
With Clustdoc’s smart client onboarding platform, you can easily and quickly build a unique one for your customer by choosing from different templates or editing one of your existing checklists. The onboarding tool helps you start on a positive note and build a personal relationship with your clients.
Clustdoc is a client onboarding orchestration platform used by modern teams around the world. With Clustdoc, you can run automated workflows for requesting, reviewing and verifying new customers’ data, documents and contracts – without juggling between tools.
If your team is managing new customers using emails, spreadsheets and PDFs, you’ll probably love using Clustdoc.
