Define your customer onboarding and offboarding process

You will often hear people talking about a good onboarding process, but the offboarding process is just as important. This is all about creating a relationship with your customer, but also creating and upholding your reputation.

Think about it this way: You invite someone to your house for dinner. When they arrive, you open the door for them, welcome them in, offer them a drink, and make conversation. You will probably serve them dinner, perhaps offer them condiments, salt, pepper, and another drink. After dinner, you might do dessert, or tea and coffee, and chat some more until it’s time for your guests to leave.

At the point where your guest is about to leave, will you say, “Ok Bye!”, and walk away from them? Or do you walk them to the door, make sure they’ve got everything, and thank them for coming to visit you?

Probably the latter of the two, right?

So why wouldn’t you treat your customer the same way? This is a person who has trusted you, spent money with you, and is about to go back out into the world after experiencing you as a business – so let’s create both a good first impression and a lasting impression. Your entire process should give them another reason to come back to you again, because your service and care was exceptional from start to finish.

Onboarding

Your onboarding process may be different for each of your products or services, but it’s still important to map out what is required and why. As much as possible, we are also going to use automations to help us with our processes and take work off our hands.

Your onboarding process might look like this:

• A welcome pack/email
  • A short message to welcome the client
  • Introduce yourself/your team and points of contact
  • A customer intake form (gather any extra details you need from your new client)
  • A timeline of events (setting expectations)
  • Any links, knowledge base, groups, info, login details etc
  • Any NDA, Contract, Invoice
• Add client to your account software
• Follow up any outstanding info, signatures, and payments
• Schedule and complete your first meeting – schedule next meeting
• Add the client to any communication tools, time trackers, project management, or calendars as necessary
• Assign tasks, share files
• Client check ins
• Celebrate your client as they reach milestones

Offboarding

As with your onboarding process, the offboarding process will be unique to your product/service. This is your chance to leave a lasting impression and get valuable feedback which can help you improve your business.

Your offboarding process will look like this:

• Email sequences to check in with the client along the way – ask for feedback and reviews, use open ended questions
• Help your customer measure the success they’ve had while working with you – show them where they started and where they are now
• Make it easy to leave/cancel any ongoing payments
• Offer and offboarding call to discuss any feedback and next steps
• Compile a short list of suggestions for the client to action/consider next
• Make recommendations for partners/complimentary providers to help them with the next part of their project
• Thank them for working with you – this could be an email, handwritten note, gift, flowers, charity donation in their name etc
• Ask them for referrals – they loved working with you, and they will have contact who will too
• Follow up down the track (3, 6, 12 months) to see how they are

Your on and offboarding processes should be tailored for the product/service your client has purchased. The outlines above are quite detailed but your process doesn’t need to be.

You can see we are bringing together the work we’ve done in our previous weeks’ lessons to create our processes and complete the picture for your business. If there’s anything you aren’t sure of, or need to work on some more, go back and revisit the lesson on that topic – ie systems, customer avatar, etc. And if you have any questions, please let me know in the Facebook group.