Your customer forgets 90% of their onboarding after a week

Here’s how to avoid it!

This claim is backed by science on how our brain generally remembers. Unless you have a strategy to make your customer onboarding memorable, it’s not gonna lead to adoption or a good customer experience.

I discovered this very important point in Rachel Provan’s latest episode of “Psychology of Customer Success”, which specifically addresses onboarding. This is the basis for what I discuss in this post, and I highly recommend you listen to the episode and subscribe to her podcast here (or where you listen to podcasts): psychologyofcustomersuccess.com

She reveals why most businesses' onboarding methods are extremely ineffective. Passively listening to someone explain functions and buttons for an hour, is actually the worst way to learn, EVER.

Also, it follows after sales enthusiastically managed to convince them how fantastic your product is. So what a contrast and letdown that quickly becomes!

When we in customer success fail to focus on the customer's desired outcomes (because we’re not trained to do so)—meaning the customer's own definition of success—we also fail to measure it, emphasize it, and customize our training for it.

Anything not relevant to that desired outcome will be forgotten. And that’s why it’s so important to focus on the desired outcomes rather than just features and capabilities.

The positive part of the equation that Provan explains, is that while our brains erase irrelevant information quickly, it’s also wired to notice and remember things that are highly relevant. So if you present highly relevant information, and only that - your customers are likely to take notice of situations or activities where your product would be particularly useful.

You might also have to step up your presentation with some interactive features, adding a little fun or creative ways to involve your audience so they don’t doze off. Your customers will also need repetitions, reminders, and easily digestible ways to refresh their knowledge. And again, all of this has to be directly tied to their desired outcome and how your product will help them achieve it.

And, yes. I’m painfully aware your team has limited capacity and can’t always follow up every client manually for days or weeks after the onboarding. So what often happens, in my experience is that customers forget about you. Then sales have to drag them back in using every tool in their kit. This takes so much energy and time, and sometimes even forces us to onboard the same customer again! Because by then of course, they certainly forgot how your product works.

This is why having segmented, automated communication- flows during onboarding is both important and effective, in my not so humble opinion.

By segmenting your customers into relevant categories and including automation tools and strategies to your onboarding and customer journey, you can deliver tailored, relevant, engaging information repeatedly and consistently at scale.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again:

Your customers should hear from you when they need you, not when you need their money.

And if you think of automation as less personal, authentic or effective than manual follow-ups, I get it, and it certainly can be the case. But not if you approach it with a customer-centric perspective and a genuin intent to help them get results.

Just make sure to segment your customers in sensible ways, and craft different onboarding and nurturing sequences for different needs and and use cases. Customer success teams have so much valuable data and knowledge of how different customers benefit and use your product. These insights can help you define your categories and build your information-flows.

Yes, crafting guides, videos, quizzes and other information products takes time. But once you have them, you can scale it. And you can automate, at least parts of your onboarding process.

Another benefit to automated communication is that it can be tested, measured and optimized based on concrete data. They're reliable and will take care of your customers when half your staff is out with the flu (or out celebrating your recent growth!). They’re predictable and crafted in advance, when you’ve set of the time and resources it takes to make the content clear, entertaining, and focused on the customers desired outcomes. Something thats often difficult in live sessions, where having a bad day or lack of sleep can lead to a terrible presentation.

Crafting great, memorable, inspiring and useful onboardings for customers requires human empathy, creativity, social intelligence, humor and curiosity. But scaling that content to relevant customer segments over time, is out of our capacity, and should run smoothly with automated sequences.

To learn some effective ways to actually do this, make sure to get my free guide below.

Until later!