My customers resist onboarding. What should I do?
We like to provide onboarding opportunities for customers so they get started on the right foot. They will be able to use the product better, they will reach their business goals faster, and they will need less support. What is there not to like? Well, certain customers just don’t sign up for onboarding sessions, don’t show up, or drift away.
Ruthlessly assess the quality of the onboarding
Most onboarding/training is simply terrible:
- poorly thought-out
- organized by product feature rather than task
- too long compared to the content
- linear rather than branched by interest
- consisting only of a brief demo with no opportunities for the user to actually try things out, or even ask questions
- conducted by someone who does not care, or does not know much about the product or the user
- offered at inconvenient times, in inconvenient chunks, through inconvenient channels
- too costly
It’s hard to be objective about your own training, so reach out to a few users who are past the immediate onboarding stage and ask for feedback. How do they perceive the training now that they have had a chance to use it in real life? What would they change? (Simply reading evaluations delivered right after the training won’t do. They are called smile sheets for a reason).
Give users attractive options
If your assessment yielded mediocre results, rethink your onboarding program. Here are the key points:
- Address the users’ goals. What are the top 3-5 things that users need? If different populations have different needs, you will have to create different paths (you can reuse common modules, of course)
- Identify self-training opportunities vs. instructor-led scenarios. The flipped classroom model, where users consume some content on their own before being given an opportunity to ask questions and interact with an expert, is well worth exploring. Hint: include a test at the end of self-learning segments to make sure that the user is ready.
- Ideally, provide multiple delivery mechanisms. Fast readers prefer text; others may love videos, and videos are good if the visual experience is essential.
- Make it short. Most users have time issues. Short and incomplete may be better than long and thorough. On of my clients created a series of 2′ videos that can be viewed in succession and have become a hit.
- Plan for maintenance. An ambitious program may become worthless in a couple of months because it cannot keep up with product changes.
Hire a good instructional designer. They know all the tricks. Most bad training is created by well-meaning, technically knowledgeable amateurs.
Push onboarding
This is obviously much easier to do if the onboarding program is wonderful!
- Push it during the sales cycle. Sales reps can be very supportive of onboarding if they are convinced it’s good. Have them go through it as part of their own onboarding.
- Schedule it on the very first post-sales conversation. The longer you wait, the more the users will feel they don’t need it, even if they do.
- Feature it on the website. New users are added all the time, and existing users may want a refresh.
- Select the right facilitators for live training. A bored user will easily drift away.
- Measure attendance and completion. Customers love dashboards showing them whether users have gone through training. Make it easy for them, and their CSMs, to view their progress and how well they compare to other customers.
Are your customers fighting onboarding? What are you doing about it?
