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The Gist
- First impressions matter. Onboarding is crucial for setting the tone of the entire customer experience, influencing feedback, engagement and success.
- AI transforms onboarding. Utilizing AI in onboarding can personalize experiences, predict needs and automate tasks for a more efficient process.
- Strategic onboarding objectives. A well-planned onboarding process should set engagement pace, demonstrate professionalism and focus on accelerating time-to-value.
From the moment a sale is made, the customer onboarding process is your first opportunity to demonstrate the value and commitment of your brand, ensuring customers feel welcomed, informed and ready to succeed with your product or service.
Further, and possibly even more important, onboarding has the potential to be foundational to every aspect of your CX strategy, including feedback, engagement, success, advocacy and customer-centered transformation.
What Is Onboarding and Why You Should Care
Let’s start this with a definition. This may not be your definition or even a generally accepted description of customer onboarding. It’s ours:
Customer Onboarding:engaging customers immediately post-sale to deliver the order and position them for the successful attainment of desired outcomes. It is the onramp for each customer into your CX strategy.
First Impressions
First impressions tend to be lasting impressions. This is so regardless of whether your customers are consumers, businesses, patients, passengers, students, citizens or investors. The point of a CX strategy is to ensure that your customers gracefully get past the commercial transaction and enjoy (or at least tolerate without plugging their nose) a painless experience with what you sold them so as to reap the rewards they were promised.
It’s generally easiest to envision this in a B2B environment. Given that many B2C transactions entail nearly simultaneous sale, payment, delivery and attainment of value, the notion of consumer onboarding often isn’t as intuitive. But it’s there, and it’s important, and we’ve seen it transformed by AI.
Like Buying a Car
Think about the onboarding process for buying a car. The thrill of buying the car is often more than offset by the pain of the paperwork and the complexity of the actual handover of the product (after spending an extraordinary amount of time in a dingy little “financing” office).
Hospital and clinic admissions can be equally brutal. Think of how long it takes to get from an emergency room admission to a hospital bed. Or from a hospital bed to a skilled nursing facility. Or from diagnosis to procedure or surgery.
Or from student enrollment to course completion and then a job (or enlightenment!). In a completely different and possibly less dramatic scenario, consider what it usually takes to travel the road from ordering software to receiving, installing, configuring, deploying and then optimizing its use to realize the intended value.
Onboarding is everywhere:
- The sale of a house is one part contracting and one part onboarding.
- Checkout at the grocery store involves sorting, price verification, payment, packaging of goods and more.
- Getting a haircut, at least for me, includes adding my name to the queue and selecting a stylist on an iPhone app and then driving to the shop, waiting in the physical queue while watching a bit of baseball, confirming what services are to be delivered and then getting my remaining hairs cut.
- Buying a book, either online or in an actual bookstore, similarly means price verification, selection among price and delivery options and payment.
- Boarding an airplane or train is, well, onboarding.
And, as with most other aspects of commerce, there is a plethora of AI applications or use cases for onboarding.
Setting the Tone
From a CX perspective, setting the right tone for our customers in these initial interactions sets the customer on the right track for success, conveying the right impression of your customer centricity and commitment to painless (even pleasant) customer outcomes. Methodical, straightforward, speedy, proactive and even educational are the adjectives that should describe the ideal onboarding experience. And, yes, advanced AI can help design and deliver this.
Look at Salesforce in the B2B space. The company exemplifies the use of AI in customer onboarding through its Einstein platform. Einstein AI integrates across the Salesforce customer success platform to personalize the onboarding experience for business customers. By analyzing customer interactions, service history and business needs, Einstein provides tailored recommendations for additional products, setup configurations and educational content. This personalized approach not only accelerates onboarding but also reveals new upsell and cross-sell opportunities while doing so in a customer-centric manner.
Related Article: Successful Customer Onboarding: A Quick Guide
But First: Strategic Objectives of Onboarding
Customer onboarding can cover quite a lot of ground, especially when you think of it as the onramp to an entire CX strategy. To keep us focused, here are the essential features or objectives of a strategic onboarding program:
- Set the pace and nature of your customer engagement model: For every new customer it’s important to demonstrate not just a level of continuity but a sense of momentum beyond the promises of the sale and into the realization of those promises. To the customer, this must feel less like reengagement and more like a continuous process from sale to delivery to attainment of outcomes.
- Demonstrate the professionalism and customer outcomes-orientation of your organization by efficiently and effectively engaging with the customer and introducing new players and processes that are homogeneously committed to fulfilling the customer’s objectives.
- Setting the stage and the right expectations within your own organization by demonstrating how a systematic, coordinated approach to putting the client at the center of how products or services are delivered creates value for both parties — your customer and your own company.
- Collecting and propagating customer data (and more qualitative characterizations) that will be key to helping that customer effectively take delivery of the product, attain their objectives and be forward-looking about future value contributors.
- Focusing everyone involved on acceleration of time-to-value through effective and efficient product adoption, as well as value realization.
A Critical Part of the Journey
For Ruth Veloria, chief strategy and customer officer at University of Phoenix and Experience Alliance member, “Onboarding for students is a critical part of their journey because it sets the stage for each consecutive experience. Students need to build the confidence that they can be successful. We use several pieces of information about our students to better prepare them: Do they have previous credits? Are they the first in their family to go to college? Have they started somewhere before and had to take a break? Today, we use this approach to prescribe an in-depth onboarding process. In the future, we will enhance our assessment of student engagement with more tools, such as advanced AI and predictive analytics, to deliver personalized nudges that will accelerate student progress from the earliest days of onboarding through the entire student lifecycle.”
The University of Phoenix approach to onboarding is focused on every one of the strategic objectives defined above: setting the pace, demonstrating an outcomes orientation, setting high expectations within the university, taking maximum advantage of data and accelerating time to value for students. Check, check, check, check and check.
Related Article: Designing a Winning User Onboarding Experience
Lots of AI Use Cases for Customer Onboarding
Consider the different types of AI use cases: data analysis and insights; predictive analytics; automation; coaching, training and education; content development; and personalization. The world is awash with AI opportunities, and all aspects of CX are no exceptions as interesting targets for thoughtful and impactful AI.
We can cut through some of the noise though and look at a slate of examples, organized by use case type and CX functional domains — all specifically aimed at onboarding. Every one of these use cases is designed to take advantage of a thoughtful onboarding program for the benefit of all aspects of the entire CX strategy, across every subsequent step in the customer journey.
Table 1: AI use cases for customer onboarding to impact all other aspects of the customer journey. Note: highlighted cells are further detailed in the discussion below this table:
This table is not intended to show the exhaustive list of AI use cases for strategic onboarding. Instead, the idea is to look at the onboarding program with an eye toward how the program can better position the entire CX strategy from the earliest customer interactions and product experiences.
Specific Examples: Consider These to Get the Ball Rolling
Customer Feedback/Coaching, training, & education — distillation of feedback & implications for employees to support ongoing education on product usage and attainment of outcomes
Feedback early and often is, of course, a hallmark of a strong CX program. Bringing customers into a sustainable, manageable and minimally invasive feedback loop in the earliest days of onboarding can yield invaluable insights in real-time for your team. The speed of advanced AI analytics creates a new opportunity for doing this based on feedback from your customer for the benefit of that same customer as they progress through onboarding.
Customer Engagement/Automation and process efficiency — automated engagement through chatbots and triggers for human action
Process automation is one of the more obvious AI opportunities in onboarding. Advanced automation techniques can either execute next steps or trigger human action by a customer success manager across the customer onboarding process. This has twofold benefits: automation means economies, and it also means consistency in how customers are guided through the process.
Customer Success/Data analytics & insights use case — identification of product usage success patterns & realized value for best practice sharing
Realized value is the most fundamental tenet of the modern customer success and customer experience strategy. Starting off on the right foot with an onboarding program creates the platform for value realization. Advanced AI can provide new customers with specific, customized guidance based on how similar customers have already achieved results in similar circumstances.
Customer Advocacy/Predictive analytics — next likely purchase guidance & new target customers, markets based on early engagement and product experiences
Go beyond identifying and abating churn, even while onboarding customers. Look early and often (and with an especially deft touch) at what the next likely purchase should be for your customer, even (or maybe especially) as they are progressing through the onboarding process. AI’s predictive analytics can help you anticipate and plan for that add-on cross-sell by looking at desired outcomes and current actions in the earliest days of product ownership.
Customer Advocacy/Personalization — delivering the right customer content to the right prospect, in the right way, at the right time
Here again, the speed of advanced AI, along with hyper-personalization of AI-developed content, can illustrate the value of a successful onboarding experience to the next customer in near real-time.
Customer Centered transformation/Content development — Collateral for employee consumption to encourage & facilitate change & transformation efforts
If you accept the principle that a thoughtful customer onboarding program can make a huge impact on the overall CX strategy, it’s not a great leap to see how customers progressing through advanced, AI-enabled onboarding can generate contemporaneous content as proof points for your team to see the benefits of their actions. There is no better accelerator than that for a CX-driven transformation.
Some Challenges and Limitations of AI in Customer Onboarding
While AI offers enormous advantages in onboarding, it’s important to acknowledge some challenges and limitations. Data privacy concerns are paramount, as AI systems require access to vast amounts of personal and behavioral data to function effectively. Ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and maintaining customer trust is crucial.
Additionally, the complexity of AI systems can lead to high implementation costs and the need for specialized talent to manage and interpret AI outputs.
There’s also the risk of over-reliance on automation, which can detract from the personal touch that is often critical in building strong customer relationships.
Addressing these challenges requires a balanced approach that combines AI’s efficiency with human empathy and oversight.
Related Article: Doubling Down on Customer Retention? Don’t Forget Your Onboarding Process
AI Is Definitely a Big Part of Way Forward
To transform your customer onboarding with AI, start by asking your customer what they don’t like about onboarding. Consider implementing AI-driven personalization to tailor the experience for each customer, using predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs, and automate routine tasks for efficiency. By taking these steps, you can create a more engaging, efficient and effective onboarding experience that not only delights your customers but also sets the stage for a long-lasting and rewarding relationship.
Unique Analytical Abilities
Leveraging AI’s unique analytical capabilities, predictive modeling, automation proficiency and personalization prowess, organizations can unlock limitless opportunities to transform the otherwise mundane onboarding process into the platform for your CX strategy.
It’s no surprise that everyone wants a methodical, straightforward, speedy, proactive, educational, easy and enjoyable onboarding experience. What might well be surprising is that the same onboarding experience can set the tone — and even enable — every other aspect of your customer’s journey. That will in turn enable you to more effectively deploy CX programs that improve revenue and profitability.
Final Word
Brian O’Neill, chief client officer at Numerated and Experience Alliance member, says it best: “As a financial technology provider, our AI strategy has been outward facing. Put simply, we are leveraging AI to improve our products while making them more marketable. What do they say about the cobbler’s son? So too for an AI provider. Our next step in the AI journey will be focused on CES — the Client Effort Score whereby our deployment drives a more simplified experience, starting with onboarding and then progressing into ticket resolution and leveraging data across the entire client lifecycle to get ahead of churn. It’s not just about a product. AI has to be grounded in all facets of our operations to drive sustained success, retention, and ultimately a client’s willingness to recommend (demonstrated by their willingness to buy more).”
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