Building a customer onboarding strategy

Simply put, customer onboarding is the first step of the customer journey, and, arguably, the most important since it sets the stage for your relationship with them. Taking a customer-centric approach to onboarding will increase the customer lifetime value and might transform new users into brand advocates.
As with most things, this is easier said than done, but worry not! This article is meant to help you set up a customer onboarding process for using Storyblok.

Create specific goals

Clearly the main goal is to onboard your customer, but you need to be more specific than that. The first step in setting specific goals is knowing your clients and their distinct needs. Do they have a content creation team? Are they externalizing these types of tasks? Do they have the resources for maintenance and development tasks? By asking the right questions, you will be able to pinpoint clear objectives and start working on an onboarding plan according to how they will use Storyblok and their business objectives.

Establish an onboarding team

Now that you have established the goals and you know the dimensions of the onboarding plan (also a result of knowing your client), you can start thinking about the team that will guide the client through this process. Ideally, in your relationship with the client, you already have a customer success manager or an account manager. Having a pre-existing relationship built on trust with the client, this person can further guide them into the next steps with the help of a subject matter expert, an instructional designer, and depending on the project size, a project manager. Each of these roles can be performed by more or less people. It is not uncommon that one person from your team can have two or more roles.

Align process to milestones and metrics

When setting up the onboarding plan, it is important to also set some milestones, metrics, and even deliverables, like course materials. Our recommendation is to discuss these with your clients and make sure you come to an agreement on what is considered a successful onboarding.

Generate learning content

Having done all the planning, now comes the practical part: generating the learning content, based on your findings from the previous steps.
The creation of extensive documentation can be a time and energy consuming activity when it comes to legacy CMSs. Best practices dictate that the documentation will contain detailed instructions, a custom step by step guide, for each page and field.
You can also rely on a more visual approach, using visual aids like video materials and click-tutorials of the actual project.

Storyblok already has a list of resources you can use as they are or as inspiration for more specific training materials.

Our YouTube channel

On our youtube channel you will find a number of short editor guides which you can use both as they are and as an inspiration for your own tutorials. We recommend you to keep them as short and as simple as possible, to give clear titles for easy referencing and to focus on one thing per video.

Our partner portal

As our partners you can join the Partner Portal and benefit from access to our Learning Center. You will be the first to know when a new learning opportunity is available which provides access to educational & promotional material, white-label sales decks as well as technical implementation guides to enable faster selling.
One of the courses we will offer will be on Editor Training Basics, meant to help you empower your clients in using their magic wand: Storyblok.

Implement the onboarding program

Now that you have prepared a theoretical and practical approach you can start implementing the onboarding program according to the established milestones and schedule.
Our recommendation is to stay flexible during this process. While it is vital to keep the milestones and stay on track to reaching the objectives, the onboarding process can be fine-tuned during its run. Be an active listener in the relationship with your customer and adjust accordingly to their feedback.
It can also be helpful for future onboarding processes to make note of errors and achievements, a type of “lessons learned” list.

Follow-up

During the onboarding process it is important you check-in with your client, at regular intervals, to see if any new pain points have arisen.

Best practices

Aside from these general steps, we also have some recommendations with regards to best practices. It bears repeating that you need to study your customer. Find out what about their preferences and obstacles you might face, and shape your content and approach accordingly.
This might also be redundant, but onboarding needs to be a personalized experience. Of course, you can re-use training materials you created for other clients, but always make sure they are tailored to your current customer.
And, last but definitely not least, always measure results. The end-goal here is to improve customer experience, meaning you should keep attentive track of feedback and metrics, and keep working on perfecting the process.

Conclusion

The red thread going through this article is understanding your customer. The better your analysis is, the easier it will be to offer them a great customer experience and, as a result, you will also see a change in customer satisfaction and retention.