Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
Successful businesses thrive on an ever-growing base of customers. But the reality is that acquiring new customers is as crucial as retaining and keeping them happy. According to the book Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% and just about 5-20% for a new customer.
To keep your customers happy and help them achieve their desired outcomes with your product, you need an effective customer success strategy. When you help your customer win, you win as well. Customers won’t just buy your products; they'll become loyal advocates for your brand and keep coming back for more.
So, what are the most effective customer success strategies that work? In this post, we’ll show you what a customer success strategy is, why you need it and 10 practical customer success strategies to retain your best customers.
Let’s dive in.
A customer success strategy is a high-level framework or tactics businesses deploy to deliver value to customers throughout their entire lifecycle—from initial onboarding to future engagements.
This approach revolves around gaining deeper insights into your customer's unique needs, aspirations and blockers. It involves proactive measures to help customers achieve their goals and derive maximum benefit from the products or services they have purchased.
Customer success goes beyond just providing proactive customer support or account-based management. It's about creating share-worthy experiences for individual clients that align with your business goals and vision.
Keep in mind that every company’s journey with its customers is different. Even within the same company, your journey with customers may take different paths. With an effective customer success strategy, you can make sure individual customers are satisfied, engaged and getting value from your products or services.
Both customer success and customer experience are closely related concepts but differ in scope and objectives.
Customer Experience (CX) is the total of all experiences a customer has with your brand, including customer service, product quality, website usability and more.
CX adopts a holistic approach and aims to optimize all touchpoints and interactions that can shape a client's perception of your brand. CX teams focus on developing a lasting connection with clients and creating incredible experiences across different touchpoints.
Customer success ensures customers achieve their objectives by effectively utilizing your product and service. Compared to CX, customer success takes a more specialized approach. Customer success teams provide personalized support, guidance and resources to help customers derive maximum value from their investment or purchase.
Customer success and service teams share a common objective: to serve customers. However, their approaches to achieving this goal differ significantly.
Customer Success teams adopt a proactive stance. Their role involves not only advocating for customers but also proactively identifying and resolving potential issues before customers realize.
In contrast, customer support teams are generally reactive. They respond to incoming queries and concerns, aiming to rectify situations after they've occurred or enlighten users on how to accomplish specific tasks. These teams play a vital role in troubleshooting and educating users, ensuring issues are resolved effectively.
Having a customer success strategy pays off. Not only is it a winning business strategy, but it’s a critical success factor for any company that wants to scale growth.
Here are some specific benefits of developing a customer success methodology.
| Benefit | Reasons |
| Increase Customer Satisfaction | Customer success ensures customers are constantly winning by offering personalized services, anticipating issues, and addressing them proactively. This leads to loyal brand advocates who spread positive word of mouth. |
| High Customer Retention | Happy customers are more likely to stay loyal, reducing churn and driving repeat purchases. This helps cut down on expensive acquisition efforts while boosting customer lifetime value (CLTV) and overall revenue. |
| Upsells and Cross-sells | Satisfied customers are more inclined to accept additional product or service offers, increasing revenue per customer and maximizing CLTV. |
| Develop Stellar Products | Customer feedback is a crucial component of a successful strategy, helping improve products or services to better align with customer needs and preferences. |
| Increased Competitive Advantage | Exceptional customer service and proactive support differentiate your business from competitors. Understanding customer needs and adapting to market demands keeps you ahead of the competition. |
The Customer Success Journey and Lifecycle represent the various stages and experiences a customer goes through, from their first interaction with a company to becoming a loyal, long-term customer.
When you understand what a client is looking to achieve when using your product, you can map out a journey that helps them achieve those goals as quickly as possible.
Here's a breakdown of the typical stages in a customer success journey and lifecycle:
Made with Visme Infographic Maker
1. Awareness: The customer learns about your product or service through marketing, advertising, referrals, or other means. Your goal at this stage should be to create a positive first impression and generate interest.
2. Consideration: At this stage, the user conducts research to get detailed information and reviews and also evaluates your offering against competitors. Aim to provide in-depth, accurate information to help the customer make an informed decision.
3. Decision: This is where the customer decides to buy your product or service and completes the transaction. Make your buying process seamless, user-friendly and barrier-free.
4. Onboarding: The customer starts using your product or service and learns about the features and functionalities. Provide effective onboarding to help customers get started and experience initial value quickly (more in the latter part of this article)
5. Adoption: The customer incorporates your product into their routine, exploring advanced features and benefits. Encourage active usage, demonstrating the product's full potential and addressing initial challenges.
6. Retention (Renewal or Repurchase): For subscription-based services, the customer decides to renew their subscription. But for physical products or usage-based services, customers may decide to repurchase. Provide clear value propositions and incentives for renewal, ensuring a smooth and attractive renewal process.
7. Expansion: The client explores and adopts additional services, features, or upgrades.
Identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, showcasing additional value propositions.
8. Advocacy: Satisfied customers become advocates, referring others and sharing positive experiences. Nurture relationships, encourage feedback and leverage satisfied customers for testimonials and case studies.
9. Reactivation (If Necessary): The customer churns for various reasons like product fit, pricing or better offers from competitors. Re-engage with inactive or lost customers and understand their concerns. Address concerns, demonstrate improvements, provide tailored solutions and rekindle their interest in your product or service.
Understanding and optimizing each stage of the customer success journey and lifecycle is vital for building strong customer relationships, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving business growth.
Remember to tailor your strategies and support efforts according to the specific needs and challenges customers face at each stage.
When it comes to customer success, there are various proven techniques that can help you retain customers and drive growth.
An effective customer success strategy starts with understanding what matters to your customers. What are their needs, goals and pain points? What does value mean to them? With this information, you can build out the rest of your customer success strategy to achieve its intended purpose.
Let's dive into ten proven customer success strategies. Remember to stay agile and adapt your approach as your customers' needs evolve over time.
Once you've identified your buyer persona or ideal customer profile, the next step is identifying their path to reach your brand.
It's not enough to define the stages of your customer journey. You also need to pinpoint the goals you want to achieve at each stage.
Getting it right at this stage helps you:
One way to figure out your customer journey is by creating buyer persona surveys with tools like Visme.
Another way to define your customer's journey is by using a journey map. A customer journey map visualizes the different stages a customer goes through when interacting with your business.
This map starts by highlighting the target users. It further splits the journey stages into awareness, consideration and conversion. The map captures the activities at each stage as prospects move from awareness to conversion. You can expand this template to include activities that go into driving repeat purchases and customer loyalty.
The customer journey stage is not a one-size-fits-all. Unlike the customer success strategy template, this one splits the customer journey stages into reach, research, consideration, conversion and review.
In addition, you can create a touchpoint map to plan out the customer experience. It helps you identify touch points where you can engage with customers.
When executing this task, make it a collaborative process. This eliminates the silo mentality and gets everyone on the same page. Use Visme’s online whiteboard and collaboration feature to improve collaboration and communication across teams of all sizes. Everyone on your team can edit or leave comments or draw annotations in real time.
Also, you can assign different sections of the document or project to specific team members to work on using the Workflow feature.
By understanding the customer journey, you can optimize each stage to ensure a seamless and positive experience every step of the way.
Your customer success plan is a detailed document that describes what success means for your customers. It also outlines the strategies and support to help them achieve that success.
Think of it as a clear roadmap that guides the operations of your customer success team. It not only articulates the benchmarks of success but also ensures
Sr. Customer Success Manager, Visme
So, what should a customer success plan include? Here’s an exhaustive list of elements to include in your customer success plan:
Visme offers a wide range of stunning templates and resources for creating action plans and strategies.
When designing your client’s onboarding experience, don’t deploy a generalized approach. Instead, personalize it according to these factors:
Personalized onboarding experiences accelerate proficiency and client adoption of your product. Also, when there’s individualized engagement, customers will reach their value realization moments quickly. This also builds rapport and increases their confidence in your brand.
Provide tutorials and resources specific to the customer's industry or use case. Customize your training materials, videos, or documentation to focus on the features and workflows most relevant to user requirements using the template below.
Offer interactive, step-by-step walkthroughs within the product, guiding users through essential features based on their user profile or goals.
Provide real-life examples and case studies from your customer's industry. The goal is to showcase how similar businesses have benefited from your product.
Here’s an impressive case study one-pager you can use right away.
And if you prefer multi-paged case studies, use the one below to get started.
You can publish and share this case study online. Alternatively, you can download them in multiple formats and share them with your clients offline.
Your personalization efforts shouldn't just end with providing your clients with training materials and resources. Assign a dedicated onboarding manager or specialist to each new customer to guide them through the setup process. Also, schedule periodic check-ins (calls or video meetings) to check the customer's progress, answer questions and provide personalized assistance.
Be sure to empower your agent with effective customer success training. To learn more, read our practical guide to creating customer success training for new clients. We’ve included a wide range of customizable templates to get you started.
Customer feedback is invaluable. It helps you feel their pulse as you make iterative improvements to your customer success efforts.
Start by implementing a feedback loop that encourages customers to leave feedback. You can collect customer feedback through surveys, interviews, focus groups, online reviews, website analytics, online communities, or other methods.
Feedback mechanisms like NPS and CSAT can provide a high-level understanding of customer satisfaction. However, they lack the granularity to identify specific issues.
Focused in-app feedback methods such as feature fit index/ sentiments and customer effort score and average feedback response rate give you better insights into opportunities for improvement.
But what's the use of having a pile of data if you don't act on it? Regularly analyze the feedback data collected during this process. Then, glean valuable time insights and use them to make iterative improvements based on customer suggestions and preferences.
You can even incorporate this data into your product roadmap, customer support processes, marketing strategies and other aspects of your business.
At Visme, we collect valuable feedback from our users from a wide range of sources, including the Visme community, third-party review sites, onboarding surveys and social media, among others. These insights are fed into every aspect of our business—from customer support to product development to marketing to operations and beyond.
Retaining existing customers is as important as acquiring new ones. While setting your sights on new clients, develop a mechanism to monitor the health of existing customers or spot churn red flags.
High churn creates a “leaky bucket” situation where you may be acquiring new customers, but that topline growth is being negated by customers who are leaving (churn).
Develop a sophisticated customer health scoring system that considers various health metrics such as product usage, adoption rate, engagement, customer satisfaction and feedback.
Set up monitoring systems in your CRM to track these metrics and trigger alerts when there are signs of dissatisfaction or disengagement. You can also leverage customer success tools like Gainsight, Smartkarrot, Custify, HubSpot, and others to track your customer health score.
For example, HubSpot’s Customer Success Management tool lets you set up a series of customized health metrics and visualize all your customers’ health scores within a single dashboard.
This lets you proactively identify at-risk or churn-prone customers. By identifying patterns and behaviors indicative of potential churn, you can take proactive measures to retain customers before they leave.
In every business, churn is inevitable. At some point, you may have to offboard users for many different reasons. But you can draw lessons from them or turn them into an advantage. For example, you can share churn or exit surveys to collect valuable feedback. Better yet, make last-ditch efforts to prevent clients from pulling the trigger, such as
Value realization is the aha moment when a customer discovers the value of your product or service.
Accelerating this moment can reduce the number of prospects that fall off or churn during the sales process. It also plays a crucial role in turning shoppers into long-term customers and loyal advocates.
The best part is that it builds the foundation for future and ongoing engagement, retention and opportunities for upsells.
But when and where does value realization happen during the customer journey? Well, that's subjective. Value realization differs based on the type of product or service as well as the priorities and needs of the client.
For example, if you offer a free trial or demo for your SaaS product, value realization may happen during that stage. But for a physical product like Adidas running shoes, the value realization may occur at different times, including:
Whether you're a B2B, B2C or DTC company, you need to uncover where value occurs for your customers and measure that moment.
Focus on reducing the amount of time required to recognize value. Customers should see signs of success with your product or service earlier in their journey.
So, how can your customer success team spot the aha moment that delivers value to users?
These exercises help you evaluate value delivery from the perspective of the intended consumer. Also, a customer success manager strategy helps you unveil opportunities that bring the moment of value realization further up the funnel.
Customer success is about helping the customer explore the full potential of your product. Educating your customers is an effective way to achieve this.
Educated customers tend to have an in-depth understanding of your products and functionalities. This allows them to maximize the full value of your product.
And by customer education, we don't mean the materials and in-app walkthroughs you provide during onboarding. You'll have to proactively educate customers at every stage of their journey.
Engaged customers are less likely to churn. On top of that, educated clients are more receptive to upsells or cross-sell opportunities and better equipped to advocate for your brand.
So, where do you start? Beyond basic product knowledge, you want to explore other strategies, like
Visme provides a wide range of intuitive tools, features and templates for creating interactive customer onboarding and training materials.
Provide basic knowledge about your products and services using brochures, flyers, sell sheets, product specification sheets, data sheets, product one-pagers, sales one-pagers and other one-pagers.
Incorporate icons, stock photos and videos to boost customer engagement. Make it even better by aligning them with your company’s branding using the Brand Wizard.
Showcase how other similar companies have achieved success with your products with multi-page case studies or case study one pagers.
Create interactive training modules, guides and other resources with interactive features available in Visme. You can incorporate animated icons, illustrations, hover effects, pop ups, quizzes, polls and other special effects.
Record presentations and share them with customers so they can view them at their own pace with Visme’s presentation recording software. Or create captivating and engaging video walkthroughs with our video maker.
In addition, anyone, regardless of their design level, can create interactive training manuals, courses, onboarding checklists, presentations and other types of visual content.
Tap into the comprehensive library of stock photos in Visme’s library. And if you don’t find the perfect visuals, use Visme’s AI text to image generator to develop unique and high-quality visuals in different formats.
Don’t stop at just educating customers about your product. Keep them informed about industry trends, best practices and new product features. This will establish your brand as an authority in the industry and build trust among your customer base.
Need help creating training content or thought-leadership pieces? Visme’s AI writer can help you generate valuable content in seconds. You can even use it to develop an outline or proofread your existing pieces.
With the analytics tool, you can measure the effectiveness of your training materials. It captures metrics like Views, Unique Visits, Average time, Average Completion and more.
Kalyn firmly believes that our deliberate approach to customer education has been instrumental in maintaining Visme's impressive 90% retention rate within our key accounts.
Head of Sales and Customer Experience, Visme
Proactive account management is a vital aspect of the customer success strategy and operations. It’s about taking proactive steps to ensure customers fully maximize your product to achieve their goals.
It all starts with assigning dedicated account managers to key customers. These managers should have a deep understanding of your customer's industries, challenges and goals. They should be able to spot potential roadblocks or challenges and work with customers to resolve any issues before they impact their experience.
Proactive account management involves several key activities:
Proactive communication and strategic guidance yields results. It helps you stay ahead of potential issues and offer targeted solutions that can enhance the user experience.
Making the renewal process smooth, efficient and customer-friendly increases the number of repeat purchases.
Provide customers with easy-to-understand contract terms, pricing options and payment plans. Also, set up automated renewal reminders via email, SMS, or in-app notifications to alert customers about upcoming renewals. By doing this, you’ll avoid last-minute surprises or misunderstandings.
Offer flexible payment plans, such as monthly, quarterly, or annually, to accommodate different budgetary constraints. Set up automated payment processing systems to simplify the billing process and reduce the risk of payment delays.
Consider offering self-service portals where customers can review contract details, initiate renewals and make payments independently. With an opt-in automated renewal system, customers can seamlessly continue their subscriptions without manual intervention.
Send personalized thank-you messages after successful renewals. Make sure to request feedback on the renewal experience to identify areas for improvement and enhance future renewals.
After implementing your tactics, how do you know if your customer success efforts are working? How do you spot areas that need improvement? The solution is to monitor customer success metrics and KPIs
It helps you gain profound insights into what truly drives results. Without these metrics, you risk inefficient spending or unknowingly teetering on the edge of a business catastrophe.
Here are key metrics to assess your team's performance:
Customer success shouldn’t just be about the customers. Your efforts or investment must translate into positive returns and other benefits for your brand.
Below are some key metrics for gauging the impact of your efforts in terms of revenue and business growth.
You might want to ask. Do I track all of these metrics? Or how do I prioritize what’s most important? It's simple. Simply assign values or weights to each KPI based on its significance to your business and customers.
Set targets or threshold values for each KPI using historical data, customer objectives, or industry benchmarks as your guide.
Track the performance of your sales and customer success team using this interactive analytics report template below.
By comprehensively measuring these metrics, you not only validate your efforts but also steer your customer success initiatives toward impactful, revenue-generating outcomes.
The “3Ps of Customer Success—People, Process and Product—are three key elements fundamental to a successful customer success strategy.
One-to-Many Customer Success Strategy refers to an approach where customer success efforts are scaled to efficiently serve multiple customers simultaneously rather than providing individualized attention to each customer.
This strategy is particularly useful for businesses with a large customer base or a Software as a Service (SaaS) model where personalized interactions for every customer might be impractical. It enables them to deliver valuable resources and support efficiently while focusing on customer satisfaction and retention.
A customer success plan is a strategic document that lays out what customer success means and how your business will help its customers achieve their goals and objectives using the company’s products or services. It serves as a roadmap for ensuring customer success and satisfaction throughout their journey with the company.
Investing in customer success keeps your customers happy and coming back for me. This translates into massive growth and success for your business. By following the strategies we’ve shared above, you can streamline customer success efforts.
One word of caution: Don’t just create a strategy document that’s collecting dust on the shelf. Act on it and continue to iterate as the product continues to evolve and your customers’ needs change.
More importantly, investing in the right set of tools can help keep things organized. And that's why you need a complete tool like Visme. With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily develop your customer success plan and create valuable marketing, sales, client onboarding, customer training and feedback materials.
In addition, Visme offers templates for creating stunning visual content, including case studies, brochures, flyers, proposals, product sell sheets, one-pagers, videos, presentations, infographics, ads, reports, manuals, ebooks and much more.
Request a demo to discover how Visme can help your company boost sales and customer retention.
Design visual brand experiences for your business whether you are a seasoned designer or a total novice.
Try Visme for free
