Consider your customer onboarding process exemplary if your customer meets these two milestones: when they discover the value of your product, and when they first achieve something with that value. Between these two milestones is where you will do most of the hard work — work that will inevitably be guided by design.
Why design? Because more than the actual service, it is a good design that informs, interacts with, and inspires the customer. Great customer onboarding tools or apps blend these three to provide personalized and consistent customer experience.
Where should you incorporate design? Here’s where it should shine the brightest.
In your welcome e-mail
Did you know that only 58% of businesses send a welcome e-mail to new customers even it can generate up to 320% more revenue than standard newsletters and promotional e-mails?
Even just a simple but visually appealing welcome message appeals to an attentive customer. Don’t automate your welcome message. Send a genuine e-mail that provides a valuable resource to begin their learning journey or that points them to the best place to get started.
In setting expectations
Contrary to common practice, your new customers don’t need to be sold to further. Due to the endowment effect, once they’ve bought in, they’ve already understood the value of your product, it’s just a matter of motivating them to be loyal.
Structure their growth with an easy-to-follow progress meter or lesson calendar, and clarify what they should’ve already learned at every step.
In breaking things down
When onboarding new customers, assume they are starting from a blank slate. Utilize design to help your approach be more granular, and always base your customer’s progress on how they understand the product, not on how you expect the product to unfold.
Have you noticed how, when signing up for a social media account, they always encourage you to do the bare minimum to explore their otherwise multifaceted features? Just like that.
In making learning tools
Proficiency in design greatly contributes to diversifying the medium of your educational resources as well as in determining how the order of information should be structured. Establish learning modules as part of both a learning program and an on-demand compendium for further skill-building.
While you’re at it, make sure to collect learning engagement feedback to know how to improve their experience further.
In steering your service
Even though your customer is comfortable enough to navigate through your product by themselves, the efficient design should still affect their exploration. How many times have you given up on a mobile application, a website, or any interface just because you couldn’t find a particular page or it kept asking you to log in? Exactly.
In this regard, the design should always center around user interaction, information architecture, and of course, applicability. The simpler, the better.
In keeping close contact
Want to provide excellent customer support? Your on-page chatbots should be visible and responsive. Design the persona to be as close to a human being as possible, and the automated responses should pinpoint common concerns, as well.
Just as you rely on skilled engineers to develop the best product, you should invest in great user experience designers to make learning about your product as easy and rewarding as possible for new customers.
