Three effective strategies for improving customer onboarding with AI

AI is changing just about everything within the SaaS and technology space. What was once time-consuming and tedious is becoming streamlined and automated, with customer success teams better able to manage their customers proactively. 

It’s easier than ever before to map out effective customer journeys with automated milestones and tasks. CSMs can keep better track of customer health and act on potential escalations thanks to the power of AI. And let’s not forget that sending out highly detailed recap emails after customer calls has never been easier. 

AI is here to stay and it will continue to make the lives of CSMs easier as it matures. How can we apply it to onboarding?

Onboarding is an essential part of any customer journey map, and sets the tone for the rest of the customer journey. Research by Wyzowl found that 86% of customers say their loyalty to a business is increased when they are offered a great onboarding experience. One major issue, however, is that so many software and tech companies are still using many manual processes. Onboarding needs to be seen as more than just getting your new customers familiar with the products or services they bought recently. It’s an opportunity to not only learn about what success looks like to them, but also a time where they learn about your company and how you are going to ensure their success. 

AI should be viewed as an elite personal assistant during this process. The human element is key to effective onboarding, especially for more complex products and services. However, AI can help streamline key areas that will ultimately improve the onboarding experience for your customers and your organization as a whole. 

While the onboarding process varies widely from company to company, here are three essential ways that every company can improve customer onboarding with AI. 

1: Scaled, personalized customer onboarding with AI

Use AI to analyze customer data and behavior patterns to create a personalized onboarding experience for each user. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, AI can identify the most relevant features, tools, or services for individual customers based on their industry, company size, or usage patterns.

Implementation Tips:

• Integrate AI tools that track user engagement and feedback during the onboarding process to continuously improve and personalize each experience.
• Implement chatbots powered by natural language processing to provide real-time, personalized assistance, guiding users through the onboarding process based on their specific needs and questions.
• AI tools to consider when improving your onboarding processes are WalkMe and UserPilot. Both tools use AI to analyze user interactions, optimizing the onboarding journey for clarity and engagement.

2: More Targeted and Value-Packed Content

Every company needs to think like a media company these days. Creating content and material that helps your customers see value in our products and services needs to be at the top of every organization’s priority list. AI can help create informative guides, video tutorials, and FAQs for customers. While AI shouldn’t replace content writers and quality marketing teams, it can act as an assistant to speed up the process of creating these valuable materials and tailoring them to fit customer needs. 

Implementation Tips:

• Use AI-driven analytics to segment customers into different cohorts, allowing for more targeted onboarding materials such as video tutorials, FAQs, and setup guides.
• Team up with marketing: start using AI tools to identify which materials are getting the most traction, and make more of them to boost customer engagement in the onboarding process and beyond. 
• Tools like Synthesia are ideal for creating AI-generated multimedia content at scale. Having a tool like this in your tech stack is the perfect way to automate content creation, while ensuring your content stays customer-focused and tailored to their evolving needs. 

 

3: Automated Feedback Collection and Analysis

Leverage AI to automate the collection and analysis of feedback throughout the onboarding process. This strategy involves using sentiment analysis and feedback loops to understand customer satisfaction in real time, allowing for immediate adjustments and improvements.

Implementation Tips:

• Implement AI tools to analyze feedback from surveys, support tickets, and social media mentions to gauge customer sentiment.
• Use sentiment analysis to identify patterns or common themes in feedback, helping to highlight areas of the onboarding process that need refinement.
• Establish automated feedback loops that prompt users for their input at critical milestones during onboarding, ensuring continuous improvement based on user experiences.
• Qualitrics XM is a leader in this field, using AI to analyze survey responses and feedback, identify key trends and sentiments in real-time, and adapt quickly to user needs.

 

As stated before, onboarding sets the tone for the rest of the customer journey. While the human element should never be overlooked, CS teams need to view AI as their personal assistant throughout this process. CS leaders, meanwhile, should be looking for ways to improve the day-to-day duties of their CSMs. Onboarding is the perfect place to start. 

Note: As you assess the exciting directions you can take with AI, it’s important to ensure that data is protected and customer trust is maintained. Read more about setting up the appropriate guardrails here, with advice from ChurnZero’s CEO You Mon Tsang.