Enhance Your Customer Relationships

In a recent article from Neil Patel entitled Only One SaaS Strategy he highlighted FreshBooks.com, an accounting software that sends recently on-boarded clients a cake. That’s right, cake.

In our minds, the cake itself is meaningless but the gesture goes a long way in showing personalized service.  Start to think about the on-boarding journey that your customers experience and ask yourself a few simple questions:

1. How effective is our onboarding process? Have we standardized the process to ensure consistency?
   • Follow up: How is our time-to-value compared to our competitors? Compared to best-in-class software? Are our implementation fees out of line?
2. During the transition from final sale to onboarding, have we been clear in our communication in setting expectations?
   • Follow up: Are we delivering on those expectations? How do we ensure a smooth transition from sales to onboarding and adoption?
3. Have we personalized the experience and do we feel invested in our customers’ success?
   • Do we know what our customers are trying to achieve independently of their relationship with our company? Are we a part of what they are trying to accomplish strategically? If not, can we get aligned?

Each interaction is an important step to building the relationship with the client – many times this relationship can become a deciding factor when an account is due for renewal.  Don’t go through the motions, but rather invest the time and energy to set the relationship up for success from the start.