Customer Onboarding Template

What was the last time you signed up for a service? Did you feel understood or completely lost during the onboarding process? 

Onboarding sets the tone for your relationship with your customers: If one customer receives a thorough and guided welcome but another has a threadbare experience, the second customer could churn out of frustration, causing you to lose money, time, and other resources. But before you panic, there’s an easy fix.

Deliver a quality onboarding experience for every single customer with the customer onboarding template from Slack. This resource enables companywide collaboration on one template, empowering you to continue to evolve and improve your onboarding experience for customers.

What is a client onboarding checklist template?

Customers form their impressions based on how you introduce them to your products, provide answers to their questions, and address their needs. A client onboarding checklist template is a tool that helps support agents access the right information to make a positive first impression and give new clients what they’re looking for. 

When your customer success team uses the new customer onboarding checklist, they can access your onboarding experience timeline, metrics, goals, legal obligations, onboarding checklist, progress trackers, and more on one organized page. This prevents them from wasting time getting lost in spreadsheets or various documents to find what they need. With this shared canvas, everyone works with the same, updated information that helps you track the customer onboarding process. You can build on the team’s success while customers receive a streamlined, uniform introduction to your business.

A client onboarding template should include the following: 

• Onboarding guide files for continuous reference
• A new checklist of onboarding steps 
• The support team’s contact information 
• Commonly asked questions and answers about the product
• Training resources for new team members 

A new client onboarding checklist template ensures agents follow all the steps for a smooth onboarding experience, which increases the chances customers will stick with your business (among other perks).

The benefits of a customer onboarding checklist template

A well-structured customer onboarding process can help set the stage for long-term success. By centralizing key resources and automating tasks, businesses can create a seamless and efficient onboarding experience that enhances customer satisfaction. With Slack’s customer onboarding template, teams can ensure that every new client receives consistent, high-quality support from day one.

Elevate your customer support experience

The customer onboarding template is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline your support processes and enhance communication. It bundles all essential documents, trackers, and tools, ensuring a seamless and efficient support experience for both your team and your customers. By centralizing key resources and automating tasks, it enables faster resolution times and improved customer satisfaction. With the customer onboarding process clearly defined from the start, you can ensure that each new client receives the best possible experience. This template is a great way to provide your team with everything they need to stay on track, build stronger relationships with clients, and meet customer goals.

Real-time communication for swift resolutions

At the heart of exceptional customer support is effective communication. The customer support template features real-time messaging, allowing your team to respond promptly to customer inquiries and issues. This instant communication channel fosters a more responsive and engaged support environment, ensuring that customers feel heard and valued at every stage of the customer journey. With the right tools in place, your team can easily handle requests, improving response time and customer retention. Having a direct line of communication at the first point of contact makes all the difference in client onboarding success.

Seamless onboarding and resource sharing

To ensure new customers have a smooth start, the template includes an onboarding checklist and support guide canvas. This feature allows you to share essential resources, guides, and FAQs with new customers, helping them get up to speed quickly and reducing the need for repetitive queries. By providing comprehensive and easily accessible information, you can enhance the customer onboarding experience from the first impression. Customers can learn how to navigate your products, access support, and understand your services with ease. Best of all, they’ll feel confident as they begin their customer journey with you.

Efficient task and feedback management

The customer support template also includes a shared task tracker list, enabling your team to keep track of action items and responsibilities. The list automatically populates with form submissions, making it easy to gather and manage customer feedback. With the onboarding checklist template, teams can ensure that no task is overlooked, from product training to handling client questions. Automatic task update alerts notify customers when their tasks are assigned, ensuring transparency and keeping them informed throughout the client onboarding process. This streamlined approach to task and feedback management not only improves efficiency but also builds trust and satisfaction among your customers. With real-time updates and organized feedback management, you can ensure that every step of the onboarding process is handled efficiently, making the onboarding experience even more effective.

By using this customer onboarding template, businesses can build a stronger foundation for their client relationships, ensuring that customers’ needs are met promptly and effectively. The customer success of your clients depends on this seamless onboarding experience, which in turn drives progress and helps your business thrive. This is an important tool to help guide new clients through their initial stage with clarity and confidence, ultimately leading to greater client success and satisfaction.

A new client checklist is usually part of a larger strategy to provide a streamlined onboarding experience. For many successful teams, this strategy also includes abiding by several tried and true principles to engage customers in this early stage.

Six best practices for creating a positive client onboarding experience

A positive onboarding experience isn’t just about following certain steps. To enhance the customer journey, your team needs to: 

1. Listen and track customer feedback 
2. Effectively communicate customers’ experiences with the product and dev teams 
3. Ensure timely engagement between customers and agents 
4. Foster smooth communication within the customer success team 
5. Update resources as needed 
6. Celebrate wins

The client onboarding process template has limitless capabilities that help you follow these best practices and create a valuable onboarding process and customer journey that builds stronger relationships with your customers. 

Let’s go over these six best practices and how to follow them:

1. Listen to and track customer feedback  

While listening to customers’ experiences is the first step to ensuring they feel heard, tracking their comments or reactions helps you assess whether the business is on the right track. 

Pro tip: A product feedback tracker makes it easy for agents to log issues or mark down what customers love.

2. Communicate the CX with the product and dev teams

Communicate all feedback on the customer experience with your product and dev teams so they can make product improvements. 

Pro tip: To make your life even easier, you could create a workflow automation that collects all feedback from a client onboarding form, adds it to a shared list, and sends a message to the product and development Slack channels, altering them to new feedback. 

3. Ensure timely engagement between customers and agents

A designated tool or space for agent-customer communications ensures fewer messages get lost between platforms. This means customers and agents know exactly where to go to check for updates, saving everyone time and energy. 

Pro tip: In Slack, you can archive or pin messages to avoid long threads that are difficult to follow. 

4. Foster smooth communication within the customer success team

Just like you need an easy way to communicate cross-departmentally and between the CS team and your customers, your team needs to search across files, messages, and channels to quickly troubleshoot issues and find answers. 

Pro tip: A customer support live chat can easily facilitate any exchange. 

5. Update resources as needed

A customer onboarding checklist is only as good as the resources on the list. Record all product updates, new goals, guide additions, and so on so your team can deliver a standardized experience. 

Pro tip: You can create canvas within Slack and edit it right on your customer onboarding template.

6. Celebrate wins

Keep agents’ motivation and morale high by highlighting and recognizing wins on the team’s communication platform. By transparently sharing successes, team members can celebrate with each other and encourage great service. 

Pro tip: Utilize emoji, gifs, or audio/video clips as a fun way to engage team members.