This document serves as a comprehensive guide to client onboarding, emphasizing the importance of a standardized onboarding process to ensure a positive client experience and drive long-term satisfaction. It outlines key steps for successful onboarding, such as assessing client needs, setting goals, and maintaining communication, while also highlighting best practices like automating processes and encouraging feedback. Ultimately, the guide suggests that effective onboarding can significantly enhance client retention and generate referrals, making it a critical component of business strategy.

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Client Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide (& Free
Template)
process.st/client-onboarding
When it comes to client onboarding, you’re responsible for making the best first
impression possible. Without proper standardization, it can be too easy for things to slip
through the cracks.
Luckily, standardization can stop you from fumbling the bag. You do want to ace your
client onboarding, right?
Here at Process Street, we love to turn everything we do into a process. Client
onboarding is one of those recurring things we needed to standardize into a repeatable
workflow. It’s through this standardization that we’re able to provide consistent onboarding
experiences to our clients.
And these clients love the process too, so much so that we’ve got an endless list of
quotes like this:
“Before Process Street, we would probably hold our new employees’ hands for a
good month. But now we’ll show them something for two weeks and then we’re able
to throw them into things.”
Ellie Rego, Product Manager at Wodify
Through the thousands of clients we’ve onboarded throughout the years, we’ve been able
to understand that great client onboarding is all about having a super strong system in
place.
A system that allows us to:
Move quickly
Understand exactly what it is each partner needs
Maintain close communication
Provide an action-oriented framework that drives stellar client experience
Here’s a guide to get you doing the same.
What is client onboarding?
Client onboarding is the process of welcoming new clients into your services. The goal is
to make sure you start off on the right foot, and start providing value for them ASAP.
It’s also a time during which important information will be exchanged to facilitate work and
prevent bottlenecks.

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SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are often used to clarify deliverables and establish a
timeline.
Length of client onboarding will depend on the complexity of the product or service being
offered. Your client onboarding may take the form of a simple welcome email and a
meeting with project stakeholders, or it may involve a complex, month-long setup cycle.
Often, client onboarding will incorporate key milestones, to help track progress and
understand “when onboarding ends”. What that looks like will depend on how you work
with your client, and what kind of service or product you’re offering. More complex
services, and more complex problems may require longer, more complex onboarding.
Either way, the goal will remain the same: Client satisfaction.
Your ultimate goal while onboarding is to make your new clients feel as though they’ve
made the right choice by choosing your company.
Examples of client onboarding
There are many examples where client onboarding can add value and help to improve
the quality of the product or service you’re offering, thereby improving long-term business.
For example, you could be an IT managed services provider dealing with complex
technical problems per client. Having a client onboarding process in place helps you
establish a roadmap, lay down reasonable expectations for deliverables, and exchange
important information to reassure your client and address any immediate questions or
concerns they might have.
Or, you could be a software design agency starting a new project. You need to be on the
same page with your client about timeline, deliverables, communication channels,
stakeholders, and work owners.
You’ll also likely need to have a kickoff call, and there will probably be some kind of spec
sheet for requirements that needs to be established ASAP. A clear process for client
onboarding helps to streamline this process and allows you to focus on supporting your
client more directly.
Here’s a few examples to support client onboarding:
Knowledge base content
‘Get started’ videos
Surveys used to understand what your client’s wish to receive from using your
services
Interactive walkthroughs and tutorials
Automated welcome emails and in-app messages
Automated check-ins and support

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The importance of good client onboarding
Gartner Group has stated that 80% of a business’s future revenue will likely come from
20% of its existing client base, so it’s easy to understand why you should allocate
company resources to ensure you keep your existing clients happy.
If you’re onboarding new clients effectively (e.g. they become long-term customers),
you’re saving money, because it’s cheaper to keep an existing client than it is to attract a
new one.
There are multiple factors at play here.
Making a good first impression with client onboarding
One reason to focus on providing a good onboarding experience for new clients is
because you want them to remain loyal to your company.
Losing a client due to a poor first impression means that the time and resources you’ve
spent on marketing, relationship building, and proposal drafting have all been in vain. All
of your hard work is wasted if you aren’t doing a good job onboarding your new client.
Good client onboarding fuels word-of-mouth marketing
For one, because happy clients are excellent referrals, and we all know word-of-mouth
still remains the most powerful form of marketing. That said, it’s no surprise that 20 to
50% of purchases come from recommendations made by previous clients.
Word-of-mouth marketing can be an extremely effective compound lever that allows you
to not only retain existing customers, but get new customers (and free marketing) for free!
Build strong lasting relationships with clients

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So how do you build lasting relationships with clients, make them excited about your
business, and convert them into evangelists?
Well, you need a good product. You need to deliver real value. Because when you’re
product-first and delight clients with your offering, you’ve already won half the battle.
But that’s not all; first impressions are important, too, as well as the operational efficiency
of your business. And both of these things are core pillars of client onboarding.
That’s why focusing on how you onboard your new clients is so important.
Benefits of effective client onboarding
Viewing client onboarding as a core business strategy, rather than a nice-to-have tacked
on as an afterthought, you start to see its true benefit.
When done efficiently, it helps to:
Reduced client churn
Your highest risk of client churn happens during the first 90 days. By demonstrating value
and building relationships early on, you help to reduce this risk of client churn.
A good client onboarding strategy will work to foster this relationship and walk them
through the value of your product or service. Your clients are satisfied with your business
and want to stick around.
Improved efficiency
An effective client onboarding process doesn’t just help your clients. It also helps your
employees. With this onboarding strategy, your employees have all the information they
need right at their fingertips.
Your well-documented onboarding process puts your employees in the best possible
position for success. This helps increase your team’s overall efficiency while preventing
bottlenecks later down the line.
Increased client base
As I mentioned before, your clients work as powerful referrals. Edelman Trust Barometer
reported that 84% of B2B decision-markers start their buying journey with a referral.
Delighting your new clients with a effective onboarding strategy will help to foster strong
relationships and upsell your existing clients moving forward. But it will also help you gain
referrals.
What are the challenges of onboarding clients?

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You might be bouncing between the idea of using a client onboarding process. Here are
some strong indicators that can help you understand if a client onboarding strategy is the
right choice for you:
You have a high client churn
You see a low feature adoption rate
There’s a significant load of support requests
Steps to successful client onboarding
A lot of time, energy, and money is needed to attract potential clients to a product or
service. So it doesn’t make sense to lose these clients once they finally sign up with your
company.
With an efficient client onboarding process, you have a plan in place and a clear direction.
This ensures both your client’s and business’s needs are met.
Here are the steps you should follow to help get the most out of your onboarding
process:
Step one: Assess the current needs of your client
Your clients may all have different reasons for picking your company just as they’ll likely
have different uses for your product or service. Understanding their weaknesses and
strengths will help you develop a comprehensive plan that lets them get the most out of
your service.
You want to make a list of your client’s current strengths and highlights areas that can be
improved. From here, lay out a path that involves your service being the thing they can
use to make these improvements. This plan helps establish your company as an expert
source your client can use to combat their weaknesses.

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Step two: Take note of your client’s desired objectives
An excellent marketing campaign is what got your client aware of your company. You
already have an idea of what your client is hoping to achieve and you’ve advertised how
you can help them. Now’s the time to develop measurable goals that your team can act
on.
The more articulated these goals are, the better your team understands what’s expected
of them. You then need to have a system in place that holds responsible team members
accountable for achieving these goals.
For example, at Process Street, our company mission is to make recurring work fast, fun,
and faultless. This is the measurable goal we advertise to our clients, and it’s what each
of our employees work towards achieving.
Step three: Make sure your team is briefed
Now that you have a clear understanding of your client’s needs, strengths and
weaknesses, and their desired goals, it’s time to brief your team. You want your team
fully-aware of your client, the work involved, and their industry. This can be by having your
employees:
Assigned to reading materials
Working through the initial assessment (or demo call) and contract
Documenting next-steps based on available information
Once your team has a clear understanding of your client, they’re better prepared to start
their kickoff call.
Step four: Schedule a kickoff call
Once your team knows your client and what needs to be done for a successful
onboarding experience, it’s time to schedule a kickoff call.
Making sure your team is prepared helps offer a good impression to your client. Without
this good impression, your client is likely to lose faith in your company’s ability to help
them achieve their desired goals.
It’s vital that your team demonstrates their understanding of the client. Once this kickoff
call is complete, both you and your client should have a clear vision to work towards.
This plan can then be sent over to your client with measurable goals and milestones
created by your team to nurture engagement.
Step five: Have regular check-ins

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It’s important to check in with your client periodically to ensure everything is going
smoothly. These regular check-ins also work as an excellent tool to build your relationship
with the client.
Have a list of questions to help you gain insight into your client’s experience so far. For
example:
How are you feeling about our product/service?
Is there anything you aren’t 100% clear about?
What can we do to help you gain the most out of your experience?
Is there any reason you might consider not using our company any more?
With these questions, you can better understand if your client is still on the right path to
achieving their desired goals. It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of client
experience and satisfaction, because if you lose track of this vital metric, you run the risk
of churn.
That’s exactly what these kinds of questions are for. Regular check-ins can help you
highlight what the problem is and how you can redirect them before they feel dissatisfied
and leave your company.
Client onboarding best practices
You only have one chance to onboard your new clients – and you want to get it right from
the get-go. Here are some best practices to help ensure your delivery is spot on each
time:
Standardize your client onboarding
The secret to client onboarding success is consistency. That’s why it’s important to
standardize your onboarding process with comprehensive templates your team can use
to reference any time they need to onboard a new client.
Prioritize a people-focused approach
Oftentimes client onboarding processes focus on ticking off tasks from a template.
Although the best onboarding processes need to run through all the steps, the tasks
shouldn’t be what your team is most focused on.
Instead, your approach to onboarding should be to build relationships with your new
clients. Practicing a people-focused approach means putting the people first. That entails
being attentive to your new client’s specific goals and needs.
You want to acknowledge your clients questions, fears, and concerns as soon as
possible. This is vital to building trust during the early stages of onboarding.

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Revisit the concerns your new clients expressed during the sales process and highlight
ways you can help them. A great way to do this is with a quarterly plan, setting
expectations, or a list of quick wins.
Prove your value immediately
This is especially important if your new clients are trying out your product or service. At
the start of onboarding or during their trial period, you want to demonstrate the value your
company can provide to them.
By doing this, you’re more likely to convert them into paid clients or have them more loyal
to your company.
Your client’s goals might be mostly longer term. But that doesn’t mean you can’t
demonstrate results from the get-go.
Set smaller milestones that can be achieved in the short term and then work towards
these successes. These can then be the metrics you present your new client during your
next check-in to help prove this value.
Have organized communication channels
Consistent communication will keep your client engaged. Not nurturing engagement can
led your client away from your company, which is exactly what you don’t want happening.
Here are some important things to ask your client when setting up a communication
system:
Are they in the same time zone?
Would your client want a weekly, biweekly, or monthly check-in meeting?
Would your client like to be included in your company updates and newsletter lists?
But the most important thing to know is how long your new client wants to hear from you.
In most service-based instances, it’s necessary to offer larger loads of communication
early on to ensure your clients aren’t missing out on anything. You can then slow down on
this communication further along in the onboarding process.
Encourage client feedback
Once your new client has completed most of the onboarding process and you’ve had
regular check-ins with them, it’s time to ask for feedback about their experience. Here are
some questions you might want to ask:
Is this communication schedule working for you?
Is this goal schedule aligning with your expectations?
Do your milestones align with the objectives you wish to receive?
Is something missing?

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How could your experience be improved?
Not only does this feedback empower you to ensure your client’s experience is good, it
also helps you improve your onboarding process for clients in the future.
People love feeling comfortable about expressing their opinions. Offering this comfortable
environment is only going to grow your client’s engagement and keep them loyal to your
business.
Client onboarding software
Onboarding is an extensive process. You need to dedicate a ton of time and resources to
get it done right. One of the biggest challenges is creating the process you ultimately
follow each time you onboard a new client.
Client onboarding software can be incredibly beneficial when it comes time to sit down
and construct an onboarding process.
With an efficient onboarding software, you can access a library of pre-made templates
that can be used to onboard your new client. A good client onboarding tool lets you edit
these templates to your exact preferences and run it whenever you welcome a new client
to your company.
How client onboarding software achieves onboarding optimization
Investing in a client onboarding software tool means your templates are easily accessible
in a centralized onboarding hub. This helps promote visibility, because a good onboarding
tool will offer analytics and reports to illuminate what state a client is at within the
onboarding process.
Simply put, these reporting systems can send notifications whenever tasks are
completed, overdue, on-track, or need approvals. This leads to a more streamlined
process.
How client onboarding software helps streamline onboarding automation
Process mapping is a vital step to creating an onboarding process. It involves highlighting
all the tasks you need to complete until your client is fully onboarded.
With a client onboarding software, you get a birds eye view of all the tasks needed within
a single onboarding process. From here, you can identify which tasks are recurring and
then automate them.
Good onboarding tools feature popular integrations to help automate tedious tasks and
streamline the whole experience. Therefore, by investing in client onboarding tools, you
increase your efficiency, promote consistency, and reduce costs.
A complete client onboarding template

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Want to offer an exceptional onboarding experience to your new clients today? Use this
template to get started!
The future of client onboarding
Us at Process Street love our product so much that we use it ourselves. That means the
very software we’re providing to you (the client), we’re using ourselves to onboard you
(the client).
We onboard you with Process Street’s onboarding software, you onboard your clients
with the same software and the cycle continues.Continuing this cycle of consistent
onboarding experiences helps keep your clients engaged and employees on the ball.
Without effective client onboarding, you’ll likely see a larger churn, which is exactly what
you don’t want. That’s why software is the future of client onboarding.
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