If you’re running an agency, you probably know the importance of onboarding new clients. Just like employee onboarding, the process of new client onboarding is essential to a successful relationship. As the first formal step in the relationship, the client onboarding phase sets expectations and conventions. How clients see you will often depend on the first impressions you make during onboarding.
Common Client Onboarding Mistakes
Despite its importance, agencies frequently ignore or rush through the client onboarding process. They may neglect to ask the right questions, build rapport, or establish best practices. The result is confused new clients and strained relationships.
Make sure you’re setting your best foot forward in every client relationship by avoiding these five common client onboarding mistakes.
1. Not sharing your process
As the agency owner, you know your processes inside out. You know exactly what steps you follow to take a project from the creative brief to final deliverables.
But, what’s clear to you might be completely unclear to your clients. Unless they’ve worked extensively with agencies during the client onboarding, new or prospective clients often don’t know what you’re doing or what’s expected of them. They have no visibility into your schedule, processes, or practices.
This lack of visibility creates two problems:
- Unrealistic Expectations: It gives clients unrealistic expectations since they don’t know how much effort a deliverable takes to create. This is particularly true for creative deliverables, such as a logo, in which the end product often looks much simpler than the process to create it.
- Scope Creep: If clients don’t understand the effort involved in producing a deliverable, they might ask for changes and additions without realizing that it will take the project out of scope.
These problems can be solved by being transparent about your processes and timelines. Tell clients exactly how much effort, in hours and raw materials, will be necessary to produce a deliverable.
For instance, you can informally share the brainstorming and creative iteration process that goes into designing a logo. This will help clients understand your results better.
2. Not communicating clearly or often enough
Your clients are apprehensive in the first few weeks of the relationship. They’ve just signed a big contract and handed over the reins of their business to you. How can they be sure that you’ll actually deliver on your promises?
This is why it is always better to over-communicate in the initial stages of any client relationship. Reassure them of your practices, results, and availability during client onboarding experience. Show them you prioritize their business and avoid onboarding mistakes.
Although, it’s not enough to simply over-communicate. You also have to do it clearly and consistently. At the start of the client onboarding process, establish the following:
- How often you’ll send them recurring messages, such as status updates and project reports
- Your preferred communication channels, whether email, chat, phone calls, etc.
- Who you’ll share each message with, whether that be the client project team, internal team, project sponsor, etc.
- The best way to reach you in case of an emergency
It is recommended that you create templates and seek areas for automation for any messages you send more than once. This will ensure that there is consistency in your communication.
communication process for successful client onboarding experience
Creating a stakeholder communication plan can help in the client onboarding process (Source: TheDigitalProjectManager.com)
3. Not establishing boundaries
At the start of the relationship, the client might come in with a request that’s clearly out of scope. But you’re eager to please, so you agree. That one request turns into another, then another, and before you know it, you’ve stretched your budget beyond profitability.
One of the hardest things to do as an agency is to say no. It is only natural to concur with clients in any service industry. But, when you fail to establish boundaries clearly, projects can quickly go out of scope.
Setting boundaries should be a core part of the client onboarding process. Yet, having soft boundaries is one of the most frequent onboarding mistakes. Tell clients exactly what is and what is not within scope. Make reasonable concessions where necessary, but have clear guidelines for what they should expect from the relationship.
It’s important to set boundaries in a friendly, calm manner. Instead of simply telling clients that you can’t do something, explain to them why you can’t do it. Focus on the following in your explanations:
- The process and effort required to fulfill the request
- The effect of the new request on dependent tasks
Your objective in setting these boundaries is to minimize scope creep. The more you can say no to out-of-scope requests, the easier it will be to run profitable, on-time projects.
4. Not setting clear goals
You’ll be surprised to know that projects often fail simply because they don’t have a clear goal.
Projects often fail because of a lack of clear vision or goal (Image source: PMI Pulse of the Profession)
This is particularly true for projects with multiple stakeholders. Different stakeholders, sponsors, and even the agency itself might have different ideas of what the project should accomplish.
The less agreement there is between all parties, the higher the chances of the project falling into disarray. These types of gaps can have serious consequences for customer success and a positive new customer experience—the ultimate goal.
One of the biggest onboarding mistakes you can make is not clarifying both yours and your client’s goals upfront. You can’t simply assume you and your clients are on the same page. You have to build consensus on your goals and the metrics to measure them.
Solve this problem by asking clients to identify their top three priorities for the following:
- The Business: What the project should help the company accomplish, such as “increase revenue of flagship product”
- The Individual: What the stakeholder expects to accomplish with the project, such as “launch new product division”
- The End User: What the client expects the project will do for end users or customers, such as “lower product cost”
The overlap between these priorities would be your project’s primary goal.
5. Not developing a client onboarding process
One of the more common client onboarding mistakes is not following a client onboarding process at all. In such cases, agencies rely on ad-hoc client onboarding processes and fragmented tactics to onboard new clients instead of relying on a well-developed system. They may start out with an onboarding meeting and an onboarding email but never go any further with the customer onboarding process.
While this haphazard approach can work for smaller agencies, it will end up creating inconsistencies and client data gaps as your agency grows. You might miss capturing crucial information you need to get the customer’s project off the ground as well as miss some of your client’s needs. Or you might forget to create an important project document.
Solve these common client onboarding mistakes by creating an organized client onboarding process. List out the following in your client onboarding template or a client onboarding checklist:
- All the information you need for project kickoff, such as logins, data access, etc.
- Documents and templates necessary for the project, such as status reports, project plans, etc.
- Project stakeholders, i.e., customers and your communication priorities for them
Map out the exact steps involved in customer onboarding. You can even create an onboarding workflow or flowchart depicting these steps, as in this example:
Over to You
A positive client onboarding experience is a critical but often ignored part of any successful project. A top reason for client churn is a negative onboarding experience and the problems that ensue afterwards.
This is the phase where you capture necessary information, establish client expectations, build rapport, and set the tone for the rest of the project. Smooth onboarding will leave a good impression on the client and help you get the most out of the relationship.
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