Client Onboarding in Zendesk…

What is client onboarding?

Client onboarding is the process of getting new customers or users onboard and familiarised with your products and services. This process is critical to ensure that you deliver great first impressions and maximise the potential lifetime value of your customers. 

A great onboarding process can have many benefits to your business and to your customers. The perks include: 

More customers: When there’s an easier on-ramp to your business, it means clients are more likely to choose, and to stay with, you over your competitors.

Happier customers: Reducing any initial friction and finding ways to quickly impart more of your business knowledge, ideas and product information means that clients not only spend less time in a state of confusion or uncertainty but become empowered to move forward, boldly thinking and building creatively within your offerings in order to achieve their goals.

Viral effect: Happy customers turn into evangelists for your business. When people love what you do they tell others about it and this feeds back into, you guessed it, more customers. 

Less ongoing support: When clients begin using a new service or product, they’re at a peak of engagement, so they’re more receptive to new information about what you do. By leveraging this opportunity you can avoid having to impart this knowledge at a later date through less efficient means. 

There are plenty more reasons why a great client onboarding flow is beneficial, like greater efficiencies all around, a reduction in scope creep with the customer and ensuring compliance.

How does SweetHawk help you implement or improve your onboarding process?

SweetHawk provides a super suite of apps that you can use in combination with Zendesk to create stellar onboarding flows that automate most things and make it easier for you to delight your new customers. For an example on how to setup an onboarding flow, see this article and video that shows precisely how to setup a client onboarding workflow in Zendesk.

Setting tasks: Our Tasks app lets you automatically apply checklists to specific types of Zendesk tickets. So when you get a new customer you can create an “Onboarding” ticket which then automatically has all the steps involved sitting right there on the side to be completed. Each step can either be checked off or turned into its own subprocess within a sub ticket. This allows you to divvy out work to multiple parts of the business while at the same time keeping track of it all under one umbrella project.  

Getting sign-offs: If there are things that your customer needs to sign off on through any part of the onboarding process, whether it is terms & conditions, contracts or implementation plans our Approve app allows you to attain this in an automated, consistent, enforceable and auditable manner. 

Planning: For planning out key dates for customer onboarding, you need not look any further than our Calendar app which allows for unlimited calendars with granular access control and integrates with both Google Calendar and Office 365.

Follow-ups: Finally for continuous upkeep of your customers after the initial onboarding phase, you can use our Future tickets app and/or our Recurring Tickets app that enables you to automatically spin up tickets for customer health checks at any required cadence to help ensure you always keep in touch with your client base. 

What are the advantages of creating onboarding flows using Zendesk and SweetHawk apps?

In addition to all the benefits listed at the top of this article, advantages that attain specifically to using our apps with Zendesk for your client onboarding include:

Consistent Outcomes: You can set it so that tickets can not be marked as solved until a predefined task list, approval or other workflow have been completed first. This allows you to ensure the onboarding workflow takes place consistently on every ticket.

Time savings: With the addition of SweetHawk apps into Zendesk, the ability to automate processes is dramatically increased. Whether it’s spinning up predefined sub-tickets or automatically creating tickets on a repeating basis, the amount of time you could be saving is massive!

Auditability: We bake audit trails into our apps so you can know who did what and when. Whether it's being able to track who approved something or who completed a particulate job in a checklist. In many of our other apps, we also leverage the power of the Zendesk ticket's events logs to ensure you always have a record of what happened.

Accountability: With improved consistency and auditability comes, by nature, increased agent accountability that feeds back into higher quality and output of work.

Flexibility: Our modular approach to building apps combined with their deep integration into Zendesk allows you to build customisable onboarding solutions.

Insights: SweetHawk apps sync data to an array of Zendesk ticket fields. This allows you to build custom reports in Zendesk Explore to track how all of your onboarding is going and cross-reference this with how you’ve done in the past.

So, if you’ve been thinking about setting up an onboarding process, there are plenty of benefits to doing it using Zendesk with SweetHawk.