How to automate your customer onboarding process

Being able to onboard clients in your sleep is a beautiful thing.

Automating customer onboarding is one of the easiest (and impactful) things you can work on.

This is one of the first areas I focus on when working with clients because it’s predictable, sets up client expectations (making fulfillment easier), and helps with buyer’s remorse.

What’s buyer’s remorse? That feeling of regret right after making a purchase. It’s more common than you think.

As for setting client expectations, this is (very) important.

The better your systems (particularly during onboarding), the more your clients will trust your process and the less they’ll get in your way. They can only sit back and relax if they feel you’re putting them on a train track.

Client expectations include:

- milestones

- billing process

- access needed

- clear next steps

- ongoing reporting

- team members involved

- how questions get addressed

- clarity on the plan going forward

The good news is that it’s easy to address them all, immediately, and without manual effort.

But first, you need to be clear on these yourself. That’s what the first step is all about when trying to automate your client onboarding.

Step 1/5 - Identify the trigger for the onboarding process

If there isn’t yet a specific trigger, picking one is critical to streamline the rest of your onboarding. Without a clear trigger, you can’t streamline or automate.

This is often the signing of a contract, an invoice getting paid, or a form getting filled. If it’s simply an email confirmation, it’s time for a change.

Step 2/5 - List out every step of the onboarding process

Past the initial trigger, make a list of the steps that follow in your current process.

Step 3/5 - Identify points of friction

Once your current flow is mapped you need to label all of the manual repetitive steps.

Step 4/5 - Identify the tools

For each step that you labeled with friction, make a note of the tools/software you’re using.

Step 5/5 - Automate

Now that you have a clear trigger for your onboarding process, listed every step of the sequence, and identified the tools involved, you can use automation platforms like Zapier to integrate them.

Trigger → Action → Action

As I said earlier, onboarding clients in your sleep is a (really) beautiful thing and will allow you to focus more time and effort on growing your customer base.x

I hope this walkthrough helps streamline and automate your client onboarding.

See you all next Thursday 👋

PS. Whenever you're ready... Here are three ways I can help you become more replaceable:

1. Get actionable tips on systems & productivity weekly → Join
2. Learn how to use ChatGPT to create SOPs in minutes → Free Access
3. Find out how I can help you automate & delegate operations → Get My Help

More recent posts ⤵️