If you’re selling via Ecommerce, and particularly if you’re a B2B or wholesale business, ensuring a well-executed customer onboarding process is an important part of getting started with your buyers.
Providing a smooth, seamless experience to purchasing online will not only give your new buyers additional confidence in their decision to shop with your Ecommerce environment, but set a strong positive tone to working with your team as a whole. In fact, Wyzowl reports that 86% of buyers are more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding.
So here’s four considerations you can take into account when it comes to the customer onboarding process.
1. Make Registration Simple
Most B2C Ecommerce sites allow you to register in real time, offering enticements like a first purchase discount as a way to get that information. B2B Ecommerce can be more complicated – you might need to capture an exemption certificate, for instance, or other additional information required in the B2B Ecommerce workflow.
Some B2B businesses make customers fill out a form that’s not tied to registration, and then will contact businesses and make them go back and forth before enrolling them online. That process can prove to be a hassle and turn off potential buyers.
Instead, you can set up a registration form with additional fields, capturing what you need while intaking that information directly into the Ecommerce solution. You can also enable an approval stage, where once someone registers, you can review and approve them into the store. This gives you the chance to assign them a customer group and pricing, for instance, so they see the right catalog pricing for them when they are granted access.
2. Offer Helpful Training
Some of your new customers to Ecommerce may not be new to the business. Many businesses adopting Ecommerce solutions have previously sold in other forms, whether via phone, fax, email, conferences, on site, and so on. Shifting these customers to Ecommerce can require training, so part of customer onboarding should be helping them get acclimated.
Zoey customer Ninkasi Brewing Company utilized a training video, along with their sales team, to roll out their new distributor ordering portal powered by Zoey, and within a few weeks of launch had adoption by 95% of their distributors. With the right training, your buyers can be quick to get set up and rolling.
3. Set Customers Up Accurately
This was mentioned in the first bullet briefly, but deserves its own callout, especially for B2B Ecommerce businesses such as brands, wholesalers or distributors. For B2B Ecommerce to be successful, they need to be able to access their customer-specific pricing, catalog, payment options and more. This means proper configuration when they’re set up on the site, so when they log in they see the information they expect to see.
Mistakes can be costly, dragging down trust that ordering on their own can be done while still getting what they qualify for as a buyer. The flip side, however, getting everything set up accurately, can build trust and confidence for buyers who can get to a point of self-service ordering through Ecommerce.
Self-service Ecommerce is the holy grail for B2B businesses, as some percentage of sales can be generated without sales or customer service interference, allowing them to focus on buyers who have gone quiet, bringing in new business, or generating larger orders from customers with room to grow.
4. Load Existing Customer Data, When it Exists
If you’re bringing onboard a customer that you’ve worked with in the past, another confidence builder can be ensuring their customer data is already present. This can be a number of things, including previous order history, billing and shipping addresses on file, and frequently ordered products.
Many businesses have other systems or predecessor solutions that may house this information, so it may pay dividends to integrate those systems with your Ecommerce solution. Not only will it allow their history to show up, but it will allow new information to flow back as orders are placed, accounts are updated and so on.
Zoey Makes Customer Onboarding a Snap
With Zoey, you can easily set up approval workflows, capture the information you need at registration, establish customer-specific pricing and more, all from the Zoey Admin, your web-based hub for managing your Ecommerce business. To learn more how we can take your business to the next level, request a demo with a member of our team:
