If you’re an avid Agatha Christie fan, you’ll notice the rough sketches and maps that the author adds to recreate the murder scenes. The courtyard, bedrooms, and living room are all mapped to help the reader visually reconstruct the happenings of the ominous day. The author is also content, knowing that the readers are in step with her as she takes them along the journey to solve the mystery.

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that a positive customer onboarding experience ensures that your customers feel like they made the right choice by picking your product or service from the first moment they start using it. It also, eventually, helps you retain them. But what does customer onboarding mean, and what are the must-have strategies to make the process hassle-free for your prospects and customers? Read on.

Customer support vs customer success – two terms that have been seen as the same function in some companies, while also operating as completely separate groups within others. While customer support is key to solving customer problems and producing great experiences, customer success is responsible for empowering customers, keeping them happy on your platform/ through your services, and bringing them back for more.

As Kelly Uhlrich, Vice President and General Manager of CX company Humach, explains, “the proper focus and investment of time and budget requires a more strategic approach. It’s not a marketing problem or a technology initiative.” Authentic customer-focused culture is far more exhaustive than just researching your customer experience or observing a segment of your market.

Customer service has grown to become a critical function across industries including airlines, software companies, retail, and even real estate companies. Because of this, a career in customer service is growing in popularity, while companies and individual employers continue to struggle with scaling their support teams as their business grows.

When chatbots were first introduced in customer support, they were only capable of executing rule-based commands that often led to poor customer experiences. Chatbot features back then weren’t developed keeping user experience in mind, and caused frustration instead of offering solutions. Chatbots have evolved over time, but so have customer expectations. Customers today do not accept experiences that are less than ideal.

When you have access to customer data for every stage in the buyer journey, you are able to manage your customer lifecycle better. Therefore, it is important for you to understand the key difference between the buyer journey and the customer lifecycle, so that you can cater to your customer pain points and deliver a positive customer experience every single time.

Imagine visiting a particular restaurant once a month. One fine day, you are denied entry despite having made a reservation. The staff informs you that the restaurant is booked out and they are unable to find your reservation. This experience is likely to change your perception of this place and you might reconsider your next visit. But as you make your way out, the manager walks up to you and offers you their best table.

When a customer reaches out to your company with a question or problem, they expect immediate attention and prompt responses. In an ideal world, you’d be able to respond to each of them immediately. However, it’s not possible to meet customer expectations every single time. This means that for many customer support teams, there’s almost always a queue full of customer requests waiting to be attended to. So as soon as an agent finishes helping one customer, they move on to another.

Companies set up knowledge bases to help customers find answers to their queries faster. However, not all help centers have the desired outcome of providing effortless resolutions to customers. In fact, they end up leaving users more confused and frustrated after accessing a poorly-designed knowledge base. If you’re building your first help center or looking to improve your existing self-service experience, you’re in the right place.