Did you know that clients are three times more likely to churn during the first 90 days?
What exactly is client onboarding and why is it so important to us? The process of welcoming new clients into your company is known as client onboarding. It’s your chance to start creating a solid relationship with the customer, get them up to speed, answer any questions they might have, and lay out the strategy for the future. Lastly, and most importantly, you want the customer to feel certain that they made the correct decision and that your firm will meet their standards.
Client on-boarding is a crucial business strategy, and if done correctly can lead to good results. As previously stated, clients are at a greater risk of churning within the first 90 days, and a successful client on-boarding process can make them stick, and create relationships and demonstrate value early on in their journey.
Onboarding is beneficial for both; a company and its clients. It gives companies all the required and necessary information, putting them in the ideal position to start working for a customer. As a consequence, they will be able to boost efficiency and eliminate bottlenecks down the road.
Moreover, clients want to engage with organizations that know what they’re doing, have a solid plan in place, and are committed to building long-term connections. Every firm should have a standardised, and a highly repeatable client onboarding procedure in place. This will not only help you dazzle your clients but also make on-boarding a hassle free process for your internal teams.
At Code District, the client on-boarding process is broadly divided into two categories; Onboarding for Fixed price engagements, and Onboarding for Dedicated teams engagements. This blog will discuss our seamless, and short process for both these engagement models to help give our clients a transparent image.
Fixed Price On-boarding:
This approach is ideal for small to medium projects, which normally last between three to ten months. Fixed price projects on-boarding is the simplest. It’s very concise and transparent starting from requirements gathering to estimation to the eventual kickoff. It starts with the process of a discovery workshop. This lasts for a period of 1-4 weeks, depending on the project scope with two 60 – 90 minutes long calls per week with the client to further discuss requirements, end goals, probable solutions and also to run them through our weekly developments. These meetings help our clients talk their minds outs. Whatever you are thinking in terms of short term and long term goals regarding your new software. Typically, clients like to run us step by step through their mundane or challenging daily tasks and routine. This detailed walkthrough helps us get in their shoes and see the pain point or the problem from a different perspective. We even probe our clients minds and thought process to help them think of situations or scenarios that they might not have thought about earlier. And all this eventually allows us to come up with a better solution for them. Think of it as a very intense brainstorming session with quick and high deliverables that include a high-fidelity clickable prototype, a detailed requirement feature document, a project delivery and a concrete estimation plan for the actual development.
Dedicated Teams Onboarding:
Moving onto our next category for client onboarding – Dedicated Teams! When you don’t want to hire permanent resources, you can rely on our dedicated resources to either work as an independent extension or as part of your existing team, both on a partime/fulltime basis. These dedicated resources can be any combination of frontend/backend developers, QA experts, designers and project managers. The actual team composition is determined by the scope of work and the required credentials and skill levels. With dedicated teams we start off the onboarding process by setting up a call, with the following agenda:
- Team introductions
- Getting access to your codebase, if any
- Understanding your GIT practices and coding standards
- Getting familiarized with your commit guidelines
- Identifying the development platforms the code is expected to work on.
- Setting up a dedicated slack channel for real-time daily communication
- Task assignment process/project management tool setup like JIRA (identifying whether to use clients’ or our own)
- Set up our schedule for stand-ups and retros
Voila!
Once we are done with the above mentioned steps, our development process starts. We keep our client in the loop throughout the project by setting up weekly calls with them to run over the developments. Once the project is developed, we give our clients the facility of a 2 week UAT – User Acceptance Test. This is for them to let our team know of any bugs that need to be fixed. Code District simplifies any complications that can result in the process of client on-boarding and makes it a short and efficient process. If for some reason, the assigned resource for a project quits, they are required to give at-least a month’s notice in advance. And during that one month, we put on a new extra resource to over shadow the leaving resource for the entire month at our own cost and expenditure. We do not charge you a single penny extra for that. This is done to get the new resource familiarized with your work and coding standards, so that when the previous resource leaves and the new one takes over, your project does not bear the burden of that in any way.
Happy On-Boarding with Code District!
Psst. Just so you know, we won’t abandon you after the initial on-boarding process. We will stick you like a glue stick, and make sure that if any issues come up we erase them from the face of this earth, or just the code base for now.
