How to design the right offboarding process
Is this the bit of doing business that no one ever wants to talk about?
I Googled ‘How to offboard clients’ and the first thing that cheeky little search engine said to me was ‘Did you mean how to onboard clients?’. No, I flippin’ didn’t. Of course, onboarding is important, but so is offboarding, it’s the bit where your customer or client leaves your business and you have the chance to make them into lasting advocates who talk about, remember and recommend your business to others.
And a great offboarding process delivers so much benefit back into your business, and makes it more likely that customer will buy again.
Here’s a quick run down of some of the things to consider when you are designing your offboarding process.
Start at the end. What do you want your customers or clients to most think, feel and do as they complete their transaction or time with you? Jot down a thought bubble, a heart and a hand on a piece of paper, and for each of your client types, decide on the one thing for each you want them to think, feel and do. Keep this in front of your eyeballs at all time and design your offboarding to create these reactions.
Point out the wins. If you work consultatively with clients over a period of time – such as a coach, or a personal trainer – it is valuable to find a way to recap the good stuff, map the progress and note the changes that have happened. Its amazing how much of the progress that happened at the start can be forgotten, and its great marketing to remind them! Find a creative way to deliver this; anything from an X Factor style back story video to a foldable timeline through the post.
Keep talking. Look, no one wants to see clients go (well, most of them). Juliet wasn’t wrong, parting is such sweet sorrow. But it really doesn’t have to end in grisly death and overwrought proclamations of love… why not keep talking to them instead? A newsletter can be a great way to keep adding value and reminding dormant clients you are there – if you do it well and pack it with useful or interesting stuff. Or add a quarterly check in to the process, so you drop them an email, a postcard or dispatch a pigeon to say hello and find out how they are. You know, just simple, human interaction.
Show you are thinking of them. Create a swipe file of ‘I saw this and thought of you’ content that you know would interest your departed client and can ping across to them on a semi-regular basis. You can do this individually or create groups of customers and send en masse with personalised copy.
Say thank you. Sure, send chocolates and flowers. But maybe get more creative? Get an item of branded merchandise made for offboarding purposes, or if you are budge conscious, there are a host of things you can do to say thanks – send a voice note, drop them a letter (yes, an actual letter on actual paper) or email them something they would find useful – for example, any customer who has made one purchase from your website and has not returned for 1 month, email them a link to your blog telling them how to get the most from the thing they bought from you.
Keep them close. There may be natural gaps of time between client or customer purchases, so be sure not to let them drift so far from your business that you become a tiny, indistinguishable dot on the horizon. Think about creative ways you can keep clients in your territory after purchase – set up a VIP Club, invite them into a social media group where you can interact with them, create a library of information they can access, or build a community that interacts with each other.
Get that testimonial. Make sure at some point in the process you are asking for a testimonial, that gold dust of social proof (and central to any case studies you create). You can read more about why testimonials are so important and how to ask for them here.
Be brave, get referrals. Think about if you want to create a formal referral programme, so you reward anyone who brings you new customers, or if you want to have a more informal approach. Either way, offboarding is a great time to remind clients that you would just love a referral – and if the offboarding process is working, they should be more than happy to.
Signpost the way to return. Ah, the perfect offboarding, where you turn it directly back into onboarding. Make sure you are clearly signposting how to keep transacting with you if that is appropriate – a new product that would perfectly complement what they have already bought, or the next service level, or an online solution that feeds directly from more intensive work you have carried out. Turn that exit door into a revolving one, just try not to make them too dizzy.
There you go, eight parts of the offboarding process to think about. You don’t need to include them all – the key is to make it simple and repeatable, and see which parts you can automate so you can be consistent and measure what works. And make sure it is absolutely an on-brand experience for your customers or clients.
And if you want a simple framework to help you design the perfect offboarding process for your business, then look no further. Well, you need to look a little bit further. Just over there, to the Tool Shed, where you will find the Offboarding Framework, free to download.