Map your customer onboarding process | Virtual Assistant Example

Onboarding, virtual assistant example. We are going to be talking about onboarding, and if you are not familiar with this idea, actually, let's make it a little bit bigger. The concept of onboarding is if we think of our business as a machine, I'm going to change the shape of our machine this week. The very beginning, where people are funneling in again, I hate the word funnel, but it works. Here is going to be our onboarding, and we serve them in the machine, which is our business. And then when they're done, they're off boarding. So this is on, this is off. And then once they are so they're onboarded, they're served, they're off boarded. And once they're done being off boarded, they can either come on back around to come back in and become a repeat business, or they might trickle off and say, all right, thank you so much, we're done here. So today we are focused again on that offboarding or on that onboarding. And the example I want to use today, since I think it's helpful to give an example when we're telling these stories, even though really this is all relatable for any industry. The example today is going to be that virtual assistant. And just like last time, we're going to be using that as an example. But these workflows, the mapping that we're going to be doing is something that can be applicable to any business following a similar structure. So even if you are not a virtual assistant, if you are a outsourced marketing agency, if you are even an accountant that works on a retainer, if you're managed it, there are things that you can learn here. So a couple of simple symbols to get us started. Just to review how we're going to map today. You don't need any of these, but it's sometimes nice to have. When we are mapping, we are going to be using this symbol to mean a hold or delay. This symbol to mean a start or stop. This symbol as a step or an action. This symbol as a decision. Excuse my handwriting, guys, this is trying to go fast here. And this one, as you guessed it, an arrow just to show that we're moving to the next step. So pretty simple legend here for what we're going to be talking about today. All you need to do this in your own business is right now I'm using a tablet, but you can use a piece of paper, some sticky notes. I think sticky notes are actually a great tool for this. And let's get started. So the reason we are process mapping today is that we can figure out what this hypothetical virtual assistant company would need to have from a technology perspective. So once we have these workflows, so once we have these workflows here, we can use that list, we can grab it, bring it with us to go buy some software and not do that in the opposite order. So we get this first and then we go out and we start shopping for some software. Whether that's ClickUp, whether that's G Suite, whether that's some other more sophisticated tool for managing your business or managing your practice, we are doing this mapping first. So we figure out what we actually need, what we need, what we want, and what do we want most importantly in this case, our customer experience. To be like customer experience. When we're mapping, we are mapping the steps in this process, in this case, onboarding. But really what that map is telling us is it's setting the rules for our customer experience. It's making it clear what we want to have happen. So we are not winging it every time, not that any of us have ever done that before. Once we know that, we can then inform our choice of software or even how we set up our software to make sure it aligns with that. So let's dive on over here. So to begin, we're going to do a status quo. If you're new here, this is kind of the way it goes each week, status quo workflow. So I'm going to map out how things are today. Let's do in blue. Status quo is going to be blue and we're going to map out the steps as they stand and then together we're going to improve those steps in about, oh, I don't know, probably 15 minutes here. So should be a pretty good example of what this might look like. So onboarding, that's what we're focused on onboarding for a va. That process probably starts with one of those kind of discovery or consult calls. So I'm going to put that as our first step in the process here. Mapping actually, first step, follow my own rules here, let's make it a circle and let's say that we, rather than having them schedule on our website, we do that old school thing of having them fill in a form, contact form, you might call it an intake form, where they fill in a few pieces of information on your website and then you're alerted. So the form submitted. Next step is you're alerted, hey, there's a lead, lead alert. Then after that maybe we reach out and we say, hey, would love to schedule a Time with you to have a. What do we want to call it? Any suggestions? If you're watching here, give me a suggestion. Thinking we can do a discovery call, clarity call. There's so many cliche names. No, you know what, let's pretend we're going to be better than the norm here. Let's give it a really original name. A office audit. That sounds really harsh, but maybe we're like an obm and we are very serious about the work that we do for our clients. And so we call it the office audit. It's maybe 30 minutes and we're scheduling it here by reaching out via email. Once we go ahead and do that, we move to the next step where it is scheduled. That's scheduled maybe via email. So they email back and they pick a time. Pick time. Maybe there's a few other iterations of emails here as they are not responding, but they're picking a time for a session. So that's booked. Actually, you know what, that's probably better of a calendar icon. Let's do that. So you pick that time via email. Then we actually have the appointment. Maybe it's on zoom. Let's just imagine that. So we have the. What are we calling it? Office Audit call for this virtual assistant, hypothetically going through their onboarding. Zooming out some more here. We're gonna need a lot of space. Let me make this a bit bigger here. Office audit happens. So during that call, maybe we have kind of an internal checklist for ourselves of the things we want to talk about. On that kind of sales call, it's our consultation. Maybe if we're calling it an audit, maybe we actually have some prep questions we need to give out. We didn't talk about that, but that's possible. Once the office audit is over, we wrap it up by saying, hey, you know, are you interested in working with us? They might say maybe not sure, need some time to think about it. So we as the virtual assistant are going to send a follow up email. And just so you know, if you're mapping this on your own, feel free to write these in the box. I'm just spreading it out a bit because turns out my handwriting is a little bit too big. So this is going to be our follow up. I put F slash U for follow up. Do not assume I am writing anything else here. So this is our follow up after our call here after audit. Maybe we do that right away and maybe we hold for a bit and we go again. We'll just, we'll follow up once here. So let's assume we follow up, they respond with an email that says, yes, I want to move forward. That's from the client there. And so then again, we're all still mapping onboarding here. It is a long process, there's lots of steps. Then we go ahead and we send them our contract. Contract, then that's one of these things. Send them the contract and then we send them the invoice and maybe at that point they are totally in our world and that is our onboarding process. If you're still watching this, if you're still following along with me, we are talking about onboarding for a virtual assistant as our example company today. And we've just mapped out what might be kind of a typical process. And now we're going to try to look at some of the repercussions. This process as it stands today, what are the repercussions for customer experience? Now when I'm actually mapping this, if it's for myself or for a client, we might go deeper. We might start looking at how much time are we spending on each step. So we know how much we should be charging for this onboarding. Or, or we might be thinking about. Actually let's keep that. We might be thinking about what is the delay between each step. So we know how long this takes and how frequently we can onboard or how many we can onboard at the same time. But since we're keeping it simple here, just get it out of your head is the first step. So with this process as it's documented right here, I have enough written down that I could probably start delegating some of this maybe, but I think it's missing some key steps. We're just going to keep, we're going to, we're going to improve the fundamentals before we even think that we're ready to pass this off. So customer experience wise, let's go through and think about some of these feelings that we're going to be facing here. So as we're starting onboarding, they've got this form which as a first impression, I think, let's just assume our ideal client is like me. It might be kind of cold where it's not really a lot of emotion there. It's just a form that they're putting into a void. I don't know about you, but I think the forms are kind of dated on websites and don't really. They're not the most direct. We get that lead alert. So there's silence, so there's silence here where the ideal client is just Waiting, thinking, I wonder if they got my email. There's a delay here as we're waiting for us to process it and reach out. Then there's the scheduler, which is great. Yay. We finally got our scheduler. We're on the calendar. We've got that audit. Maybe this happiness carries us through. And it looks like just based on the pace that we're going here, it's probably staying pretty happy through the follow up until they say yes. Then there's the paperwork. And that is a lot of paperwork for someone who's hiring a VA and is trying to cut down on the paperwork in their life. So maybe we're not having such a happy time at that point. And then the invoice before any work is done can always be a little bit unsettling. And we might have a little bit of doubt here creeping in maybe. Oh, my gosh. I don't know if this is the right choice. We had one conversation. I'm paying her how much money in advance for my retainer for the month. There could be a little bit of stress. So we're going to consider remapping this slightly differently below just to give us a different. So let's look at an alternative here. What if I'm going to use a highlighter to break down what we're talking about? That color is gross. Let's go to yellow. So what if we were to eliminate some of the steps in this process to make it a little bit more simple, because maybe we want our customer experience to feel a little bit more modern, or maybe we just want it to be more efficient and spend less of our time. So we specifically, I'm talking about this waiting period as the lead is waiting for us to respond. And maybe we're not the fastest at checking our email. So that takes a day or two. What if we were to cut out these two steps of our process? And so what that would look like is, we're down here. The very first step of our process would instead be booking. Make it a circle. Book, book. Office audit. What this does is it cuts out two steps in our process. It cuts out that awkward waiting period that we're not crazy about anyway. We're starting our process by doing something that's very satisfying, getting something on the calendar. It's an achievement, for lack of a better word. Here you see where the workflow is starting to inform our technology choice. If we were maybe looking up at this workflow up here, we might have not thought we. Whoops, sorry. We might have not thought we needed a specialized scheduler. But now that we're down here, if we want to have this be something that's easy and convenient, then yes, we want to have that. We want to have that scheduler on our website. So here we are. Book Office audit as our first step. That would look something like this. You go on your webpage and then there's a scheduler right here where you can pick times. Great. And then let's go to our next step up here. We're looking. So we've got our office audit. One thing that did not happen in our status quo example here. Circles are driving me nuts for not being perfect. But whatever. In our example, we just go right to our appointment and let's just assume I'm just going to make things difficult here. Let's assume that we are working with an ideal client who's incredibly busy. Maybe they're visionary entrepreneurs. That's a pretty common niche that people are going to. Well, the downside of those visionaries is they tend to be a little bit disorganized. So maybe we want to include something. We want to actually add a step here that is a reminder. And maybe we want that reminder to be two days before or two hours. Let's do two hours before enough time that if you totally forgot, you can still make it there in time. And that could be automated by our tool. Now that we know we need a tool that does that. So we want to have a reminder. Then we want to have our audit, which is our session again. We've got our checklist. We don't need to change much there. We thought that went pretty well. We've got our checklist for what we want to cover during that audit. Okay. After or during even that office audit, we could go a few different ways here. This is where our workflow could shift our vibe. We're giving off. We could in that office audit be a little bit more forceful in our sales and actually ask during that session. You know, hey, would you like to set a follow up time to be able to talk through all this stuff? Maybe that would be in a day or two. Can we set another 10 minute time on the schedule to actually talk through it? And you could call that something like a proposal review. There's a bunch of different names for it, but you could ask them actually on the call whether they'd like to have a follow up conversation. This can be a little bit overwhelming for some and it might be a little bit too forward for people who aren't professionally in sales. So for now we're going to not include it. But again, that's an option we could add in if it felt right for the vibe we wanted our brand to be giving off. So we're going to not include that for now. Just an idea to throw out there. So we've got this office audit. The next piece is. And also by the way, by adding that scheduler in there, we removed this step too. So that step's gone now. We are over here following up after our audit and I don't know that we're going to change too much about that, but you know, I'm kind of biased towards using video. So maybe we want to make that follow up a bit more personal. If we're not going to schedule a time to actually get face to face with them, the next best thing we can do is use some kind of asynchronous face to face. So the way to force face to face is to send videos. Whether that's a link in an email, whether that's an embedded GIF that links out to a video, but actually includes some kind of follow up that is personalized to them. I remember when I joined the what Works network, if any of you are familiar with that online group. I received an email back for my application and I remember reading it like, wow, that's such a great idea. And it was just a few sentences and then a video made specifically for me. It lasted I think about a minute, just saying, hey, we think you'd be a great fit. Do you have any questions? Let us know that kind of thing. So we could actually send them a video, email, follow up here because maybe that's more our brand or maybe we call them if that's more the way we want to go. But we are still going to have this follow up step here because we decided to not do the scheduled proposal over here, the scheduled proposal, review, whatever you want to call it. So the next step on our process map up above is this kind of yes, we just wait for them to say yes again. We have a choice here of how aggressive we want to be in our process. We could say we just wait indefinitely, we just wait indefinitely until that yes comes. Or if we are in a environment where we can be a little bit more forward and feel okay about it. We could also add a decision in here. Or we say here, maybe this is responded. If yes, keep going. If no, we're going to wait. Let's say we'll wait three days and then email again, and then again and again and again and again and again. And again, until they can actually respond, you know what I mean? So at each check in, if we send an email and maybe they did respond, we would jump them back up over here to the next step in the process. But we could build out some kind of follow up sequence for ourselves here so that if we know that we are constantly losing people at this point, people are constantly not responding to this follow up. There's no activity happening here when we want there to be. We could build into our process, our sales process here, still kind of sales, even though it's onboarding some follow ups to make sure. Hey, did you get the email? Hey, have you had a change of heart? Hey, you have any questions? There's a lot of things that we could do here just to make sure that we don't lose track. Now, as you can see here, just to back up for one second before we continue on, we're almost at the end. Promise. This is a lot of steps and the reason we are mapping it is so that we can then turn this workflow into technology. And if we're talking about ClickUp terms here, these steps, these big steps in the process could help us determine the stages our leads are in. So if you're using a CRM, if you're using ClickUp as a CRM, maybe you want to keep track of who is at this stage, who is at this stage. How many times have you followed up with each person? If you want to be able to track each one of those stages, you need to know what those stages are and that's what we're defining for your business in this example. Okay, so once they respond, then we move on to the step that we already had up here. Again, I think this is an area where we can condense some steps. So we're actually going to combine these two. We added some stuff here, but we're going to combine those two into one. So if you're using a tool like Dubsado or many other kind of tools where contracts and invoices are combined, we're going to actually set a combined step here of both contract and invoice all attached to one email. So as soon as they say yes, we're going to respond with an email that has a nice link in it and it says, hey, hey, you're awesome. Here's the link to go ahead. And that link takes them to both a contract and an invoice in one click rather than again, we having to send two emails and extending this process. Now we still have this issue of feeling a little Bit of doubt of having to pay in advance. And for many of us who are charging in advance, it's good business practice, really, it's protecting you. But it can lead to that kind of sense of doubt, that fear. So what we might want to do here, whether that's before or after our contractor invoice is, is add a step in here that is the infamous welcome kit. So if you're not familiar with it, add that step in here as our last step of our onboarding Welcome A welcome kit, which I think I am going to try to fit in that box. A welcome kit can be a physical mailed object or more often it can be a PDF. And what this is, is, is some information about how to actually be a good client of your business. You are setting the expectations, you are setting them up for success. Actually, let's do that either or, or. And that welcome kit is kind of just being you putting some service up front, just like you're asking them to pay upfront. That way there's not like there's a big payment happening before you provide any real service. So this welcome kit could be here like we have it, it could be before the contract and invoice. There's some different things we can do to move this around. But what your welcome kit would probably include is things like how to contact you, your hours. If you are a virtual assistant, for example, you might be off on holidays, maybe you're a one person show or a 10 person show, that's very different. Maybe you have a project manager, maybe you have a tool that they need to be onboarded on, they need to know where to log in, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are so many different things here that you could have in your welcome kit to set the tone and make it clear that you are there for them and you're not just asking for money and then radio silence, let's get on with it kind of thing. So a welcome kit or welcome email with an attachment is a nice way to go about it. So there we are. So we mapped two different workflows here. Not suggesting that these are by any means the correct way. There's not really a correct way for this. But what I wanted to do by having this live was to talk through kind of different ways of approaching it, what mapping looks like, and as you can see here, it's quite what color we want to do orange. It's quite simple. Nothing here, we've got some illustrations just to add some color here. But none of these steps, none of these things that we've been talking about are rocket science. Odds are you're already following some kind of process like this in your business to actually onboard your clients. But what happens when we start writing things down is we start noticing things like this. We start noticing areas where we can condense steps where we can improve the experience. And that only happens when you really start writing things down. Also, if you're looking to grow your team, they cannot help you with this unless you write the stuff down. Additionally, I've heard this metaphor that I'm going to use again here is it's kind of like. Or simile. It's kind of like writing a book. You can't edit the book if it's still in your head, even though you can kind of figure out some of the ideas. When you start writing down this process, we can identify different areas where maybe we need a piece of technology. Like right here. These two things would be better with a piece of tech, but the reason we want them isn't because, oh look, that shiny tool has that feature. No, we want them because we think that's going to be the better experience for our people. So it might guide tech. It might also. Right here, I know this example. You had that from the get go. But maybe we need to create resources. So tech resources, resources might be things like checklists, task templates in ClickUp. For those of you who are on ClickUp as I am, you've got your templates. Maybe it's PDFs that you can prepare in advance with FAQs. Maybe it is just an FAQ you add to your website. As you're going through this, you might identify resources that you can take a few minutes to create now that are going to be good for or in perpetuity. The tech piece I already talked about, avoid that shiny object. Figure out what you actually need. Here we're just adding again, more resources, more content, kind of the same thing as resources there. So we're adding some videos in some personal touches that we can either do custom every time, or we could template it. And maybe we just have a video we send that says, hey, this is explaining my virtual assistant service. And you have the same video for every single one. It's filmed on your iPhone in a nice background and it's two minutes long. And you just send that and attach it to every single one. How different would that be? The most onboarding or sales experiences you're in. All right, and then the response. Maybe we decide that this response is such a pain because our ideal customer doesn't use email. So maybe over time we decide that rather than having this respond, we instead send a proposal right here. Imagine this is a button. Friends, we send a proposal in that follow up email where they can click and they can check out, you know, accept the proposal rather than having to really respond or do any of this stuff. And maybe that proposal automatically reminds them when it's about to expire. Again, just continuing to innovate on this workflow here. This isn't even. There's like a whole 12 step process for how you can go through this workflow. But this is just some quick ideas here. We talked about adding technology here once again. So this is a tech piece and to create this technology piece, we need to actually build out that template within whatever tool you're using. I use the example of Dubsado here. There's many others that would do this as well. And for the welcome kit, maybe we need to buy materials, buy promotional products. Buy promotional products. Maybe we just need a design or pay for someone to design a PDF. Or maybe we just need to hop on Canva and do our best. Maybe we need to template this email. Once we have this mapped once again, we start going through here and figuring out this, what all the orange is saying right now. We went through a process, we improved it, and now each of these pieces is telling us an ingredient, a piece of the puzzle that we need to either create or gather in order to bring this to life. So what I would do then, and this is what we do with clients as well, is once we have this kind of rough workflow here, we've got the workflow, that's what this purple is, workflow. We start figuring out what we need and that then that goes on to zoom out a bit, that goes onto a list, just an action list of things that we need to do. We've got a checklist of all the pieces that we need to create in order to bring this new workflow to life. And guess what? Then you come back to this workflow in three weeks and you do it again. Because this is an ongoing process of improvement and this is just on onboarding now. Then there's service delivery, then there's fulfillment or same thing, then there's offboarding. There's so many other pieces of your process, but when we can start getting them out of their head, we can start figuring out how we want to make them better, how we want to make them more you. And we didn't do anything in here that's particularly revolutionary. If this was my workflow I would try to go through here and figure out what's a way that we can really break the mold of what all the other virtual assistants are doing. Maybe this video is enough, but I would bet we can do more thinking about how to make ourselves stand out by branding this process and having those memorable moments. That's really when we start getting to that next level. I didn't even remember guys, I've got these nice little things but I forgot to use them. So that is it for this live. For those of you who are joining us a bit late. Catch the replay. We are talking about onboarding with a virtual assistant example here and this was our live here. Next week we're going live again. I forget what the heck the topic is, but it will again be at 10am next week. So if you have any ideas, suggestions or a industry that you'd like to see used as an example. I know this virtual assistant one was actually pretty general because the virtual assistant is very similar to many others. I would love to hear your suggestions so you can leave them in the comments. Tell me what you think. That would be awesome. But for now I'll let you get back to your day. Thanks so much for watching and see ya. Well, not really see you because I have to still click off but all right, bye now.